OK Xer
August 19, 2023 11:15 AM Subscribe

'My Generation' Anthem for a Forgotten Cohort
posted by box (111 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite

I thought part of being Gen X was being really into Harpers in college and now finding the magazine sad and embarrassingly pretentious. Harpers>Adbusters>Metafilter?
posted by rikschell at 11:21 AM on August 19, 2023 [25 favorites]

It me, I'm afraid
posted by chavenet at 11:27 AM on August 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't have time for anybody, of any generation, who criticizes those younger than themselves. In a few decades/years/months, they will still be alive, while you will not. Each and every one of us, no matter what we may create or strive for during our respective lifetimes, is irrelevant to the future because we are all mortal. This is true for us as individuals and as a species. History is written by the winners, and the winners are the survivors, and eventually there will be no survivors left.

Also, Sha Na Na is awesome.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:29 AM on August 19, 2023 [23 favorites]

Harpers>Adbusters>Metafilter?

Pretty sure I went Adbusters>Harper's>MetaFilter, but close enough.
posted by May Kasahara at 11:31 AM on August 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

The word "Anthem" made me think this was going to be about Todd Snider's song.

My Generation, Part 2, Verse Three, Chapter Four, Jackson 5, Nikki Sixx.
posted by tzikeh at 11:46 AM on August 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

What a load of shit. Oh wait, was I supposed to be impressed with both his musical tastes and command of the written word? Yeah, no. I've read Salinger, and I swear it was shorter and more interesting than this. Thank god I'm at work and can pretend I'm too busy for this shit.
posted by evilDoug at 11:46 AM on August 19, 2023 [21 favorites]

>1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name

I remember seeing at the checkout stand the Time Cover Story on "twentysomething" July 1990:

This is the twentysomething generation, those 48 million young Americans ages 18 through 29 who fall between the famous baby boomers and the boomlet of children the baby boomers are producing. Since today’s young adults were born during a period when the U.S. birthrate decreased to half the level of its postwar peak, in the wake of the great baby boom, they are sometimes called the baby busters. By whatever name, so far they are an unsung generation, hardly recognized as a social force or even noticed much at all. “I envision ourselves as a lurking generation, waiting in the shadows, quietly figuring out our plan,” says Rebecca Winke, 19, of Madison, Wis. “Maybe that’s why nobody notices us.”

https://rolfpotts.com/time-twentysomething-1990/

This Harpers piece was too much text to read these days but a quick two-finger scroll-thru didn't reveal anything all that salient.

A lot has sure happened in the 13 years between 1990 -> 2023 tho!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:50 AM on August 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

Look, it was going great. Nobody was talking about us, nobody was noticing us. Just stop bringing us up and we'll get out of this unscathed.
posted by hippybear at 11:52 AM on August 19, 2023 [99 favorites]

Well, there's only a seven year age gap between Hodgman and Long and they're both younger than I am.
posted by hippybear at 12:17 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hello, I am solidly Gen X. My experience of the youths is that they are actually really pretty great. Unlike the author, I don't feel defeated at all. I understand where the author is coming from but I'm noping out on living in that particular headspace.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 12:18 PM on August 19, 2023 [36 favorites]

in a funny coincidence i took this mag off library shelf to read this article immediately before opening mefi and seeing this post

having second thoughts bout reading it now
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:27 PM on August 19, 2023

All music is great but he's gonna hate on later Bowie? Um, okay X-er.

I am an X-er myself so I feel free to roll my eyes at him, as he has defined that as my generational tic.

This stuff about millennials and Gen Z not knowing their depths because "something something social media" is silly. Of course they know depths. The older millennials are 40! They're losing their hair, having midlife crises, and wondering how they're ever going to pay off their student loans. Gen Z is facing the climate crisis that will define their whole lives. And he's going to say that they're unaware because they're doing Tik-Tok dances? Nope.
posted by tuesdayschild at 12:30 PM on August 19, 2023 [27 favorites]

This is a great piece, actually, and gets at a very real phenomenon. Yes, he becomes a bit hyperbolic at the very end, but just before that, I think he nails the present moment:

It is presumed to be a betrayal of those who have a direct stake in the future, who will be around to live in it, to so much as broach the suggestion that there are dimensions of human experience they have not figured out. But this unconditional support for the youth ends up making children of us all, as it leaves us unprepared for our exposure to the raw power of subartistic entertainments that are in fact only the sugarcoating of propaganda, to the cataracts of “content” pouring out of our streams and feeds. “Content,” whatever else we may say of it, is not art. No one involved in its production, nor evidently in its consumption, appears to be interested in probing the depths of the self. On the contrary, the new system of constant cybernetic feedback-looping between content producers and “fans” is one that primarily functions to reduce entertainment products to the role of norm enforcement.

One may protest that 't'was ever thus. But the the social media matrix in which we're now embedded is so much more pervasive than any past media system -- certainly vastly more so than what I grew up with. That has changed the conditions of our outer and inner lives in so many ways. I'm glad that I'm old enough to remember this. Younger people will simply never know what life was like before the panopticon -- a life where there were far more gaps and spaces for the unobserved, idiosyncratic development of private selves and relationships, for better and for worse.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:38 PM on August 19, 2023 [23 favorites]

"I acknowledge that I am feeling defeated, and it is a symptom of this defeat that I have withdrawn to live in the past"

This guy thinks he's speaking for Gen X?

To feel defeated you have to want to win. You have to see yourself as playing the game. The whole point of Gen X is that we opt out. We don't do sincerity or all of that rat race striving. Our whole zeitgeist is of a disaffected outsider.

We haven't been forgotten, we never saw the point in striving to be noticed.
posted by oddman at 12:39 PM on August 19, 2023 [41 favorites]

As a person born into the "millennial" time designation, I generally agree with @betweenthebars that generational traits as marketed are mostly BS, and usually if they do have truth to them only refer to the shared experiences of white middle class people. That said, the amount of disdain that is heaped on Millennials and Gen Z by "boomers" in one form, and "Xers" in an entirely different, if equally obnoxious, form is unreal. The number of times I've had to explain the most basic financial realities of my life to older people, and their steadfast refusal to believe or understand is exhausting.
posted by DarlingMonster at 12:40 PM on August 19, 2023 [16 favorites]

I'm Brave Generation myself
posted by philip-random at 12:42 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hello, I am solidly Gen X. My experience of the youths is that they are actually really pretty great.

I am also Gen X and really like all the younger people I know, either socially or at work. At the risk of making a gross generalization, but they seem a lot more together and emotionally healthy than what I remember from being that age and certainly from what I saw of older generations.

I only read part of the article, it was all way too overwrought for me. It's good that the author says they are seeing a mental health professional, but I feel like they need more help in that way, not generational angst.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:46 PM on August 19, 2023 [25 favorites]

Well, my kids:

Eldest is a poly amorous butch lesbian.
Next is working for a bio-genomics startup in the bay area.
Next is a non-binary person who just got a degree in ASL.
And the youngest just headed off to college last week.

The Kids are Alright.
posted by Windopaene at 12:50 PM on August 19, 2023 [26 favorites]

I nod along to his explanations and silently go on believing that I am a ghost.

That right there. That's my jam.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 12:54 PM on August 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

well ok i skimmed it
im like o hey another ghost wonder how thisn died but i DADT on that

thinks he's writing about music by writing about the music industry, check
not much there in terms of interesting ideas for me

the article about the plumbers after was fun tho
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:56 PM on August 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Eh, leave the young people alone. They got a super raw deal economically, even worse than us, though we may have the relatively unique burden of having to support in midlife a much larger generation older than us and a much larger generation younger than us. But we are all still living in the world left over after the Boomers cracked the bones of midcentury society open and sucked out all the marrow.

