Generation X: What Will Be Our Role In The New Millennial World?
***Trigger Warning!***
I mean that trigger warning, kids. You should just back right the fuck out now. This is a Millennial free zone! Adults only! That goes double for that little junior Nazi brigade. I’d give every last one of you shits a spanking if I didn’t know it would just give you a God damn erection. Little fucking perverts. Nothing against the rest of you Millennials though. I got nothing but love for most of you. It’s just you wouldn’t understand what you’re reading. You’re not my audience. I am speaking to my peers. I am speaking to the unloved and unwanted bastard children of the Baby Boomers. I am speaking to Generation X.
It is an interesting existence being a part of the generation that is defined by no one giving a shit about you and you knowing it. Our very name was a placeholder. The people who come up with this shit tossed around a few names without anything sticking before we finally just collectively grabbed that fucking placeholder and told the world, “Fuck you! We know you don’t care.” We went ahead and owned that fucking shit. We knew the score. There wasn’t a damn thing in this world that was about us and there never would be. Our parents had sucked out every last bit of oxygen we could ever breathe. It was the Baby Boomer’s world and we were accessories at best. Unfortunately for that disgusting generation of narcissists, we couldn’t just be dropped off at Goodwill after their interests changed. We hung around like an unfortunate odor after an explosive shit. We lingered. Angry.
We have never been a large generation. The Greatest and Silent generations spent most of their reproductive wads breeding a super generation of self-important locusts after World War II. The massive social changes demanded by those locusts resulted in reproduction being delayed as Boomers chose not to have children. Generation X was birth controlled and aborted into oblivion before we even began. God only knows how many we lost while our parents left us to play in the street or put chemicals where we could drink them. Each of those ridiculous warning labels we see every day have the corpse of at least one Gen X child behind it. Our numbers were further culled by suicide, the various drug epidemics of the late 20th century and as if that wasn’t e-fucking-nough, mother fucking AIDS. We couldn’t even escape with drugs and sex like our parents did without taking our lives into our own hands.
Our entire world is still defined by our God damn parents. At this point we’re all getting a little creaky, our hair is falling out, we have kids of our fucking own, but we still can’t escape the shadow of those fuckers. They are like some towering vampires still sucking every ounce of blood out of the entire world. It has always been about them and no one else. When they were children their Depression-era parents coddled the Boomers and gave them everything they never had as children. As the Baby Boomers got older and wanted to fuck, society itself changed to accommodate them. Sexual liberation only exists because Baby Boomers were horny. They didn’t want to go to war, so the draft ended. I’d give them credit for the Civil Rights movement, but let’s be honest, the heavy lifting was done there by the Greatest and Silent generations. Kudos for going along with it though, guys.
Society is better because of the changes Boomers brought in their youth. Unfortunately, those changes were nothing more than enlightened self-interest on the part of the Baby Boomers. The moment those things were no longer about them the Baby Boomers moved on. The Boomers brought us Reagan for the same shallow and vapid reasons they brought us sexual liberation and ended the draft. They were older now and it was all about their stock portfolio. Gone were those college-age radicals, it was time to make some fucking money. To hell with long-term economic health and the environment. The 80s were known as the “Me Decade” and it is so easy to forget that the people who made them that way were the exact same fucking people who had defined the previous two decades. The late 60s and 70s had been part of the “Me Decade” as well, it just had an air of faux social consciousness that masked the naked self-interest of the Baby Boomers. In the 80s the mask dropped and we could finally see their generation for what it really was. The Boomers had come of age and seized the levers of power for themselves. They have held those levers in a death grip ever since.
