Gen X: "It's Fine."
The Unknown Variable
My discovery of generational demographics as a thing coincided with my enlightenment that I was fucked. And it aligned with three concurrent realizations, which I internalized and carry with me to this day. Number one: I knew it all along. Number two: it explained a lot. And number three: it was fine. Or rather—in awakening to a new awareness of connection—we were fucked and we would be fine. I had a generation, it turned out.
At least I wasn’t alone.
“Your generation is historically small,” my professor explained in my moment of clarity, pointing to a dip in the bar graph projected behind him, attributing it to birth control, a trend toward self-actualization among grownups, and the cultural bearishness that pervaded our birth decades of the ‘60s and ‘70s. “You’re trapped between the two biggest generations in American history, the Baby Boomers and the generation coming up behind you, which is shaping up to be even bigger.” That latter generation was just over halfway finished being born, would fall just shy of matching the Boomers in size, and at the time had been provisionally named Generation Y. “You should expect to have the torch of popular culture passed over your heads, your time at center stage to be brief, and your very existence to be somewhat parenthetical.”
To be in my cohort-group is to be among the only living Americans spiritually predisposed to hearing such a forecast and taking it in stride. Of course, we’re fucked. We were born and raised in an era where conception itself could be avoided via a new pill (or legally aborted), when the vibes were openly “anti-child.” We were latchkey kids, children of divorce, and subjects of experiments in free-range parenting. The unknown variable: Generation X. Some thirty years after we’d begun being born—around the 1991 release of Douglas Coupland’s eponymous novel—we remained a nameless afterthought, a living testament to how little everyone thought about us.
When Boomers acknowledged us at all, it would be to remind us that everything cool had already happened to them and that we’d missed it. And we concurred. Their history, their politics, their music: we’d mainlined it all in utero and never questioned its transcendence. We revered the ‘60s, lionized MLK and the Kennedys, listened to Motown, the Stones, and the Dead. There was no backlash against the Boomer canon or hegemony and what would have been the point? Their cultural artifacts were unambiguously and deservedly acknowledged as awesome. We’d be outnumbered and on the wrong side of every cultural argument anyway.
In Boomers’ shadow, expectations for us were low. Unwanted maybe, inarguably we were bad seeds. In horror movies like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976) filmmakers depicted Gen X spawn as literally from hell. If they were honest with themselves, grownups would be forced to admit that they were more than a little scared of us. And we would have to admit that we knew it and didn’t mind.
Raised By Wolves
Left to our own devices, we were raised by wolves (i.e. by one another). Like my friends, I considered myself more street smart than the grownups and was as unreachable as I was un-locate-able by them. When I got my first job talking on the radio at age seventeen, my mother told me she liked when I was on-the-air because then she knew where I was. Looking back now, no adult was a reliable source for my whereabouts throughout my teenaged years (during every single day of which Ronald Reagan was the US president).
When tragedy came to my friend group—a student-driven van flipped over a guardrail returning from an apple-picking field trip, seriously injuring one of our friends and killing another—we grieved together. We skipped school, assembled at a house where no parents were home, day-drank, and took turns crying in small groups in various bathrooms. We were fifteen. When I remember that day, it’s the sound of muffled sobs behind closed doors and the awareness that one of us will write a memoir about it one day and the title will be Unsupervised. The fellas and I still look out for each other, text most days, and—while we’ve been blown all over the country and world—link up somewhere once a year to talk like we’ve never been apart. If our connection makes us sound more like old war buddies than high school homies, our bond is surviving our Gen X adolescence together.
Our generational picture came into focus for me a few years later in that lecture hall at Syracuse University in the summer of 1992. I’d just started grad school—my overreaction to a job market in which everyone who’d graduated with me was folding T-shirts at The Gap. “You should also expect to spend the first half of your careers working for the generation before you, and the second half working for the generation after you,” the professor continued. “Without ever wearing the mantle of leadership yourselves.”
The prof was too old to be a Boomer—I’d learn his was called the Silent Generation. And giving it to us straight was as on-brand for him as not freaking out about it was for us. It was a relief to hear someone say it out loud: an explanation that added up, not a cross to bear or an excuse.