Are there things I don't love about Millennial and Z culture? Sure. Though most of them make me feel more sorry for them than angry--e.g., the willingness to butcher up their subjectivity for parts and offer them to the highest bidder(s). But, you know, overall they are so much more relaxed about gender and sexual identity alone that it's quite refreshing. ("Relaxed" maybe isn't the right word, they looooooooove their little boxes of categorization, but a lot more accepting of difference.) The boys wear nail polish. The queer girls date openly trans girls. In high school! In conclusion: leave 'em be.
posted by praemunire at 1:04 PM on August 19, 2023 [18 favorites]

I just want to acknowledge that "The Final Cut" is not a good Pink Floyd album, but it's a fantastic Roger Waters album.
posted by wintermind at 1:11 PM on August 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

Younger people will simply never know what life was like before the panopticon -- a life where there were far more gaps and spaces for the unobserved, idiosyncratic development of private selves

Am hoping they have found/made such gaps and selves and I just don’t know where because I am, duh, an old
posted by clew at 1:12 PM on August 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

“Hello, I am solidly Gen X. My experience of the youths is that they are actually really pretty great. Unlike the author, I don't feel defeated at all. I understand where the author is coming from but I'm noping out on living in that particular headspace.”

Same here. (I feel solidly Gen X, although by most definitions I was born right at the Boomer/X cusp.)

I was nodding along through much of the beginning, some things deeply resonating while others generating an ambivalent "hmmm", but then got to his rant against Those Who Came After and I had to resist abandoning the piece out of deep irritation, maybe even anger.

I'm tempted to question how deeply connected he is to the Gen X experience, given his abstruse education, interests, and current residence — but I'm not sure there is such a thing as "the" Gen X experience. It's sort of like his, I suppose, but we're all kind of misfit toys, aren't we? So who am I to say?

In my view, the core of the Gen X experience is the era of the latchkey kid and the disaffected independence that this nurtured. Everything else is just local color and not that relevant.

Certainly not is art and music central to the Gen X identity — not in the way he thinks it is, except perhaps how aggressively we formed our identities around genres. But I'd say that television, not music, is where you are most likely to find the essence of our generation, and it's extremely banal. And not in a sanitized, white-bread, fifties way, but just simply banal with nothing very interesting one way or another.

I mean, really, I feel fortunate to be a Gen Xer because we're not anything in particular and are mostly uninteresting. This box of nondescript misfit toys has allowed many of us to meander into being whoever we've become unmolested by a cultural narrative of weighty expectation.

But that being the case, it's also not a surprise that Gen X is now more MAGA than the boomers; a core of our generation was always destined to be reactionary. This guy's rant demonstrates that you don't have to be MAGA to be a reactionary asshole. It's enough to simply be afflicted by an assumed birthright to being a cultural critic.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:27 PM on August 19, 2023 [18 favorites]

In my view, the core of the Gen X experience is the era of the latchkey kid and the disaffected independence that this nurtured.

Ow, that's a crystallization of something for me. Thanks.
posted by hippybear at 1:37 PM on August 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

Oh my goodness, that did just turn into "kids today are too sensitive and don't read correctly" didn't it? Something something Freudian repetition something.

To feel defeated you have to want to win. You have to see yourself as playing the game. The whole point of Gen X is that we opt out. We don't do sincerity or all of that rat race striving. Our whole zeitgeist is of a disaffected outsider.

That's at least what it was supposed to be. I think it takes a lot of will power to maintain that attitude and not get bitter, speaking as someone who was forged in the very crucible of "Nirvana is too popular to be punk"*. I think that we thought that attitude was something that would stay with you through life easily rather than being something that needs to be reaffirmed. If you don't want to buy in, you have to stay outside, and that does inevitably mean less money, less power, more opportunities for jealousy and regret, being increasingly out of step with the world, etc. I chose to lead a dull, weird little life because I didn't want to make the kinds of compromises that I saw others making and now that I'm old I'm relatively poor and have always had low-status jobs while various peers have risen to various heights. On balance, I'm okay with that - I didn't have the kind of talent and brilliance where I could have made it in the arts at least somewhat on my own terms, so if I wanted more power and money I would have had to do the usual things one does to get power and money, and after some careful consideration I feel that I prefer the life I have, even if it has its downsides.

But yeah, the whole point of being disaffected and seeking the outside of things is that you're not inside. There will never be a Gen X president and that's good. Being president is garbage, getting to be president destroys people, having power destroys people. It's good to be obscure, it's good not to have power, because when you are powerful and successful you invariably do terrible, selfish, monstrous things. Power and fame are the problem.

The thing with the Gen X ethos is that either you hold onto it with both hands and stay obscure and fight against being bitter or greedy or jealous or you end up spiteful bitter and vengeful. It's like what Orwell said about King Lear - if you're going to give something up, you have to really give it up, you can't fake give it up and expect to have all the power and advantages from the sidelines. I mean, Orwell put it better.

*The deification of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana is really something else; if he hadn't killed himself Nirvana would be just another Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. But even this Harper's guy has to soften his dislike of Nirvana. Well, I'll say it, I don't like Nirvana. I didn't at the time. Kurt Cobain would be alive today if he'd been in a big-small, locally popular band and not gotten a major label record contract, and Courtney Love would be what she was intended to be, a loved/hated well-known scene drunkard and shit-stirrer. Those are two people who were meant to have normal, decent punk rock lives and were destroyed by fame, and for that I feel very sorry.
posted by Frowner at 1:41 PM on August 19, 2023 [30 favorites]

if he hadn't killed himself Nirvana would be just another Soundgarden or Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam is the only band out of that era still recording and touring. It's a bit mind boggling.
posted by hippybear at 1:46 PM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Also, this guy is right, as you age you do have to pick a side - you can side with the future and accept that you're old, that things change, that the past and memory are important but they're not everything, or you can pick the past, death, what is crystallized and finished, refusal to change, monuments, everything already determined and done. And honestly there's a lot to be said for picking the death side. It's quieter over there, not so sad and terrifying And the future frankly looks pretty bad right now. A lot of days I want to side with the dead. If I had more money, I probably would.
posted by Frowner at 1:55 PM on August 19, 2023 [19 favorites]

I'm always surprised how much metafilter hates Justin Smith-Ruiu!

(I believe this is the last item that published item that will have his former name, Justin E. H. Smith, as the byline. I don't know the reason for the name change)
posted by paper chromatographologist at 2:02 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I do think that he might be right about Gen Xers experiencing a particularly severe culture shock in making it to 2020 and discovering a world burgeoning with neo-fascism and climate catastrophe. I expect that even the Gen X neo-fascists are a bit surprised at this.

“And honestly there's a lot to be said for picking the death side. It's quieter over there, not so sad and terrifying And the future frankly looks pretty bad right now. A lot of days I want to side with the dead. If I had more money, I probably would.”

Ideologically, I still side with the future. I've not really thought about it much, but my lifetime's steady movement to the left is almost certainly a product of my belief that the future can be better and we must work to make that happen. And maybe that's why I've become increasingly out of step with Gen X who now is — I repeat because it's significant — more to the right than even the boomers are.

That said, I've been going through some stuff.

Only two of my male relatives in all of my extended family on both sides lived past 65; my dad died at 64. I'm about to turn 59 and I feel a deep certainty that I'm not going to see 70 and likely not even that long. Given that the last twenty years went by in a flash, five to ten years is a short period of time, so my death is very real to me now.

And given the state of the world, I am taking a lot of comfort in that. Increasingly, I'll find myself thinking, well, I'll be dead soon so I don't have to worry about it. Between climate catastrophe and neo-fascism, I'm extremely pessimistic. That represents a big psychological weight I'm eager to let go of.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:11 PM on August 19, 2023 [13 favorites]

All I can say is that I'm also Gen X, I like many of the same bands as this guy does, and I don't relate to his experience at all. He seems to see people younger than us as fundamentally different, unable even to conceive of the cultural landscape he and I take for granted. As a parent of teenagers I just don't see that. In most important ways the kids seem pretty much like we were!