And what does Generation X get? Not you as an individual, you self-interested Boomer wannabe fuck, I’m talking about the collective we. Our Generation. What have we had that’s ours? We had some kick-ass toys when we were kids. G.I. Joes, Transformers, and He-Man for the boys; My Little Pony, Strawberry Shortcake, and Cabbage Patch Kids for the girls. It all kinda loses it’s luster once you realize that was actually for our parents too though. Some Capitalist fucker realized that at least some Boomers were reproducing and wanted to sell them things that would keep the booger eaters out of their hair. They let us get some decent music on the air for like 5 years before they synth popped us right back to oblivion. Yay? When we entered adult life we did so like the grim fatalists we’ve always been and I don’t think we’ve looked up since. Who has time for a bunch of talk about our generation anyway? We had to watch the Boomers constantly masturbate in public with their endless self-reflection so there isn’t a whole lot of taste for it among Generation X. The media almost comically seemed to remember that we existed a while back and gave us a little attention. We pretty much just flipped them the bird until they stopped looking at us and that was what they wrote about. What else were we supposed to do? The media hasn’t given a shit about us in years. We weren’t going to let them stoke our egos now. It’s only recently that the narrative has shifted from the Boomers to another generation. Not us of course, because fuck us. The Millennials are ascendant!
I’ll be one of the first to admit Millennials can be… challenging. At times they can seem just like Baby Boomer narcissists. They are meticulously fussy about their appearance. Looking at their social media profiles you have to wonder where the ugly ones are. I mean they come from the same genetic soup as the rest of us, you’d think at least one or two of them would be ugly. Don’t worry, they’re ugly too. They just know how to take a picture from the right angle to make them look good no matter how hideous the reality actually is. Technology can take care of any blemishes and make the lighting just right. Coming from a generation that at one point declared regular bathing to be too effeminate this can be a little off-putting.
Millennials have causes. Lots of them. Most of these aren’t exactly new and are the sorts of things I think most Gen Xers and even the few warm-blooded Baby Boomers could go along with. But, the way they talk about them! Jesus! It takes a special kind of annoying for me to be in complete agreement with you and still want to bash your face in with the nearest rock. Even though Millennials are near universal in being left with these various causes there is a smaller right-wing contingent. No generation is a monolith. They are just as annoying with the added bonus of being repulsive. Except for the hair and clothes of course. They are Millennials after all.
The Millennials could be safely dismissed as a threat to nothing. They were busy looking for someone to fuck on Tinder instead of in a bar or coffee shop like a normal human being. They were content diddling themselves while they contemplated 63 hypothetical genders. The Millennial answer to social ills has been to identify two large piles of feces before dropping trow and making them intersect with a cylinder of their own shit. It would take an act of God to slap those ridiculous kids’ heads out of their own asses. Or maybe the United States could elect an openly racist misogynistic billionaire who ran on a platform that was actual fucking fascism? Yeah, that would get ’em moving!
Oh my GOD, they are pissed! They were pissed already. The choice of Millennials wasn’t either of the Baby Boomers on the ballot. They had supported a man from the Silent Generation who was preaching the gospel of the Old Left. You know, the way the left was before the Baby Boomers ruined it just like they do everything else they fucking touch. If you think their anger is somehow funny, or that you’ve won something because of how mad they are you are a fucking fool. The generational time bomb of the Millennials just jumped forward several years. The Millennials are about to descend like millions of little raptors and tear it all to shreds. This isn’t just politics I’m talking about here. Political, cultural, economic; it’s all going down because a funny thing just happened. The Baby Boomers aren’t the largest generation anymore. The Millennials are.
Those Baby Boomers have really outdone themselves this time! In their old age, the Boomers have started to look longingly back to the world of their youth. They have begun to model themselves into caricatures of the kindly, yet over the top racist and xenophobic old men and women they remember so fondly from their childhood. The Baby Boomers have begun mimicking the racism and backward thinking of the long-dead fossils of the Lost Generation. For their last act, they have chosen to cram the values of people born before the 20th century down everyone’s throat. And they want to leave Generation X holding that bag. Even now they are slinking away out the back while the enraged Millennials are coming in a wave of righteous fury.
Fuck that!