The (Un)Lucky Thirteenth
After that lecture, I rinsed the new book 13th Gen and learned about the “Generation Theory” of its authors Neil Howe and Bill Strauss. With chapters titled “Something of a National Curse,” “Parents’ Things Are Always More Important,” and “The Choices Are Ugly and Few,” the book read like a mirror held up to my friends and classmates.
As younger generations would later say: I felt seen.
Ours was the unlucky thirteenth American generation since European colonization. I bought their definition of an average generation as twenty-two-ish birth years (reflecting the time between birth and adulthood), rolling up to repeating cycles of four generations (i.e. the number of generations that tend to be alive on the planet at a given time). I recognized commonalities with fellow cyclical “Nomad” generations: the Lost Generation of the “Great Power Cycle” (birth years 1883-1900), the Gilded Generation of the “Civil War Cycle” (1822-1842), the Liberty Generation of the “Revolutionary Cycle” (1724-1741), and the Cavalier Generation of the “Colonial Cycle” (1615-1647). I dug the authors’ ambition and their insistence on framing generations from a thirty-thousand-foot socio-political POV.
I digress here (A) to explain my use of Howe and Strauss’ broad definition of Gen X (birth years 1961-1981, “for peer personality, not the fecundity of their parents”), and (B) to share my suspicions that all attempts to apply a narrower window amount to Gen X erasure: namely conspiracies by Boomers specifically to co-opt the Obamas (Barack né 1961 and Michelle née 1963) and by Millennials specifically to co-opt Beyoncé (1981).
These acts of generational appropriation—and the Gen X disinclination to push back—simultaneously reflect the most Boomer, the most Millennial, and the most Gen X of tendencies. For the record, Barack Obama is the self-made ‘60s-born and ‘70s-raised Eminem-quoting multi-racial latchkey child of divorced parents, who admitted to experimenting with drugs during a free-range adolescence, through which he was looked after by his grandmother. Meanwhile the unambiguously Boomer U.S. presidents were Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a typically low-key Silent. Sort our living presidents as you will, I’m sticking with Howe and Strauss.
Generations Bleed and Skip
So while I admit that twenty-year generations are too broad and less useful for giving context to micro-trends—such as skirt-length and trouser-width—they’re meaningful when explaining mega-trends around politics, economics, sexuality, spirituality, the workplace, the arts, and culture. And since the passing-of-time between the start of one era and the dawn of another takes decades, humans born at different points in the same generation will have variances both obvious and nuanced.
As a child of the ‘60s, I’m drawn to Boomer hippies and have affections for Bob Dylan, the Beat writers, acupuncture, astrology, Eastern religion, and other topics many Gen X might mock as corny. A Gen X born closer to 1980 would understandably relate better with Millennials. Thus it tracks that while Beyoncé’s life partner Jay-Z was born in peak-Gen X 1969, her professional foil Rihanna was born in mid-Millennial-era 1988, and her music is Millennial canon.
Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson were all chronological Boomers, all born in the Upper Midwest of the United States within 90 days of each other in the summer of 1958 (one of my all-time favorite examples of generational and geographic kismet). Likewise many of the artists whose work helped define Gen X sensibilities—filmmakers John Hughes and Spike Lee, authors Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, alt-rockers U2 and R.E.M., synth icons The Cure and New Order, punk pioneers Joe Strummer and John Lydon, rappers Run-DMC and Public Enemy—were themselves late Boomers.
Right now, Millennial artists Arctic Monkeys, Charli XCX, Frank Ocean, SZA, and Tyler, The Creator (to name a few from various genres) are more popular than ever, arguably more beloved and better understood by younger Gen Z fans than by their peers. Generational inflection points re-contextualize culture—hence Gen Z’s role as judge-jury-executioners for which artifacts get to remain relevant and cool, and which are now “cringe.” Generation skipping is real too, for example the current tolerance among Gen Z for Gen X artifacts put down by Millennials as permanently outré.
So generations bleed and skip and are by definition generalizations (the words have the same root, as do genre and gender fwiw). People are individuals and identity is intersectional. Generational influences are fluid around the edges, but your birth year is an immutable fact about you, and your generation gets to be yours through every stage of life.