I guess I did learn one important thing from this piece, which is that the idea I always had in the back of my mind that if life got too stressful you could just move to France and you'd feel chill about everything is not in fact correct.
posted by escabeche at 2:38 PM on August 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

Oh, I dunno. Feeling like you're a ghost moving through the world feels like the ultimate extension of the American idea of what being French must be like. It's like he moved there and embodied the concept of ennui.
posted by hippybear at 2:45 PM on August 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

In an early scene of Jean-Luc Godard’s era-defining 1960 film Breathless, a character challenges Jean-Paul Belmondo, “Mister! You don’t have anything against the youth, do you?” He replies defiantly, “Yes, I do. I prefer old people.”

This is also a weird quote to pull. Belmondo was in his late 20s in the time and playing a character around the same age who was meant to represent disaffected young people! He's just being capricious in the moment.
posted by praemunire at 2:59 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dunno, I thought it was fucking great.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 3:29 PM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I experience my life, most of the time, as a ghost.

♫ Why don'tch all fffffaade away.
posted by Reverend John at 3:41 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

(I do think the current generation of teenagers is absolutely the coolest demographic for at least a hundred years and not just because my kid is among them. And maybe it's privilege and where I live but fuck, they get introduced with pronouns they choose, they know what's crap and what has to be fixed - boomers argued, they were essentially at war with the status quo and then became the status quo, but they did change it. Gen X, my crew, saw it, saw the failure, gave the future pragmatism, cynicism, and humanism. This generation is the distillation of those -- they've inherited stupid optimism, hypocrisy, cynicism and they are in a position to be informed, pragmatically optimistic with actual tools to do things.)

Also, I just want to think, to cling to the belief, that all is not lost.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 3:42 PM on August 19, 2023 [12 favorites]

Another solid Xer here who thinks the kids are all right. Don’t have any of my own but I respect and have learned a lot from the younger generations I work with (which now is almost all of my direct colleagues). They are thoughtful and compassionate and hardworking, negotiating their way through a world that is much more complex and challenging than the world of just a few short decades ago.

I don’t know what will happen in the future, I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic although it seems clear that things will fall apart even more before we as a species get our collective shit together. But The Yoof are smarter and more grounded than they are often given credit for.
posted by andraste at 3:56 PM on August 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Gen x, at least the people I know is the first generation to meaningfully change their opinions over time. 30 years ago being against gay marriage wouldn't have been weird, hell 30 years ago you could freely use language that now you never would. Kids today maybe able to choose their own pronouns but don't forget it's because we did the heavy lifting 30 years ago.

Kids like to demonstrate how woke they are, uhhh, yeah you snot noses punks, it was because of the values taught you as toddlers, by my generation. I was.taught to be a racist homophobe by my elders and rejected it.
posted by Keith Talent at 4:03 PM on August 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Kids like to demonstrate how woke they are, uhhh, yeah you snot noses punks, it was because of the values taught you as toddlers, by my generation. I was.taught to be a racist homophobe by my elders and rejected it.

I mean, if Gen X solved racism/sexism/and homophobia they sure didn't share it with the rest of us, because this elder millennial was raised that way too, and plenty of my kid's classmates are being raised that way today.

Like, everyone owes a debt to those of earlier generations who drove progress, but at the same time earlier generations may want to take a look around before claiming to have solved all the problems.
posted by Gygesringtone at 5:08 PM on August 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

30 years ago being against gay marriage wouldn't have been weird

lol what sort of benighted people did you hang out with 30 years ago?
posted by buntastic at 5:16 PM on August 19 [+] [

Regular people? I know here in the echochamber of wokeness things seem more progressive than they are.30 years ago was a different time with (very) different attitudes.
posted by Keith Talent at 5:26 PM on August 19, 2023 [16 favorites]

I must be on crazy pills, or maybe my computer got hacked, and clicking the link took me to a different site. Did we all read the same essay?
posted by smcdow at 5:32 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Did we all read the same essay?
We meta meta'd ourselves, sorry.

Happens frequently; we have like seven different timelines going on and it's the thing that differentiates Metafilter from Reddit, because they have like 40k different timelines going on, and Twitter, which has only five timelines going on, but they are all hideous.

Anyway choose your own adventure, timeline-wise.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 6:54 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Their immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:04 PM on August 19, 2023 [10 favorites]

Yeah, I'm from New Orleans, a town more queer friendly than most, and 30 years ago being against gay marriage would not be in any way unusual.
posted by brundlefly at 7:12 PM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

The "Queers Bash Back" movement started around 1990 because it used to be considered sport for jocks and frat boys to get baseball bats and beat up gay men on a regular basis. This was widely recognized within society and was widely tolerated, even when the queers started fighting back, right up until Matthew Shepard was gay bashed and left to die hanging on a barbed wire fence in Wyoming in 1998. And it continued well beyond that incident, but that's the moment that public opinion decided maybe beating up men for being gay is a bad thing.

As with most of these things, it takes a major giant public face to put on the inhumanity. It took Ryan White to make AIDS sufferers human and it took Rock Hudson to make Gay AIDS sufferers human.

If you go back 30 years, you'll understand a lot of my mindset about the world, really.
posted by hippybear at 7:12 PM on August 19, 2023 [25 favorites]

To elaborate, as a queer Gen-Xer, my teens and twenties were dominated by hints of sexual freedom and the, for a young person, rumored existence of gay bathhouses, and then AIDS and Reagan making jokes about queers dying, and queer bashing and many many media projects where our only representation was as the butt of jokes [but yay representation!], and I turned 30 the year Shepard was beaten to death.

And all in through that time, faggot faggot faggot as a constant chant in the ear. Not against a person, just as a boogeyman lurking in the background to cause malicious harm.

Coming out was a struggle, I'll tell you. It was walking through the looking glass to volunteer for a life of abuse and struggle. But people still did it, even under those circumstances.
posted by hippybear at 7:23 PM on August 19, 2023 [25 favorites]

I'm born 1967, absolutely median Gen X, and this bored the pants off me. As in, I got about a third of the way in and was like oh gods I'm wearing pants, why? and then stopped reading. If I have a get off my lawn critique of the younger generations, it's that they're whiny: the beauty of being Gen X is that nobody gives a shit what you think and we all know it, so we learned to deal with adversity and shut the fuck up about it. Except this douche. My real beef with Millennials is that they seem to be under the impression that a Strongly Worded Statement on the Internet is equivalent to action, and we Gen Xers know that most of what people say is self-serving bullshit. If I have a critique of Gen Z, it's that they're more inclusive but not much kinder. But a statistically significant number like 80s rock, for some reason, the more poodle-haired the better. Anyway, who gives a shit what I think?
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:26 PM on August 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

I think that those of us who were straight but supported gay rights in the 80s and 90s have a somewhat distorted view of how things were.

My experience was that older people were very homophobic, but most of my friends, even the very straight small-town party rockers which was my crowd in high school, were mostly indifferent. But I both influenced them about these kind of cultural issues and I was always so casually outspoken about them that I suspect many people around me just didn't express their bigotries to me very much. I mean, I was unsure about my sexuality circa 1984 and discussed this freely with those close high-school era party rocker friends and they mostly just shrugged or were bemused.

My best friend (and for many years after), when I returned to college in 1990 was gay, and because of aforementioned reasons, I probably had some rose-colored glasses on. I remember being shocked and depressed when he told me, when we were roommates in the mid-90s, that his coworkers at Dell were casually homophobic. The point being, I don't have the lived experience of being gay myself during that era and would never venture an opinion as to how bad things really were or weren't, especially to those targeted by hatred.

I can say that I began openly advocating for gay marriage as early as 1984 and all the way through the early 00s general culture, particularly older people, were hostile and (a piece of history not much discussed these days) most of the gay rights activists I knew and was aware of were hostile to gay marriage because they saw it as a straight institution and that it would be a kind of unwelcome assimilation.

I am not even remotely from a progressive, urban, coastal milieu, I'm from a bible-belt small town (though a college one) and yet my experience is that people my age and younger that I associated with were relatively progressive on social issues, although arguably more in a passive and uninterested sense, but everyone older — that is, boomers — is where the prevailing bigotry was strongest.

