Apr 6, 2016
20 Years Later: “Cultural dilemmas facing Generation X”
In 1996, I was a journalism major at Ohio State, working on the Lantern, our school newspaper. Every journalism student had to spend two quarters on Lantern staff, as a reporter, photographer or copy editor; the editorial staff was a part-time paid position for which one applied. At the time I was a reporter as well as photo editor, and the paper’s very first website was being rolled out while I was on staff. Most of my output is no longer available online, save for a story on a speech by Henry Kissinger (I got to ask him three questions; he dodged two and mostly just complimented our football team) and this column, one of two I wrote that year. I think it’s worth taking a look at it now, 20 years down the road.
Cultural dilemmas facing Generation X
On a recent trip to New York City, I spent a weekend in The University Club, a posh, coat-and-tie, members-only club.
The sheer excess of the place overwhelmed me. The lobby was all granite and marble, with thirty foot ceilings. Cigars were for sale at the desk. The rooms were infused with the scent of rose, hickory smoke or old leather. There was a private library full of rare and ancient books, all donated from private collections.
What great things must have occurred in those rooms. In the hey-day of private clubs, members were all ivy-leaguers, and who your father was was more important than who you were.
Today, private clubs are closing all over the country. The University Club in Columbus (no relation) shut its doors this summer, blaming poor attendance. There are plenty of places still around, but most are associated with golf courses or private communities and they’re supported, mostly, by rich people fifty or older.
It remains to be seen whether clubs will survive at all when our generation comes of age. We’re so fickle about whether we like or detest excess of that vein. We pierce our noses, listen to Pearl Jam while we smoke our cigars over caviar, cappuccino and martinis, dripping brie on our Doc Martins. We might enjoy this lifestyle, but something in our upbringing tells us to distrust it, creating this blend of sarcasm and indulgence. Our bodies say, ‘Ooh, sit on the overstuffed leather chair!’ but our minds say ‘But say something witty and deprecating about it first.’
How much of a generation lost are we? Sitting alone in the giant rooms of the club, I felt out of place, for certain, but because it was not for me yet.. I’m not ready to belong there right now. It’s somewhere I could be in 10, 20 years, but not as a 21-year-old in his only blazer.
Like the members of ‘Generation X’ who long for the lounge days, or the New Beat poets, or even the neo-hippies following Phish, I was in a place that is not ours but could be someday.
We are a generation cultivating and excavating the past for culture far-removed from the silicon-HTML-WWWorld that we have the heaviest hand in creating. As our environment becomes more and more computer-enhanced and reliant, we search for elements of earlier days when there were no computers. Few people yearn for the Big Blue, Mac-II days of the ’80s, and those that do want the progressive rock scene, not the computer scene. Our generation wants less an escape from reality than an escape from cyber-reality.
We are a post-modern generation. We are multimedia. We’re outsider artists. Our culture is made up of laser printers and fountain pens, CD-ROMs and 78s, raves and speakeasies. We have live jazz in our cybercafés. Our folk singers have e-mail. They updated the VW bug. The question of where our generation is going is immaterial, since we’ve no idea where we started. Our formative teenage years were spent railing against the crashed ‘Me Decade.’ Then the opulence we had grown used to dissolved and we ended up alienated. It’s not surprising that punk is in resurgence; it was the music of the disenfranchised in the ’70s, and that’s how a lot of us Gen-Xers feel.
No longer assured of what the future would bring, we became either slackers or workaholics. More people I know fit into one of these two categories than any others, and their personal or parental wealth has nothing to do with it. After the hard work some of us have put in, I hope there’s still a University Club around for us to go be snooty and not and feel like all our toil was for naught.
Andrew Huff is a senior in Journalism from Barrington, IL. He smokes a pipe. What of it?
For those wondering, I no longer smoke a pipe. I was being mock-snooty.
However, today, in 2016, vinyl is cool again, we have music and videogames that incorporate the 8-bit graphics and sound of games from our youth, and private clubs are making a comeback — both in an egalitarian-ish form at the newly revamped Chicago Athletic Association (no longer private but a hotel with restaurants and bars) and in the somewhat snootier form at places such as the members-only Soho House, whose Chicago branch is the latest of 15 locations around the globe. There are also restaurants and bars where exclusivity is enforced not through membership but through elaborate reservation processes and online ticketing systems.
Whether this is all what I expected as a 20-year-old typing away in a fluorescent-lit college newspaper office is debatable, but there’s no doubt that much of what I wrote remains true. Gen-Xers still seem to straddle eras, picking and choosing the bits they like — though perhaps that’s more pervasive culture-wide now. And we who had the greatest hand in creating the internet as we see it today also seem to be the ones most conflicted about it, nostalgic for the less perpetually connected world of our youth.
Maybe social clubs, private or otherwise, are the remedy; Soho House maintains a no-photos, no-social-media policy to keep what happens inside private. Maybe this is just the pendulum swinging back the other way — as we come to terms with how technology and social media have changed daily life, we’re beginning to find ways to reverse the trend (some might say damage.)
