That sketch is amazing on so many levels. And I didn’t even recognize Rachel Brosnahan.
So do I. Very rarely, for sure. But still.
We’re (Gen X) just a bridge generation between the analog and the digital. We remember party lines and rooting Android phones. We rode on our big wheels and in our Priuses. We carry the genes of Woke (hippies) and Alt-Right (Reagan babies) inside of us. We were the beta-testers of now. And our generation is destined to be forgotten.
Look. “Silent” and “Lost” are already taken. We’re gonna have to go with less humility.
CTRL+F Coupland returned one hit at the very end. Just Coupland, no Douglas, no link to the book. Seems petty.
How very NYT to refuse to acknowledge the literally generation-defining novel in favor of the author’s own spin on the subject ('member walkmans?!). Gen X may not know much for sure, but it does know what it hates.
Hmm. That would be a good t-shirt slogan. Well, now I can die happy. Actually, my duloxetine won’t allow that; so I guess I can die “meh”. Which is about the good as it gets these days.
Born at the end of Baby Boomers, but fuck that generation. A bunch of hypocrites and traitors.
And while we are at it, fuck Gen-Xs, and Millennials too. And whatever comes next. Bunch of crybabies.
Fucking worst part is the millenials are gonna call us boomers.
/me sitting grumpily in nursing home at age 80
/me hears middle-aged millennial: “goddamn boomers”
/me throwing Doc Marten at millennial
I feel like the “Oregon Trail Generation” is just about perfect.
The theory goes that the Xennials dated, and often formed ongoing relationships, pre-social media.
That’s one lie I can live with.
Hey, I’ll take it. I also like the Generation Jones concept linked at the bottom — Boomers/early X too young to have war veteran fathers.
Jeez, I guess he’s probably our icon, huh? I don’t want to be comfortable with that.
Clearly, Gen X are the pawns in that cause (and I would never minimize their sacrifices), but a comparison with the Greatest Generation or a Lost Generation both feel far-fetched. The primary quality of our generation’s wars is how little they were felt back home. (Which, for the record, I consider to be less of a blessing than we might assume.)
Our wars were cultural. We’re the first generation to witness and then normalize mass murder in our own schools and cities. We were the first generation of kids to watch entire armies of militarized cops blast into minority households in search of drugs and brown people. We watched and cheered as a disruptive technology created in the free-love, free-beer mindset was quickly transformed into a vast, intrusive, ultra-capitalist wasteland better used for disseminating propaganda instead of knowledge. Gen X was exposed to dozens of wars. Few of us even knew what was happening, which is why we pretty much lost all of them, allowing the usual powerhungry squares present in every generation victory by default.
I watched from the deck of the USS Nimitz as fully-loaded F-18s took off in the Gulf. Then I’d go down and tell my grunge-listening crewmates “No blood for oil, dude.”
There has been a “baby boom” in other parts of the world over the past few decades. So we may not be safely out of “boomers’” grasp even once our own Western boomers have passed.
Sort of? What i was comparing wasn’t the scale or proportion of sacrifice but that unlike the 20s and the 50s, and unlike the 80s or the late 2000’s on, Gen X was similar to the Greatest Generation in that their own cultural production was subsumed by larger, worldwide issues. It’s interesting i think 9/11 was a far more existential threat than any previous war since WW2 - in fact even in WW2 the US was not attacked so dramatically on its own continental territory - and that for a good several years, at least until Obama, whatever Gen X “wanted” or not was washed down the flood of history.
It’s interesting because like the GG, Gen X was trapped by historic forces (also, if you think about it, there’s not a ton of cultural output in the 30s and 40s - i mean, sure, there’s some, but it’s not like the 50s onward, and even the 20s seemed to have a deeper sense of a generation in command - unlike Baby Boomers, they didn’t have their Vietnam moment where there was this “cultural revolution” going on at the same time. The 2000s didn’t lead to the anything at all politically or culturally, not like the so-called cultural revolutions of 1968.
And that’s because unlike the Vietnam protests which involved an unpopular draft to fight a foreign war in a country nobody cared aboud, protesting the military confrontation and defense against this nascent Islamist threat was utterly untenable intellectually or politically until Iraq 2, and even the reaction to that was tardy and muddled. Only a die-hard Leninist could cheer terrorist attacks on the US as the catalyst for some kind of political sea-change, and there were no Leninists left.
Dude. I use command line prompts on next-gen systems every day as part of my job. Viva la command prompt, yo!
I will admit, fish(1) is more than a bit different than the ones I grew up with in the 70s. ;)
Snark aside, GenX is indeed the “new Lost” generation. I’m a serious (i.e., probably more than a little unhealthy) workaholic, and I still have a very strong “fuck the world, just leave me alone to play my video games, damnit,” streak in me.