But, again, maybe the people around me humored me and, also, some of the people closest to me, right from when I graduated high school, were extremely progressive on cultural issues (the single most influential person for me in the early 80s was a very close friend who was a lesbian radical separatist feminist) so, today, when young people amd others characterize the 90s as a regressive nightmare, I'm left feeling that they're mistaken and/or I'm a bit confused. And, again, it's not like I was in some utopian oasis — the first time I went to a gay bar was in 1985 in Amarillo, for crying out loud.

I'm left with the suspicion that my privilege insulated me even though or especially because I have always been very, very culturally progressive. That said, it seems to me that, for we Gen Xers, the 80s and 90s were a weird mix of regressive and progressive attitudes that defies simple generalization.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:20 PM on August 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

That said, it seems to me that, for we Gen Xers, the 80s and 90s were a weird mix of regressive and progressive attitudes that defies simple generalization.

I think this was peak time for being both in the closet and out of the closet. There was an unspoken societal agreement that Being Outed Was Bad, but that Coming Out Was Good, and so there was a whole undercurrent, I guess it could rightly be named counter-culture, that developed in pods of varying sizes in which people were safely and measuredly Out, but not Out in a larger social sense. It might be a divide required because of one's employment [this is the closet I lived in with my first boyfriend, him being a middle school teacher], or it might just be fear of the generally hostile outer culture in general.

EDIT: Just to expand: there were social circles in which people could move comfortably and entirely as out people, but as soon as any interaction went outside of those circles, the masks went on and there was no outward expression, as there was no expectation of safety.

AIDS is the big figure in the transition of our culture toward recognition of the presence of gays. I mean, it's an ugly truth, but even though the presence of homosexuals all across society was known as a wink and a nod, it could NEVER be stated publicly right up until the point where everyone started dying. At that point, there was no ignoring of our presence any longer, because with our deaths, the holes we left in the world were impossible to ignore.

But it was a very long journey through that entire horrible crisis/epidemic/tragedy to get to anything resembling where we are today. And I'll tell you, today still ain't much.

We still don't have national employment and housing protections for LGBTQ+ people. There are places in this country where they can fire you for being gay and say that to your face while they do it and you'd have no recourse. Also, there are places in this country that people can say we will not sell or rent to you because of your sexual orientation, and it's completely legal!

And it's becoming even more legal now, day by legislative day, for anyone to say "I don't want to deal with you because you're queer" and for that to be legal.

In a lot of ways, we're moving backward. Because while being queer wasn't a protected class back in the 80s and 90s, it also wasn't actively being discriminated against by law, which is where things are moving now.

Don't ask me about my rage. It's a much longer rant than anything I've typed into this thread this evening.
posted by hippybear at 8:38 PM on August 19, 2023 [16 favorites]

From the essay:

It is often remarked that there will never be a Gen X president of the United States.

....Wasn't....Obama a Gen-X'er?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:45 PM on August 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

....Wasn't....Obama a Gen-X'er?

Depends on how you count and how you handle edge cases. He was born in 61, which is a firm edge case. Generational theory looks at these cusp children and asks whether they ended up having more influence on their outlook on life from peers a few years older than them or from peers a few younger than them.

I think Obama probably falls in the Gen X camp based mostly on how he interacted with culture, be that pop culture or otherwise. This is the guy who was putting out playlists year by year, and he swears he actually picks the songs. He's the guy who held the event in the White House where we saw the first preview of Hamilton. He's the guy who played basketball when he could, and apparently pretty competitively.

None of those things feel like something a Boomer would do, to me anyway. He was probably heavily influenced by people older than him, yes, but he always had an eye looking toward the younger because he wanted to keep more fresh than his probably more stodgy peers.

Cusp children are always interesting. Maybe that's how he got elected -- he straddled things enough to appeal to something wider.
posted by hippybear at 8:52 PM on August 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yeah, Obama seems very much of my generation and insofar as I was also cusp but feel very Gen X, he's seemed unquestionably Gen X to me. But maybe it's because I relate to the way he straddles so many different cultural milieus, which seems not-at-all like a Boomer.

Thanks, hippybear, for your thoughts on homophobia and your experience during that time. It helps me understand some things better.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:59 PM on August 19, 2023

Gen X is pretty much universally defined as running from 1965 to 1980.

So Obama is outside of it. But he's a late boomer who's close to the cusp with Gen X -- a subgroup I've been seeing referred to (for reasons I don't quite grok) as "Generation Jones".

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, was born in 1964 -- truly on the cusp. And that's the energy I get from her. Watching her campaigning in 2020, wearing her Timbalands and Converse, she came off as very X-ish to me.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:04 PM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

This piece just reinforced for my why I have never really felt like Gen X, despite being born in what is now classified as smack dab in the middle of that age range. Maybe it's because I took my first computer class in third grade, had home computers (multiple) in the house by the end of elementary school, and had broadband internet from the day I entered college (in 1991). Maybe it's because I stuck around school until 1998 so my entry to the workforce was a vastly different experience. Maybe its because I've always gotten along well with folks of all ages, but I still spend a great deal of time with friends 20 years my junior as well as my cohort. I'll admit that some cultural references fly past me, but if you just treat people with acceptance for who they are and share joy in their joys, we all aren't all that different across the years. You just have to learn to laugh at the added indignities of age and keep on truckin'.
posted by meinvt at 9:18 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

here in the echochamber of wokeness

I will wear that label fiercely and proudly
posted by hangashore at 9:43 PM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

“Maybe it's because I took my first computer class in third grade, had home computers (multiple) in the house by the end of elementary school, and had broadband internet from the day I entered college (in 1991).”

I don't think it's computer stuff that makes you feel not Gen X. I wrote my first program in 1980. We early Gen Xers were the ones with C64s and TRS80s and dial-up BBSs. I was online in one way or another from 1984 onward. There's probably nothing more central to and constant in my life than computing and networking has been since 1980.

That said, aside from my high school friends, since 1990 it's people born in '69 or '70 or so, six years my junior (including my ex-wife) who have constituted almost all of those I've considered my peers. Generally, I feel more kinship with people nearer your age than I do with those much closer to my age. Which possibly also explains some of why I feel much more Gen X than not and the whole cusp thing doesn't much resonate with me. I think my high school buddies are more "cusp".

Thinking about it a bit, though, it may be that being an adult during the 80s is a very important cultural marker for me. I was 25 in 1990 — the whole transition from the 80s to the 90s experienced as an adult feels very significant and formative.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:54 PM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think that those of us who were straight but supported gay rights in the 80s and 90s have a somewhat distorted view of how things were.

Repeating for truth and emphasis. Of all the people that I actually knew who were LGBTQ none of them were out or open about it. PDA wasn't a thing. Normalized out in the open LGBTQ dating wasn't a thing.

This is hard to admit today but I clearly remember harboring some anti-LGBTQ sentiments when I was young, and being against gay marriage for some insane reason that doesn't make any sense at all to me today. Granted, I was also against the idea of marriage in general as an archaic artifact of church and state.

I do know that I had to unlearn and deprogram myself from massive amounts of religious dogma about sexuality in particular and in general and it took quite some time to get over it.

And this is all in my circle of alternative friends. We were the theater weirdos that went to Rocky Horror showings. We were the ones going to industrial/goth music and fetish bondage clubs. I even claimed to be "Two Tone" and anti-racist and a peace punk back then, but I sure had a lot of growing to do still.

Even much of Gen Xs favorite films are rife with anti-LGBTQ bullshit, not to mention all of the sexism, misogyny and total lack of real consent culture.

And things were even worse outside of these very small circles of "alt" whatever kids and what passed then for what we would generally call "queer" culture today. Much, much worse.

A lot of my cohort and friends didn't really start coming out in earnest until the 2000s.
posted by loquacious at 10:36 PM on August 19, 2023 [12 favorites]

paper chromatographologist: I don't know the reason for the name change

I now recount a hazy memory of something I think I saw someone on Icelandic-language Twitter mention, that apparently the “Halldór” part of his name was an affectation that he’d added to his name because of his admiration for Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness, but now he found that particular bit of cultural appropriation embarrassing. So when he got married he got rid of the “E. H.” and became just Justin.