The Other Shoe Generation
Per 13th Gen, my generation was destined to become the worst educated and most incarcerated generation since the one that fought the Civil War, one that could not expect to have things better than our Boomer and Silent parents. “Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll? How ‘bout AIDS, crack, and Madonna?” asked a Gen X stand-up in the late eighties (I remember the joke better than the parenthetical comedian, who happened to be the guy who played Skippy on the sitcom Family Ties, Google it).
The risks for us were high and the rewards were low. There’s no perfect antonym for “entitled.” But with the incentive structure of the era, my generation learned to wait for the other shoe to drop and were unsurprised when it did. And it always did. We learned to expect and accept disappointment. So of course we became nihilistic self-professed Slackers, Gang Bangers, and/or Losers.
Musically, the Other Shoe Generation grew up as Punk and Hip-Hop were making their marks on pop culture. “They’re both ‘fuck you' music,” as an interested Millennial Lyft driver recently reminded me. The sounds of their ultimate collision were captured by artists like Beastie Boys, Fishbone, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We mostly adored the music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, re-acquired the music of our parents’ record collections on compact disc, and made no apologies when Nirvana or Dr. Dre borrowed or sampled those sounds for our pleasure. Our adolescence coincided with an MTV-sponsored monoculture that peaked around 1984 (the greatest year in the history of recorded music, per the airtight argument of Gen X author Michelangelo Matos in his must-read Can’t Slow Down). Our doomed musical anti-heroes were the most Gen X of all: Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur.
Before you point out that Boomers had their own tragic musical figures, compare their demises to the ways in which Gen X artists tended to die. Singer/songwriter Elliott Smith (born in August 1969) committed suicide at age 34 by stabbing himself to death in the heart—without evidence of so-called hesitation wounds—which due to our natural instincts for self-preservation is supposed to be difficult-to-impossible to accomplish. Accepting this cause-of-death as accurate, I’ve always considered him the most Gen X of all, and his the most apt Gen X means of self-destruction.
There’s also basically no such thing as “Gen X nostalgia.” As fans, we tend toward having PTSD, being reluctant to revisit our younger selves, and shoving down our painful early memories as deep as they’ll go. And our artists tend to be dead or fucked up. Aaliyah, Adam Yauch, Andrew Wood, Biggie, Bradley Nowell, Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell, DMX, Eazy-E, Elliott, George Michael, Jeff Buckley, Kurt, Layne Staley, Left Eye, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Phife Dawg, Sinead O’Connor, Scott Weiland, Tupac, and Whitney account for hundreds of millions of albums sold and an outsize share of the Gen X canon. You can’t see them live or hope for a reunion tour.
Then there are Axl Rose, Billy Corghan, Bobby Brown, Britney Spears, Chris & Rich Robinson, Courtney Love, Eminem, Fiona Apple, Fred Durst, Kanye West, Lauryn Hill, Liam & Noel Gallagher, Marilyn Manson, Pete Doherty, R. Kelly, Richard Ashcroft, Ryan Adams, Stephen Jenkins, and Zach De La Rocha: a long list of Gen X artists variously known to be unreliable, troubled, and/or problematic. Bad seeds tend not to age gracefully.
For generational pogos down memory lane, I can offer just Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Weezer, Trent Reznor, Dave Grohl, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Wu Tang Clan (sans ODB), Radiohead, and (recently) Oasis. Shout if I’m missing someone, but I really don’t think I am. And it’s fine.
“Dad Rock Is Cool”
As foretold, our moment at center stage was brief. Gen X artists self-destructed and thus rarely required cancellation. “Dad Rock” feels like acute ageism—the type of slur that never would be directed at another group by the same people who use it freely. Pearl Jam and the Chili Peppers seem irrationally maligned based on their bodies of work and levels of success. Their disparagement feels mean-spirited and motivated by something besides their music. Many Rock artists were swept up in attacks against “rockism” by Millennial critics in a revisionist history built around the flimsy insistence that guitar-oriented sub-genres like Punk had been systemically built-up at the expense of supposedly marginalized genres like Dance and Pop. The argument depended on anecdote—e.g. the story of “Disco Demolition Night”—and felt illogical at best and disingenuous at worst.