Generation X aren’t the ones who have been destroying everything for the last 50 years! None of this entire shit show we are all living in is our fault! We’ve been powerless the whole time! There have never been enough of us to have an effect on anything! Hell, we aren’t even going to be the ones that fix things! That’s going to be the Millennials! What, did you actually think our generation was going to have a chance to be at the top of the heap? That we’d have our moment? Haven’t you been paying attention your whole life? Our irrelevance is right there in the name!
So what now? The Millennials are going to win the generational struggle just by being younger than the Baby Boomers. It’s only a matter of time. And since the victors write the history they will be the heroes. Is Generation X destined to be another villain for them to overcome? Next to our parents we make for some pretty pathetic villains. Being the abused cur fighting for the system that has hurt you even more than the people you are fighting against isn’t a good look on anyone. Generation X can’t exactly be the heroes here either. We aren’t cut out for it. Even if our generation did decide to suddenly change its entire nature and hero up the Millennials don’t exactly need or want us. They have that covered. They aren’t just King Arthur, but every fucking knight at the round table too. Camelot is forever closed to our kind. You know who else wasn’t the hero though? Merlin. And if you really think about it he is who we’ve been all along.
A generation raised by reptiles doesn’t easily understand the concept of mentoring even when we are the ones doing it. Consider this: a young idealistic Millennial worker goes to her middle management Generation X supervisor with a new workplace initiative. The thing that Gen Xer is going to do is point out the problems with the idea and show how it could never work there. He’s been around a while and seen all the angles after all. He’ll send her back with a couple of suggestions on what does work so the basic idea can still be implemented. Without him doing that for her nothing will ever happen because she is missing vital information and experience that will make her fail. He is a part of her success because he shows her what she needs to do to succeed. He is probably even going to have to be the one to give her the public acknowledgment and tell her how brilliant she is without mentioning his own role in it, but that’s OK. Taking the credit is not what a mentor does. Of course, while all of this is going on their Baby Boomer boss is hiding in his office embezzling money. He neither knows nor cares who either of these people are, but he will take all the credit for the initiative.
It turns out that all of the impotent rage of Generation X wasn’t pointless after all. While it might have felt like it was all falling on deaf ears someone was listening. The Millennials saw us and learned from us. All of the cynicism and anger about the bullshit of the world from Generation X is in the foundation of the Millennial worldview. It’s not that they don’t get it. They incorporated all of that right from the start. They are just pushing past it in an effort to end the bullshit. The Millennials are our children. Occasionally biological, but I’m not talking in those terms. They are our philosophical children in the generational zeitgeist. This is something that has always been plain to see. The trick is you have to pull your head out of your ass in order to see past your own shit.
There is dignity in Generation X going ahead and embracing the role of the old wise man in the Millennial world. Weirdos that they are, the Millennials even seem to like that sort of thing. The alternative is being the cranky old bastard pining for a world and way of life that never loved nor wanted him anyway. The kids set flaming bags of dog poop in front of that guy’s door as a general rule. Even his generational peers get a slight chuckle at his misery when they see it. The Millennials are the future, and the Boomers will soon be the past. Yeah, they will be setting the tone for everything just like the Baby Boomers did, but that doesn’t mean they are a parasitic infection like the Boomers. The new world of the Millennials will be better by default. With a little help and input from Generation X, we might all actually be able to make something… good. It feels ridiculous even saying it, but it could happen.
And maybe, just maybe, if we all work together when no one is looking Generation X can fire up some Soylent Green machines and shove those fucking Baby Boomers in feet first to finish them off once and for all! What? They’ve never been good for anything anyway, so we might as well eat them! We’ll of course have tell the kiddies that we’re eating kale wafers. Evidently cannibalizing your enemies is too offensive for some of them.
Greg Ganues is just some dude. He has done things. He has both opinions and an asshole. He is only an author in the most technical sense of the word. He wrote a thing and you read it. He will happily argue with you on Twitter.