However, I’m thinking I’m misremembering, because when I look online, I find a post by him saying that “Halldor”, without the accent mark, was on his birth certificate. And another saying that cultural appropriation is good actually.

So if anyone can clarify this, I’d be much obliged.
posted by Kattullus at 11:45 PM on August 19, 2023

Younger people will simply never know what life was like before the panopticon

They will eventually, because the panopticon is unsustainable.
posted by flabdablet at 2:07 AM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think Obama probably falls in the Gen X camp based mostly on how he interacted with culture, be that pop culture or otherwise.

I'd also say that his making a priority of getting rid of nuclear weapons is a Gen-X trait. He took WAY more steps towards getting rid of the danger of nuclear war than any other president did, and I always thought that if you were a CHILD and had nuclear war fears that's the kind of thing you'd do.

I've long thought that the nuclear war fears from CHILDHOOD is also a big Gen-X trait.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:28 AM on August 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

But it is significant that I and others of my generation have had to bear the peculiar double load of arriving at this treacherous period of the life cycle at precisely the same moment that people of all ages recognize to be a time of great cultural and political upheaval.

Such a weird complaint.

Moreover I feel like I'm a full time teacher because of this dynamic.

Kids want to hear, all the time, about where our social movement actions failed and succeeded in the 80's 90's and 00's. The kids are generally interested in history now, and I get to be part of that in our discussions

Also, no one gives me a lot of shit that we failed to stop the Iraq War, they start from the assumption that we did not have their numbers

I was going to say that the timing of this generational thing is unfair because it's so validating to be a 'younger elder' in this moment

Re music, for example. If you love the Cramps, we live in a time when you can play the Cramps for any group of young ones at any time, while explaining what it meant to you when you heard it,

or text them a link to the song, and generally they are down for giving it a shot. That kind of cultural transfer is wild.

In short. This shit is weird. Whatever.
posted by eustatic at 4:40 AM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

This fellow is taking the long way around to saying he's feeling old and irrelevant. And, well. That's rough, buddy, but that's a you problem.
posted by jscalzi at 4:50 AM on August 20, 2023 [26 favorites]

Although no one wants to hear my stories about how "in my day, kids, we had to record the police on tape, the audio sucked, and it took weeks to get the VHS out, and then no one would come to your sad video screenings of civil rights issues at the art theatre", lol
posted by eustatic at 4:52 AM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm 52, solid Get X. I remember when we were called "the Slacker Generation" for some reason that I forget. I think it was because not every one of us had a high salaried career by then (when I read/heard that I was probably 20, so I barely knew what that entailed. Took me until I was 29 to get a salary, but I eventually hit the six figure thing).

I work a different career mode now (got out of advertising and into a nonprofit that helps people, but I'm still a writer/art director/creative person there) and I work with a bunch of 20-somethings and 30-somethings. Great people. My assistant is a woman born in 1998. She's amazing, and far less of a knucklehead boozing/druggie than I was at her age. I don't even see much oblivion-seeking in the young people I work with. None at all, really, but it's not that large a sample size. In fact, if anything, I occasionally tell them to go off and take drugs somewhere in the Amazon River basin, because you're only in your 20s once. They look at me as a kindly, slightly-addled, elderly uncle from a distant land who often needs help with Office 365. I tried describing the old '70s show Fantasy Island to them the other day, and the character named "Tattoo." It's a different reality these days. I love them.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:31 AM on August 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think that those of us who were straight but supported gay rights in the 80s and 90s have a somewhat distorted view of how things were.

I recall as a child in the seventies being somewhat scandalized by an entry in The Book of Lists (Note to young people; it was sort of the ur-Buzzfeed). One of the lists was something like Fourteen Gay and Bisexual People From History, and it included David Bowie and Elton John, who were both still alive. “Should they let this information get out?”

On the other hand, I recall talking to my mom — a child of the fifties — about my basic skepticism that people didn’t recognize Liberace as gay then. Her response: “No one even thought it was a possibility. That was something that happened in prisons or in the navy, not with stars.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:22 AM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I tried describing the old '70s show Fantasy Island to them the other day, and the character named "Tattoo."

My students love hearing about interesting old stuff, because they can immediately go and watch/listen/read for themselves. They have a much more atemporal sense of culture than I ever had as a young person. I've made Columbo fans out of college students, if you can believe it (because that show holds up).

They also have figured out cultural anthropology, watching old shows is a decent way to infer that society's values and worldviews--for instance, some of my students watched the original Ghostbusters movie last year, and their primary reaction was 'wow, it's super Republican,' which had somehow been fairly invisible to me for decades but on rewatch, yep, Dan Ackroyd's shitty 80s Reagan politics are all over that script.

FYI, a current iteration of Fantasy Island is running on CBS, and it's firmly in the mythology of the original series (the island host this time is Elena Roarke, the island still has an adversarial but mutually beneficial protection agreement with mermaids, so on). It's pretty fun, actually.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:03 AM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

ok xer.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:16 AM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Also, this guy is right, as you age you do have to pick a side - you can side with the future and accept that you're old, that things change, that the past and memory are important but they're not everything, or you can pick the past, death, what is crystallized and finished, refusal to change, monuments, everything already determined and done.

listening to (broken social scene) kevin drew's spirit if... lately :P

big love
i decided god was no longer in my head
big love is dead love...
big love is not love...
dead love is not love...

philosophically i guess everything (we experience!) is an incomplete representation we can only grasp at and share of -- that we find meaningful -- what we can?
posted by kliuless at 8:48 AM on August 20, 2023

lol what sort of benighted people did you hang out with 30 years ago?

So this is the form (not substance) of Millennial social thinking I dislike, and I admit I was kind of hoping it would fade away as they got older and realized that life is slightly complicated, as young people generally do.

In 1995, two-thirds of the population reported being against gay marriage (although presumably some of them were queer people opposed to assimilation). The swing on gay marriage is one of the fastest ones on a major social issue I can remember. I've sometimes thought that the extremely awkward experience of being a straight girl whose boyfriend admits to her he's gay is an overwhelmingly late 70s-90s young woman's experience. Before that, they'd get married and everybody involved would end up miserable. After that, everyone would hand out their identity checklist upon meeting and so they'd never get started.
posted by praemunire at 9:09 AM on August 20, 2023 [14 favorites]

I realize that I’ve gotten fairly deep into weeds nobody not Icelandic cares about, but judging from a google search snippet, in this paywalled blogpost about his name change, he says that “Halldor” wasn’t on his birth certificate, but something his parents started calling him. However, I can’t be sure because I don’t care enough to actually subscribe to his substack.
posted by Kattullus at 9:46 AM on August 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

So my comment is probably off target as the whole generation label thing doesn't really extend to a lot of the world outside of the rich northern nations, so all of this thread is about people in those? But:

Younger people will simply never know what life was like before the panopticon -- a life where there were far more gaps and spaces for the unobserved, idiosyncratic development of private selves

Plenty of young people over here, and actually, all over the world not online at all, or only peripherally so. For better or worse.
posted by Zumbador at 9:47 AM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

In 1995, two-thirds of the population reported being against gay marriage (although presumably some of them were queer people opposed to assimilation).

yeah, I guess I was opposed but only because my brother (who's gay) was opposed. And not for reasons of opposing assimilation -- he just found marriage a crock, and felt one of the upsides of being gay was you didn't have to "play that ridiculous game". For the record, his relationship at that time ended up lasting over thirty years. They never got married.

But back to:

lol what sort of benighted people did you hang out with 30 years ago?

if you're hanging with "olds" who claim that they were always in favour of gay marriage, I'm going to politely suggest you maybe shouldn't just take their word for it. Because from my angle, a teenager through the 1970s, homophobia was pretty much official state policy (in North America anyway) until Harvey Milk started to get active. And even then, that (and Stonewall before it*, I guess) was really just the start of the wave that ended up making the real change.

