Gen X to Boomers and Millennials: STFU

“I’m not narcissistic, you’re narcissistic!”

“No, you’re more narcissistic than me!”

Etc. ad nauseam.

The spectacle of watching two of the currently “adult” generations bicker over who is more narcissistic would be funny if it weren’t so useless. And if there weren’t a whole generation in between waiting for everyone to shut up and get over themselves.

Dear Boomers: Everything you say about narcissistic Millennials goes for you too. Have you watched CNN lately? Seen any commercials pitched for a viewer under 30? Me neither. Retirement advice that still presumes you’re leaving a job (that you’ve been at for 20 years) to travel the world? Irrelevant to everyone else since 2006. Notice how often the word “deserve” comes up? Yeah, that means you’re “entitled” too.

Dear Millennials: It’s true, you really can learn stuff from old people who are, like, 40. Part of the reason so many startups flame out is because they work off models with flaws that someone who lived through Atari could have pointed out. And it isn’t just that you’re repeating things people have already done — you’re repeating each other. (How many different versions of a lean startup need to become fads?) As for authenticity: being authentic is one thing, being interesting is something different. Being authentic and curious is even better.

For those playing along at home, there was a generation once, mostly born between 1960 and 1980, that demographers call “Generation X.” Amusingly, way back in 1999 a seminal article in The Atlantic spoke about Gen X in many of the same ways Boomers talk about Millennials now, using words like “disaffected,” “lazy,” and, uh, “debt.” (Boomers: your fault. Full stop.)

That generation has sort of faded. Some have become “the Man,” i.e., thrown in with the Boomers as middle management with aspirations to become upper-middle management. Some have left behind those expectations and drifted in a more Millennial path: artisanship, startups, and disruption.

In neither case, however, is Gen X really very welcome. We’re the ones who discovered that traditional (i.e., Boomer) career paths got broken — often the hard way. It worked for the generation ahead of us, but then, depending on your metaphor, the ladder got pulled up or we hit the glass ceiling. We’re also the ones who figured out that Silicone Valley is obsessed with recreating its childhood, just without parents around, and with higher stakes (often involving Other People’s Money).

Gen X has tended to blend into the background. Even pollsters (smart ones: Pew Research) have noticed that not only do we have few truly defining characteristics, but we know that. Ted Halstead’s article from 1999 made an unfortunately prophetic prediction:

One way or another, this generation will be judged and labeled by its legacy. Today’s young adults will be remembered either as a late-blooming generation that ultimately helped to revive American democracy by coalescing around a bold new political program and bringing the rest of the nation along with them, or as another silent generation that stood by as our democracy and society suffered a slow decline.

Oh well.

Enough.

Regardless of what the rest of my generation does or thinks, I’ll voice a few “generational concerns”:

Boomers: Far from being the Next Greatest Generation, you’re rapidly becoming the Worst Generation. Entitlement(!) programs created by you, for you, will be dead by the time I could partake. That is the height of narcissistic entitlement played out over decades. The best things Boomers could do:

Recognize that the business environment you created — short-term metrics and bottom-line shareholder obsession — has poisoned not only business but everything business has touched (which is pretty much everything from education to law to politics). You turned humans into “human resources” — now turn them back.
Understand that you broke careers and help future generations cope with that. People will no longer have a job then retire (as in: not work), so traditional IRAs and methods of financial planning simply won’t work. You’ve made jobs that permit planning for the future the province of a select few. It’s time to understand that everyone has a future to plan for.
Show some care outside of your spawn. When Boomers think of future generations, they seem to think only of their future generations. Perhaps it comes as a surprise, but other people have had kids too. Only narcissists and monarchists focus solely on their own family line.

Millennials: More of us in Gen X are in the same boat as you than you seem to think: insecure career prospects, uncertain political/religious/institutional affiliations, searching for something intangible in the hollow world we’ve inherited.

Authenticity != remarkableness. As any given Instagram feed or Pinterest board demonstrates, simply being “present” and “authentic” is only part of the story. Experience makes you interesting — have some. Put away the camera and talk about the food you’re eating with the people there.
Not all of us in Gen X are your parents. Nominally, yes, we are, collectively. But we’re also a lot closer than it may seem, and have had not only similar life experiences but more time to digest and reflect on them. You long for mentorship and “life coaching,” but turn to 28-year-olds rather than 37-year-olds (or, gods forbid, a 43-year-old). Yikes. If you want advice on surviving your 30s, turn to people who already have.
Humility is a very wise response to astonishing change, personally and societally. Every person over 10 can look back on who they were 10 years prior and laugh at how silly/untutored/dumb/reckless/clumsy/un-potty-trained they were. That never stops. You never do figure this stuff out completely. You will, I guarantee you, look back in 10 years and realize that you were a fuckup in some manner. If you realize that now and learn to laugh at yourself, everything goes a lot easier.

Gen X: It seems like Boomers come in for the worst of it, but my fellow-travelers, we need to look in the mirror ourselves. Pew Research is right: we’ve faded and disappeared. We’ve given up either by taking up the paths trodden by the Boomers or giving up and turning to the Millennials, who sort of aren’t that into us. We are very much in danger of becoming “another silent generation.” Whether or not it is too late to manifest a generation-wide consciousness, we can at least take more control as individuals:

Don’t fall for the retirement trick. It’s become so ubiquitous that it is a default part of any financial planning: “What year do you plan to retire?” Answer: we probably won’t. What we will do is to gradually replace our job income with income from other sources so that we work by choice rather than necessity. Adopting this mindset (and refusing to answer the default question) will start changing the way big (and small) companies think about the future. More and more studies show that retirement, per se, kills you faster. Don’t fall for it.
Go have interesting experiences. While Millennials go for “authentic,” we usually end up with “safe” or “expected” — and neither of those is inherently interesting. You can paint your walls something other than a Martha Stewart color. You can raise your child someplace other than the suburbs. “Settling down” is an outdated concept — as soon as you do it you begin to die, just like retirement. The “life stages” we learned were part of a model that got broken. Don’t fall for it.
Do your own damn thing. There is no reason to follow the bankrupt Boomer models (of living or working) or to try to adopt uncritically the models the Millennials are trying (sort of like dressing too young). Do what the best do: steal the parts that work and ditch the parts that don’t. You know that you don’t know everything, but you do know something from your experience: use it.

A smart Millennial wrote about The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. This is advice Generation X could stand to take to heart. The problem is that it is easy not to care what other people think when you’re blending in and not doing anything surprising. The tougher part is to do something disruptive, to make a ruckus, and to keep doing it notwithstanding the response.

So even when these other generations do finally STFU for a moment, perhaps we might have something valuable to say to fill the ensuing silence.