Quit Yer Whinin', Gen X
I wrote a column for The New York Times about my cohort's disappointment that neoliberalism hasn't worked out for many of them, and the mistake Boomers are making right now that I don't want to see us make. (Originally published here on August 17th.)
Pour out a Zima for Gen X-ers, who will never end up running the world. This was the theme of a Wall Street Journal article recently about corporations that are skipping over the Slacker generation — those of us born between 1965 and 1980 — and promoting millennials instead to C.E.O. As The Journal put it, presumably channeling the anxieties of one of the paper’s frustrated editors: “As they enter what is usually the prime, C-suite career stage, more businesses are retaining their aging leaders or skipping a generation in search of the next ones.”
I was born in 1976, and my reaction to this news was, in Gen X parlance, whatever, man. The disappointment some X-ers feel about this is indicative of an inherent contradiction: They did not trust institutions, empty ambitions and rampant consumerism when they were young, but still feel let down when, as middle-aged adults, the system has not delivered the professional success and extreme run-up of home equity that boomers have accrued. This is especially true of X-ers who happen to be white and male and C.E.O.-shaped. And it’s a bummer!
In theory, these X-ers were well aware that their parents were probably going to be better off than they themselves would ever be and couldn’t decide whether to be angry about it pre-emptively or to just slackerishly opt out of the corporate and political structures that led to it altogether. The Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, who popularized the term “Generation X” with his 1991 novel of that name, had a character in it named Dag, who puts it thus: “I don’t know … whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world or whether I’m just upset that the world has gotten too big — way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are those blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers.”
Mr. Coupland has an entire chapter titled “Our Parents Had More.” And you know what? They did. Education was cheaper, cities were less gentrified and corporations at least put on a show of being loyal to their employees. Many of us aging Gen X-ers work in the gig economy, piecing together several jobs and hoping our potential income isn’t undermined by the post-human, tech-oligarch-enriching promises of A.I. As a result, many of us are now background players in the grand narratives we imagined for ourselves. In the words of the iconic X-er band Pavement, we’ve “been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.”
These circumstances have turned some of us into self-pitying whiners. (Maybe we always have been: Cue Beck whining, “I’m a loser, baby.”) I’ve heard so many X-ers complain incessantly about younger generations. First, millennials, but now Gen Z-ers, are accused of not wanting to do any work, being too sensitive, not wanting to pay their dues. But boomers looked down on us, too, and I’m not sure our failure to remember that can be exclusively explained by the brain cells we killed by disregarding Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, or by the perimenopausal brain fog some of us are experiencing. The younger generations are not lazier; they’re just more skeptical of institutions than we are. They can already see that they may not be better off than our generation. And the fact that they think John Hughes movies are more creepy than cute does not mean that they’re prudes or sensitive little snowflakes.
The inability to accept this may explain why so many Gen X-ers voted for Donald Trump. If they view him as anti-establishment, he validates their need to feel that they’re being subversive. If you see a post that used generative A.I. to make Mr. Trump look like a U.F.C. fighter or Rambo, I’ll bet you a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill that it was made by a Gen X-er. Mr. Trump is more Beavis or Butt-Head than John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt, and that appeals in the sense that he annoys the responsible grown-ups, which X-ers have loved doing since “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” And mostly, he gives them a story that says: Yes, you were lied to, and that’s why your life sucks, dude.
For white men in particular, who favored Mr. Trump by 20 percentage points, he tells them that where they experience disappointment or hardship, it’s not the neoliberal system they decided to buy into that’s the problem; it’s specific groups of people who are maliciously displacing them — women, minorities, immigrants, younger people. What began as my generation’s preference for independence and individualism has by some alchemy of culture and material conditions mutated into selfishness.
In Hal Hartley’s 1991 short film “Theory of Achievement,” about a group of white, young, middle-class, college-educated people living in a less gentrified part of Brooklyn, a character asks another what he does for a living. “Work I don’t like” he replies, “to pay the rent.” But, he says, “I want to write songs. Love songs. Really beautiful timeless love songs. And I can’t sing and I don’t know music.”
They go on to argue about whether they’re artists or sellouts. “I’m a writer,” one says. “No, you’re not,” another replies. “You’re a low-rent real estate agent, and you’re bad at your job.”
“I’m bad at my job on purpose,” the would-be writer replies. “If I was any better at it, I might become what I do for a living.”
In pursuit of financial gain and independence, many X-ers did become what they do for a living. They were good real estate agents, and it has produced neither fulfillment nor material security. Some calcified and became resistant to change, befuddled and irritated by new norms, less able to cope with challenges both specific to and apart from our generation.
The solution to this calcification is to ditch a Gen X quality that makes us value the individual over the collective. Our generational superstition is that if a lot of people like or participate in a thing, it must be lame. We distrust sincerity and use irony as a shield. But sincerity and community are what we need right now. It also means breaking the cycle of punishing younger generations for our own disappointments and refusing to pass the baton. Let the 40-year-old who never owned a Walkman be the C.E.O. Let the 33-year-old socialist who’s good at TikTok become the next mayor. Our undersized generation’s brief period of demographic dominance in the work force ended in 2016. You can now make those beautiful love songs — with generative A.I. (Sorry. I can’t totally excise my generation’s irony disease.)
We do have at least one example of what happens when Gen X-ers take the reins. The average age of the first 100 people Mr. Trump added to his staff is 55. Gen X-ers have become more conservative with age, just like the boomers before us. To quote Kurt Cobain, “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”
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