* we also had a Prime Minister up here in Canada whose official policy was "there is no room for the state in the bedrooms of the nation".

Change is weird, rather like rain, I suppose. At first you get the odd sprinkle, maybe even a shower or two, but then back to sprinkles interspersed with nothing at all, except maybe it is raining a few counties over ... and then suddenly, holy shit, it's a deluge.
posted by philip-random at 9:56 AM on August 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

On the other hand, I recall talking to my mom — a child of the fifties — about my basic skepticism that people didn’t recognize Liberace as gay then.

Bloom County on the subject
posted by praemunire at 10:01 AM on August 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

And the followup.
posted by praemunire at 10:05 AM on August 20, 2023

if you're hanging with "olds" who claim that they were always in favour of gay marriage, I'm going to politely suggest you maybe shouldn't just take their word for it.

Thank you. 30 years ago, there wasn't even majority support for INTERRACIAL marriage.
posted by MrBadExample at 10:30 AM on August 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

it's also not a surprise that Gen X is now more MAGA than the boomers;

They were also sold a bill-o-goods about what America was because their Grandparents had WW1/WWII propaganda and the parents got the cold war propaganda.

So as the InterNet entered their lives where finding out about Smedly Butler, Jekyll Island, Operation Northwoods, The Tuskegee Airmen, Silkwood, Baltimore/NYC cops, Samuel Byck, et al was no longer finding a self published book from Loompanics the illusion from their youth got challenged.

Someone claiming he's gonna fix the observed crooked nature by a claimed virtue of not having been in the elected class which self deals got some people hooked hard.

I'd also say that his making a priority of getting rid of nuclear weapons is a Gen-X trait.

And yet, they still exist.

The Gen X teeth had more of an effect along with Carter/Rickover having a change of heart.

A dedicated Loopmatics reader might attribute a change to various reports of overflights of missile silos getting mass activated or mass shutdown depending on the teller of the tale. VS looking at the spending on the weapon systems and saying "pass".

I recall talking to my mom — a child of the fifties — about my basic skepticism that people didn’t recognize Liberace as gay then.

People who died in 1992 in their 80's were making that claim about him and Rock Hudson along with how gunpowder green tea was the best along with vitamin supplementation.

Younger people will simply never know what life was like before the panopticon
They will eventually, because the panopticon is unsustainable.

With the use of AI and the desire of advertisers to wanting to sell things to you it'll take a BIG CME to knock the panopticon offline. Take heart of that day coming everytime you see new pictures of pink Aurora Borealis as that shows the CMEs striking are dipping lower and lower in the atmosphere.
posted by rough ashlar at 10:32 AM on August 20, 2023

Younger people will simply never know what life was like before the panopticon

I think this tide has already turned. It's kind of frowned upon now to post pictures of someone, particularly a minor, without permission.

I think economics are the bigger challenge. Can young people afford to live in the city? Can they afford education, hobbies and going out?
posted by smelendez at 10:51 AM on August 20, 2023

I think economics are the bigger challenge. Can young people afford to live in the city? Can they afford education, hobbies and going out?

Not-the-young can't afford things. Per youtujbe video - average home in CA is $800k+ needing a $208K income. They were contrasting that with the 1955ish $7K 3 bedroom kit homes w/enclosed porch.

Various degrees of hot takes on Adam Carolla show with George Galloway WRT dating and men - dear readers can go look those up and find people who's hot takes suck less/have a good point mixed in with their suck.

All kinds of ugly for the future youth/adults. I do not envy them in this time.
posted by rough ashlar at 11:51 AM on August 20, 2023

I've sometimes thought that the extremely awkward experience of being a straight girl whose boyfriend admits to her he's gay is an overwhelmingly late 70s-90s young woman's experience. Before that, they'd get married and everybody involved would end up miserable. After that, everyone would hand out their identity checklist upon meeting and so they'd never get started.

It never happened to me, but a friend back then had two girlfriends in a row come out as lesbians after dating him for a bit. They stayed friends but it knocked him for a loop for a while. I'm sure this still happens to some extent because lots of people need to find their sexuality through experimentation, but what I see most of from my friends with teenagers is lots and lots of gender identity and gender expression focus and change, which is probably just as discomfiting to have happen midway through dating someone.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:29 PM on August 20, 2023

In re people being gay prior to, oh, 1995: When I was growing up in the eighties, outside of certain parts of major cities it was so dangerous and precarious to be out that it was frequently inconceivable that someone who seemed gay actually was. Like, actually being gay would get you fired from most jobs in most of the country, could easily get you beaten or killed or sexually assaulted and would certainly get you harassed virtually everywhere by virtually everyone. Ergo, the assumption was, someone who seemed gay was not because who would risk those consequences? Thus Liberace and various other celebrities.

The whole constant-homophobic-insult thing was not, for the most part, aimed at people because their peers truly thought they were gay - it would have been a lot worse than just insults in that case. It was about social hierarchies and gender policing - "if you don't stay in line, or if we need to demonstrate the power of hierarchy, or if we just need to make ourselves feel better, we'll remind you what happens to outcasts".

This is one of the reasons you very seldom see short haircuts on straight women - from the fifties through the eighties and early nineties, there were a lot of trendy short cuts for women, haircuts not dramatically longer than men's cuts. You pretty much never see that anymore except on the very occasional art student - fashionable straight women all have hair well below their ears and usually below their shoulders. In the eighties, if you were a woman with very short hair, unless you were really otherwise obviously butch and/or in a queer part of town, people would still assume you were straight because it was inconceivable for a woman to run the risk of looking queer in public. Now, because queer women are visible (and even though many queer women have long hair) "unfeminine" short hair is the mark of the queer, and straight women shy away from it.
posted by Frowner at 12:56 PM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Also, no one gives me a lot of shit that we failed to stop the Iraq War, they start from the assumption that we did not have their numbers

Yep. When the first (heh) Iraq war happened I was one of about 3-4 students at a high school with a student body of about 4,000 people who walked out of classes in protest.

We were all strongly discouraged and threatened with administrative action by teachers and admins and given a huge load of the usual shit about how it was going to end up on our permanent records and that we were making a terrible mistake that was going to follow us for the rest of our lives.

The threats were mostly successful in that it cut the numbers of students willing to stage a walk out from, oh, maybe two dozen students down to the 3-4 of us that did it anyway. Like some of our cohort that joined the walkout actually freaked out and went back to class.

Meanwhile my dad printed up a bunch of T-shirts using the super racist cartoons people were faxing around, including one that featured the text of (I shit you not) "This SCUD's for you!" and a cartoon of a camel with a missile sticking out of it's mouth, oversized testicles on a stump or log and a racist caricature of a Arab man with a huge hammer lifted up getting ready to smash the camel's testicles to, presumably, launch the missile.

For the first week or so of the war we were selling these stupid T-shirts at a completely renegade roadside stand at an abandoned gas station in suburban Orange County and we couldn't print them fast enough. We printed thousands of those stupid t-shirts and basically sold out every day. When we'd sell out we'd go back to the shop and stay late to print even more.

I remember commenting to my dad on how stupid the cartoons were and just being really dismayed at how popular they were and he said something like "Yeah, they're really dumb, but this kind of money sure isn't!" and waving a fat wad of cash at me. I mean he was right, we were basically printing money. I personally ended up with close to a grand in cash in my pocket and we must have cleared like 10-20k in pure profits in the short week or two where people were buying.

And then one day there were no buyers at all and it all just stopped like someone flipped a switch. I think this was about the time when images from the Highway of Death started showing up in the media and people started seeing the horrifying results of "shock and awe" and what actually happened.

I never did see someone wearing one of those t-shirts in the wild. Which was really remarkable and notable because I would often see shirts I knew that we had printed out in the world.
posted by loquacious at 1:15 PM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I noped out of the article after the author started with interviewing Douglas Coupland. Yes, I'm Gen X but I never read any Coupland and have no desire to do so.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 1:44 PM on August 20, 2023

That's a shame. Coupland has done some really good work. Life After God is a collection of short stories that is sort of formatted like daily affirmations that I return to regularly. Girlfriend In A Coma is full of interesting ideas and I should revisit it sometime.

