Twilight of the Gen Xers

We're getting older, maybe even wiser. But our obsolescence looms.

Photo by Duy Vo

The day I knew I wasn’t young anymore was a cloudless, blue-skied day in early April. John and I were walking around the campus of La Sapienza, Rome’s biggest national university, which, by the way, is the most expedient way to feel old. All those tight-skinned young faces hold up a mirror to your own.

But it wasn’t even the gazelle-like twenty-year-old Italian girls that made me feel my years. It was a young parkour fan that whipped past us, leaped on top of a five-foot-high stone wall, precariously balanced there, and then dashed off to his next obstacle.

Parkour derives from parcours du combattant, or obstacle course, a form of military training that requires rapid movement through an urban environment and the negotiation of obstacles by running, jumping, and climbing.

Just looking at this kid made my knees hurt.

In a flash, I remembered bursting at the seams with that kind of youth and juice and energy once upon a time. You have so much of all three when you’re young, you don’t know what to do with it. When I was that young man’s age, I used to get off work at three in the morning, crash for half an hour, and then drive three hours to the beach just to watch the sun rise. Double shift? No problem. All-nighters? No problem. Two hours at the gym? I didn’t even need a nap.

John felt it, too, I suspect. Sort of a fierce embarrassment that someone else’s youth was thrust rudely in our faces. Despite our low-key jokiness about it, we’d been reminded. This wasn’t the nineties. We weren’t tireless. We weren’t young. And we sure as hell weren’t careening from wall to fire hydrant to bus stop bench with the ease of a well-trained lemur.

Used with permission by the New York City Library

These days, I negotiate a different type of obstacle course. Life has become an either/or situation for me. Either I spend the day writing or I run errands. Not both. I make conscious choices based solely on the conservation and application of energy.

It’s been like this for a while, long before I realized what was happening. Seven years ago in my previous life as a fulltime group exercise instructor and personal trainer, I’d work all day and then come home, feed my kids, put them to bed, and try to write. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Nine times out of ten, I’d fall asleep in front of the blinking cursor on my laptop screen. It got to a point where I couldn’t even physically hold a pen. I thought it was neurological damage from too much exercise. Turns out I was simply exhausted.

Now that I am well into middle age, I find myself reassessing the role of us Gen Xers in society. Did we help or hinder? In many ways, I feel as though we were an invisible generation. We grimly bore witness to the world we inherited. Although our Boomer parents had television, ours was the first generation to become thoroughly indoctrinated by TV culture. We were latchkey kids. Parents were divorcing in record numbers. Moms worked. We had hours of unsupervised time that we spent eating potato chips in front of a screen. In a rejection of the glitter and bombast of our parents’ disco ball youths, we were the progenitors of grunge rock, punk, post-punk, and heavy metal. We ushered in the age of independent film. We were the first generation to experience an analog youth and a digital adulthood.

Ours was the age of The Counting Crows, the Black Crows, Russell Crowe, Sheryl Crow, not to mention Jason Lee who starred in The Crow. We had Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Clerks, Pretty in Pink, Heathers, Before Sunrise, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. After the stock market crash, rents were actually affordable. We lived in places like New York City in a TriBeca loft that cost a thousand dollars. These things are impossible for our Gen Z children to even conceive of.

Wrongly, our Boomer parents called us “cynical, disaffected slackers.” They might have had the cynical, disaffected part right, but not the slacker. We merely refused to become the same victims of workaholic corporate toadyism that our parents were. We forged a different path, one of entrepreneurialism. We strove for, and possibly achieved, something approximating a work-life balance. We’re adaptable, technically proficient, and better educated than our Boomer parents. We’re also more likely to seek more cosmetic procedures than any other age group.

We came of age during the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, the very real consequences of trickle-down economics and the dot-com bubble. We grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam War, Watergate, Reagan, and Bush. But we are getting older and more politically jaded, two conditions our natural cynicism and disaffectedness worsen. We’ve been accused of standing by while the world burns. According to Pew Research, only 49% of the Gen Xers are left-leaning. Millennials and Gen Zers, both majority Democratic voting blocs, will now dominate U.S. elections.

So, what does it mean to be a Gen Xer from this point forward?

I suspect ours will be the first generation that never truly retires. We’ll monetize our hobbies, do Etsy, do anything to supplement our social security, especially if it dries up just as we’re dipping our hand in the well.

Photo by Rizky Subagja

We’ve benefited by being the “forgotten” generation, the meat between two slices of Boom and Millennial bread. No one’s watching us. We’re not a target audience for advertisers. Our concerns are not widely debated on Twitter or university. This allows us to flourish, like mushrooms, in the dark. We’ve learned to grow in excrement, and now fresher excrement will be shoveled down for future generations to contend with.

Our children are much like we were: cynical to the point of nihilism. I asked my daughter one day if it bothered her that Nicki Minaj was a bio-engineered Barbie doll with a filthy mouth and no talent. She actually surprised me by saying, “Of course not. It’s not about talent anymore. It’s about being really hot, even fake-hot, and super super famous.”

They don’t hope, our children. In a way, they’ve adopted the hedonism of the Boomers, the anxiety of the Millennials, the nihilism of the Xers, all while managing to glug down vanilla macchiatos. But they have a world-weary centeredness about them that brings me hope. I have faith in the Gen Zers. They’re better than we were, although they might not have been without our influence.

I’m not young anymore. For a woman who used to trade on her looks, I am strangely at peace with that. If anything, I want to protect them from a world that resents and covets their youth. I want to protect them from themselves. It may be true that youth is wasted on the young; but the young should be cherished and appreciated and made to feel as though a future is possible.

Are you a Gen Xer? If so, what’s your take on “the forgotten generation?” Leave your comments below.

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