There are few measures by which, say, the Clash and the Ramones had been more successful than their contemporaries in other genres. While there no doubt were high-level biases and individual-level harm, the “poptimist” argument felt like a straw man, an unnecessarily complicated means for Millennials to signal to Boomers and Gen X that the music we liked wasn’t cool. But we knew it all along. And the argument seems to have run out of steam thanks to the resurgence of Country, not to mention early signals that Gen Z will swing the pendulum the opposite way. For Boomers and Gen X: “Rock is cool.” For Millennials: “Your Rock is Dad Rock.” For Gen Z: “Dad Rock is cool.”
The F@#* Around And Find Out People
So now there are five generations of living Americans versus the usual four. Boomers seem determined to live forever just to spite everyone, hanging on as so-called Gen Alpha begin to age up as a fifth. The latter began being born around lockdown in 2021, so forgive me for calling it too soon to start ascribing generational characteristics to them, although it seems reasonable to assume that birthrates will decline due to the current state of the world into which they’re being born.
Neither the oldest nor the youngest, still the smallest, now entrenched in our middle age, too young to retire but increasingly too old to get hired, Gen X feels on-schedule and not far from what Howe and Strauss predicted:
"Playing to win but half-expecting to lose, Nomad generations (e.g. Gen X) enter midlife with a sense of exhaustion. Still forced to take hit-or-miss risks in their work and public lives, they become increasingly cautious in their family lives. By now they take for granted widening gaps between classes, ethnicities, regions, and gender roles. The ablest among them emerge as cunning, pragmatic, and colorful public figures. When crisis hits, they find their lives painfully split between the old order and new. But they rise fiercely (and sacrificially) to the occasion, able to make hard and fast choices without fretting much about what others think. Exalting the workable over the ideal, midlife Nomads forge an effective alliance with the elder (generation). Yet people of other ages are quick to criticize and slow to give them praise."
To be clear: Howe and Strauss wrote this in 1998: three years before 9/11, a decade before the financial crisis, eighteen years before the first election of Donald Trump, and twenty-two years (i.e. a full generation) before a global pandemic. As we return to normalcy post-pandemic and to the office five days a week, I hear the words of my former colleague, journalist Nathan Brackett: “We’re Gen X, Mike, we go to work.” We’re in our competency era. Our hard-won experience matters, the laps around the proverbial track have sharpened our instincts and quickened our reaction time. We should channel kindred Nomad leaders in past Crisis eras: Generals George Washington, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower.
Our Competency Years
I am the most pragmatic motherfucker you will ever meet (I don’t feel qualified to judge how cunning or colorful). And while I promise I really do care about you, you’ll eventually get bored by the extent to which I mostly care about winning. The first time a direct report told me they’d like to see more empathy from me (circa 2020) was the first time in my life it occurred to me that empathetic was something I was supposed to be. By any reasonable standard, I’d call myself a mediocre manager—having learned on-the-job, like many of my peers, from an IRL Devil Wears Prada—but a decent instinctive leader. I’m evolving and working on developing emotional intelligence, with inspiration from Millennial philosopher Taylor Swift: “Never wield such power, you forget to be polite.” I’m trying to be as direct as I need to be and as kind as the situation allows. But as I feel the world teetering between the old and new orders, in the liminal space between generations and eras, I hear the words quoted on the Internet by a great contemporary historian named Papa Woof who wrote this about America’s 13th generation:
"I don’t mess around with anyone over 42, they built different, their families had them formally trained in something by the time they were 2, they had keys to the house by age 5, could cook full meals at 7, and was pretty much self-sufficient at 9.
“They left their house at dawn every Summer morning and didn’t come home til nightfall and survived all day on water from garden hoses, they might get a sandwich on the off chance somebody’s parents had went shopping, they spent three quarters of their lives by themselves with a parent maybe checking on them twice a month, most of them have evaded at least one kidnapping attempt, and, they know 15 different ways to remove bloodstains from clothing.
“They the real fuck around and find out people."
To which I say: it me. It us. Gen X. The unknown variable. The Parenthetical Generation. The Bad Seeds. Raised by wolves. Survivors. Nomads. Gang Bangers. Losers. The Other Shoe Anticipators. The ones you want around when you have a bloodstain. The Fuck Around And Find Out People.
And at a new generational inflection point and approaching another technological crossroads—not the first time for Gen X with either—I can’t stop thinking these three things (again): I knew it all along. It explains a lot.
And it’s fine.