His first two books are his most Zeitgeisty, and he learned a lot writing them because his later novels are quite compelling.

I enjoyed his Canada House project mostly because I'm not Canadian and it was like a journey through an alternate universe.
posted by hippybear at 1:48 PM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Younger people will simply never know what life was like before the panopticon -- a life where there were far more gaps and spaces for the unobserved, idiosyncratic development of private selves

Plenty of young people over here, and actually, all over the world not online at all, or only peripherally so. For better or worse.

I'm not sure what "over here" means, and I guess maybe you didn't pick up on the fact that I was implicitly referring to the mainstream U.S. experience.

Of course people in other societies have different experiences. And of course, there are marginalized groups in this country -- including people from strict religious upbringings or other subcultures -- who still come of age with little or not experience of mainstream media, including the internet.

I find people who have come out of those kinds of situations often have the most interesting perspectives on society. I myself grew up in an unconventional, somewhat religious household, where my exposure to mainstream popular culture was limited, altho not totally obstructed, and I think it has always made me feel like a bit of an outsider.

It's also made it hard for me to accept any kind of social or political consensus in a completely unquestioning way. I have to reason thru things following my own process.

I experience the millennial generation as being far more group-oriented and less individualistic than us Gen Xers. They generally "read the room" more intuitively, and are not so devoted to maintaining their idiosyncratic personal stances.

I recognize that in many ways this makes them more kind, more considerate, and more pro-social, and has helped bolster recognition of the problems and experiences of people from historically disadvantaged and oppressed groups. I work with a lot of people who are around 20 years younger than me, and many of them are extremely impressive and way more "sorted out" than I was at their age.

At the same time, I feel like this millennial tendency -- combined with the pervasive quality of social media discourse, as described in the essay from the original post above -- has made that generation more given to groupthink, in a way that sometimes gives me hives. Even when I mostly agree with the conclusions they reach, I find their tendency to quickly flock to a particular norm because everyone in their peer group is doing so, and to be fixated with policing language and terminology, as a way of also policing particular ideological constructions, to be... a bit icky.

Whatever. It is what it is. We were certainly a hot mess, and our latchkey-kid/punk-infused exaltation of stubborn individuality has always had both a good side and a bad side.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:57 PM on August 20, 2023

> But that being the case, it's also not a surprise that Gen X is now more MAGA than the boomers; a core of our generation was always destined to be reactionary. This guy's rant demonstrates that you don't have to be MAGA to be a reactionary asshole. It's enough to simply be afflicted by an assumed birthright to being a cultural critic.

can i merge a coupla threads in this conversation and argue that the reason why gen x has skewed more reactionary than one would by isolation expect not because of any particular vibe of disaffection or irony poisoning or whatever or really anything particularly generationally cultural-ideological at all, but instead just because a whole lot of the best early-to-mid x-ers died super super fuckin' young because plague? and that they died super fuckin' early because plague because a bunch of republicans wanted them dead?

like, mccarthyism via virus worked even better than original-flavor mccarthyism did, am i right?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:12 PM on August 20, 2023

There was a thing going around on social media a while back trying to make some kind of claim about how there are so many more queer millennials and Gen Zers and how come there aren't as many queer Gen Xers or Boomers. This was gaining traction until, I might have been the first one but if not I was quite early to it, the entire wave drowned out the original point with "yes, because of plague, all those queer people died, that's why".

I felt gratified that point got made, even if I might not have been the one to make it.
posted by hippybear at 2:17 PM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

All I can think of is how much of a rage/jealousy-fuelled case of l'esprit de l'escalier this guy must have been nursing for SIX YEARS before finally getting the right platform to finally settle scores ("The Jerk Store called, and they're out of you, COUPLAND!").

And it makes me want to give a Big Smooshy Boomer Hug (but I won't of course; all boundaries respected!) to the many many Gen X and Millennial folks I've been fortunate to know, for being kind, supportive, smart, fun, sympathetic and empathetic and in not the SLIGHTEST way as massively self-absorbed or shockingly un-self-aware as this ~~writer living in Paris~~ professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité. Six thousand words and I learned nothing about Generation X and far too much about this bozo's rectocranial impaction.
posted by hangashore at 3:12 PM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I'll reiterate: I was born the same year as Douglas Coupland & Barack Obama: according to Boom Bust Echo, the worst time to be born (in the late 20th century) for getting a career started; when I got out of college in the early/mid-80s, businesses were on a downsizin' spree and the only gigs in newspaper help-wanted adds were for cold-calling cheap toner replacements (really). My buddy called us "Generation Fucked", squeezed between Boomers and more tech-savvy Gen-X.

- The 60s "Generation Gap" between Boomers and their parents was a much bigger inter-generational conflict than anything seen since.

- Douglas Coupland really captured the Zeitgeist of a change in attitude towards work: for previous generations, the "day-job" was essential to a person's identity, but with Generation X, "Work" turned into a "Gig" that was a fluid negotiation, with an individual temporarily lending their time to a capricious employer.

- Kids these days that I've met are more self-aware than when I was their age.

- Author of top essay is kinda neurotic, some good points but some yeah okay.
posted by ovvl at 6:10 PM on August 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I'll reiterate: I was born the same year as Douglas Coupland & Barack Obama: according to Boom Bust Echo, the worst time to be born (in the late 20th century) for getting a career started; when I got out of college in the early/mid-80s, businesses were on a downsizin' spree and the only gigs in newspaper help-wanted adds were for cold-calling cheap toner replacements (really). My buddy called us "Generation Fucked", squeezed between Boomers and more tech-savvy Gen-X.

Huh. I'm a few years behind you and I found just enough employment lingering from the boomer glory days that I was early on given a disappointingly inaccurate sense of what grownup life was going to be like. At eighteen I had a blue-collar summer job that, adjusted for inflation and scaled up to a full year, paid more than my white-collar gig when I was forty-five. Actually, more than the income of my wife and me combined.

By the time I was thirty in the late nineties, I was hiring summer students for my workplace; in real dollars, their tuition was about three times mine and our decent pay was nowhere near what mine had been at their age. Indeed, I paid off my entire tuition out of my first paycheque every summer.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:45 PM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think Obama is Generation Jones.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:45 PM on August 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

and from that wiki link:

Generation Jones is noted for coming of age after a huge swath of their older brothers and sisters in the earlier portion of the Baby Boomer population had; thus, many note that there was a paucity of resources and privileges available to them that were seemingly abundant to older Boomers.

this feels about right to me, born in 1959 so pretty much dead-middle-Jones. Among other fun stuff, I had the Early 1980s Recession landing as I finished my undergraduate years.

The early 1980s recession was a severe economic recession that affected much of the world between approximately the start of 1980 and 1983.[1] It is widely considered to have been the most severe recession since World War II.[2][3]
posted by philip-random at 7:07 PM on August 20, 2023

I kinda gave up reading this article, and I don't like being the guy who plays the race card (the race card! that was kind of a Gen X concept), but one thing I will note that I haven't seen yet is how *white* it is. I'll admit that I'm pretty get-off-my-lawn when it comes to people younger than me, but like, if you've paid any attention to young people of color, the world is significantly better for them, and probably not coincidentally they're a lot cooler than their peers in my generation. I went to a majority-minority high school in the gangsta rap/crack era, and like, there was one way to be black. Maybe you didn't sell drugs yourself, maybe you didn't carry a gun, but you sure as hell wanted people to think you did. Because if you did anything else, it was "acting white", and you were shunned. As a white person with a foot in punk rock, theatre, etc., the conformity was really weird to me. The guy who sat next to me at graduation was from a notorious drug-dealing family who literally sold the girl on the other side of me a bag of coke at the graduation ceremony; he ended up in prison for attempted murder after a robbery gone bad. A few years later on, I ended up working with his sister, who's like 15 years younger. She's a computer programmer who loves Adventure Time. I couldn't believe they were raised in the same house. There are so many ways to be a black kid now. I see more black kids skateboarding than white kids. The clothes I see black kids wearing! There was none of that when I was in high school, where everyone had cornrows, wore puffy jackets, and listened to 2Pac. That was the only way. And that's to say nothing of other races, who were more or less invisible pre-millenial. So yeah, millenial and Z white kids? Meh, whatever. But millenial and Z kids of color? Yeah, total cultural flowering. I'm here for it. There's a lot I don't understand, but that's exactly why it's so interesting.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:58 PM on August 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

“if you're hanging with 'olds' who claim that they were always in favour of gay marriage, I'm going to politely suggest you maybe shouldn't just take their word for it.”

and

“Thank you. 30 years ago, there wasn't even majority support for INTERRACIAL marriage.”

and

“When I was growing up in the eighties, outside of certain parts of major cities it was so dangerous and precarious to be out that it was frequently inconceivable that someone who seemed gay actually was.”

