GenXPosterChild

The Rise to a Great Generation of Slackers…

Do you ever wake up with the feeling of ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ and you can see the days stretching into months and then to years and all you can think of is ‘What’s the point?’ and take a nap?  If you do, you might be a showing signs of Generation X.  Don’t be sad or scared, you’re far from alone.  On the large scale, people known as GenXers are typically the progeny of what was the post WWII “baby boomers.  However, that’s not necessarily the best way to explain it.  Yes, we are all within the same age range, but I think it’s what we have gone through and experienced that makes us who we are, and in large part, links us.  We know what it’s like to only have three channels on the TV.  We remember those primitive computers we grew up with, the first video games, cable boxes, and the birth of MTV.  The point here isn’t the trite ‘when I was your age, I had to walk 10 miles to school uphill both ways in a blizzard.‘  It’s more a sense of we do remember what life was like without all those things.  We were the last generation before AIDS became a household word.  Coming of age in the decades following the excessive, decadent days of Woodstock and Studio 54, our parents kind of tiptoed around the ‘don’t do drugs’ issue, knowing full well if they emphasized it they’d be laughed at as hypocrites.  Overall, it seems that what our generation possesses that defines us is an inherent sort of cynicism.  We saw so much change so fast, much of it not for the good, and we don’t know how we’re going to do to fix it, or even where to start.  Worse even is the fact that so many of these problems were created by generations preceding us, each with the attitude that the next group to come along would fix things.  Unfortunately,  the debts our fathers and forefathers  took out using us as collateral are now slowly being called in, and we’re not exactly thrilled at having this all dumped on is, and we’re pretty pissed off at the way things have been left for us.  We’ll never be as wealthy as our parents.  Hell, we might still be living with our parents today.  Social security is a joke; even the baby boomers know you cannot remain at your current lifestyle with it alone when you retire.  The “American Dream” with the nice house with a white picket fence and tree house is gone-the house was leveled to make a McMansion, the picket fence had lead in the paint, and the nice, simple tree house wasn’t ‘up to code’.  There is a plus to this, however.  For women, what those who came before us did was miraculous, and it is something for which every woman today should be grateful.  The power of choice is one of the greatest powers that exist, and the pill and Roe v. Wade put some choice back into women’s hands.  We didn’t always have the power to choose whether to marry, whom to marry, whether or not to have children, what to do if we didn’t want any more children but found ourselves pregnant.  This demographic has been one of the first to be able to reap the benefits from the hard uncompromising work of women who came before us.  Unfortunately, it also put us in a conundrum.  Women today are among the first who are given the opportunity to decide between work and motherhood, and many thought they could rise in their career, put off breeding until they were well established, and having a little Jack or Jill running around would be just as easy to make happen in one’s 40’s as in one’s 20’s.   What people forgot was that women’s fertility peaks between 17-23, and it starts diminishing by 27.  Society changed in leaps and bounds, but biology doesn’t move that fast.  In some ways, it’s like GenXers got gypped.  Where was OUR 60’s?  Where was OUR punk rock, proclaiming itself dead before it even got off the ground?  When you think of the 80’s, there’s little more you can do than join with your friends to sing all of those catchy but utterly ridiculous one hit wonders that MTV played…over and over and over…You’re laughing with them, and from the perspective of time gone by those ridiculous outfits do have a certain cuteness to them, but THAT WAS IT?  Rebels without causes staring out and being hit with waves and waves of new technology, and Xers aren’t nearly as sponge like as the following Y people. So we look over on one side and we see the past, the errors our elders made, the nonchalant attitude of not worrying, because it’ll get fixed someday, and knowing that someday will probably come within our lifetimes, and we look to the right and we see the people rising up after us who speak technology like it’s another language, and it can be overwhelming.  It’s in part a sense of not rightly knowing our place in the world today, feeling a sense of bleakness that solving the problems left for us won’t be possible, and with all this crashing in, there can sometimes come a great sense of wanting to stick our heads in the sand.GenX is a broad term, and I my no means do I regard myself as a sole spokesperson, but I am a member of this convoluted group of folks, and I’m interested in communicating what’s going on in the world through perhaps a slightly different point of view. Feel free to comment, question, disagree, argue, you name it.  I’ll be here.