These comments are kind of pissing me off. They're not wrong, exactly, but they're overstatements that, in their wide scope, contradict my own life experience.

I was at pains to not speak for LGBT+ folk because obviously there were (and still are) big portions of public life where bigotry was very strong and the threat of violence quite real and I do not want in any way to diminish what it's like to live with that.

But I'm both old and, unlike most of you, grew up in one of the most conservative, fundamentalists parts of North America, and I know, for example, that a butch(ish) lesbian could be selectively out in a town of 12,000 people, where dancing at prom was controversial, in 1983.

I worked and was friends with gay men who were similarly selectively out — certainly not closeted — in Amarillo, of all places, in 1985.

In 1986, I was on CNN in a call-in episode objecting to Bowers v. Hardwick, the SCOTUS decision that upheld Georgia's sodomy law. (A data-point that cuts both ways in my argument: I was on national TV objecting; but also, anti-sodomy laws upheld by SCOTUS? Really?)

In 1988, on Compuserve in Orson Scott Card's little area he had, I had an extended argument with him about gay rights, including gay marriage. There's probably no record left of that now, but I was on USENET from 1993 onward and I'm certain I advocated for gay marriage there.

In 1990, when I returned to college and almost instantly became friends with one of the most important people in my life, he was casually out and from my perspective this was hardly commented upon. Again, I don't doubt there were incidents I wasn't aware of, but much of my extended family met him, that he was gay would come up in conversation from time to time, and literally no one ever said anything homophobic in my presence. And, until recently, literally out of like 20 people on both sides of my extended family there were only two of us who weren't Republicans, so it's not like my family were an enclave of educated liberals. Far from it.

Incidentally, that Gallup polling on mixed-race marriage showed that in 1995 just about exactly half the country was not opposed and, look, having lived in Kansas City for ten tears up until 2021, I can tell you there are still many, many people who are opposed but probably won't admit it to a pollster. (Incidentally, I found KC to be at least as racist as Amarillo, something that surprised and dismayed me. And, while it's famously progressive, I found Austin in the 90s to be incredibly segregated and there was unambiguous racism just below the surface. The point is that you don't need to convince me that there was and still is virulent bigotry all over the place, I know.)

Hippybear described his own experience earlier:

“Just to expand: there were social circles in which people could move comfortably and entirely as out people, but as soon as any interaction went outside of those circles, the masks went on and there was no outward expression, as there was no expectation of safety.”

When I said that those of us who were straight and supported gay rights have a distorted view of how things were, I was getting at what he describes here. It was possible for a straight person to move through social spaces where being out wasn't noteworthy, and so it seemed pretty acceptable, but not being gay we don't understand that these were like rocks in river rapids where one misstep could find someone moving from relative safety and comfort to situations that could even be life-threatening.

My beef is with the claim that those safe harbors were few and far between, that they were relatively insignificant and only existed in the large coastal cities. Or that you shouldn't believe me when I say I was a straight person who advocated gay marriage in the 80s and 90s. I found myself uncomfortably in agreement with Andrew Sullivan in the 90s on this, which I remember vividly because I hated to agree with that guy, and like him, heard from many gay rights activists that advocating gay marriage was a) assimilationist, b) utterly unrealistic. This was one of about three or so cultural issues that were very important to me in the mid-90s, I talked about it all the damn time.

Also, one thing I thought when I read those comments is that thirty years is only ten years longer than twenty and that's how long I've been on MetaFilter and you can certainly go back to my history as Ethereal Bligh and see gay rights advocacy by me and others, including gay marriage. Sure, objecting to sexism was somehow a controversial position on MetaFilter in 2005, but that just proves the point that, as things change, you'll see both pockets of tolerance and bigotry. It's not one or the other. They coexist; they're in dialogue.

Being someone for whom this has been an important issue for forty years, yes, I agree that the turnaround in the US in the last fifteen years is remarkable. But the idea that not much changed between 1950 and 2000 is simply wrong.

And this sort of thinking about various progressive cultural issues really bothers me because it's often self-congratulatory in the "we did it, young 'uns should be grateful" (olds), as in an earlier comment, or "we're so much better in these enlightened times" (youngs), both of which distort history in ways that are harmful by sugarcoating the present by way of exaggerating the horrors of the past. They go hand-in-hand and the narrative that arises from this is usually toxic because it denies the reality that progress is a constant and (usually) incremental struggle. It argues for complacency.

How all this relates to the Gen X experience, I don't really know. It may be that we're having this argument precisely because Gen X pretty exactly straddles this period of fits and starts of change and so our differing perceptions of how these changes occurred mirrors part of the confused nature of this cohort.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:06 PM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure what "over here" means, and I guess maybe you didn't pick up on the fact that I was implicitly referring to the mainstream U.S. experience.

For the record - I grew up Gen-X in the US mainstream, and even I didn't pick up on the fact that you were referring to the mainstream US experience.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:52 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Fuck's sake. Early 1962 and happily self-identifying as X until the goalposts shifted a couple years back and it turned out I was just a late boomer, and now I find out I've been Jones or perhaps Fucked all along?

Bugger that. Henceforth I shall answer only to Generation Whatever. This game is silly.
posted by flabdablet at 9:16 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I worked and was friends with gay men who were similarly selectively out — certainly not closeted — in Amarillo, of all places, in 1985.

I think it's worth considering what being "selectively out" was often like, especially for young people and anyone who had to be dependent on parents, or for anyone who had kids. People still lose their kids for homophobic/transphobic reasons now, but it was much worse then.

When you are "selectively out", you have to worry about word getting around, and the closer you live to family the more likely word will get out. That means moving far away, which, hooray! But it still does constrain your choices. Further, it means that if you're out to dinner with your date or partner and you do anything not strictly platonic and you are not in a super queer space and someone from work comes along - well, you might not literally get fired, but you're going to have to worry about it and it can definitely impact your job security, raises, etc. It means that if your family visits, you hide anything that seems gay and your partner becomes a friend or a housemate. It means, god knows, that if you are in the hospital with a serious illness, you are completely fucked - your partner is very likely to be unable to see you, your birth family will determine your care and if you die your birth family will bury you.

You could be "selectively out" in a tiny social circle and it was a big secret, at least outside of cities and very liberal college towns. You could maybe be selectively out. For instance, I had one high school friend who was very "selectively out" - at a small summer camp with other queer kids, to me, to a small number of other people. I was not out; I was waiting for college, where I expected to be a social outcast but knew that I would have more autonomy and that people would not be able to harass me the way they were able to harass me for other things in high school.

Like, "oh my friend who is gay" was a social litmus test - you'd get to know someone well enough that they would tell you that they had a gay friend, because even having a gay friend was a social challenge.

I'm not saying that it is the worst minority stress out there, but knowing for a fact that you can either be closeted in public or risk all kinds of negative consequences, and knowing for a fact that the MAJORITY of people around you will be shocked or disgusted and feel free to express their shock and disgust if they know you're gay - that's definitely minority stress and it alters your life. It alters how you expect to interact with people. Some people are really brave and out there and that can make straight folks feel like things are fine, but a lot of people are not really brave and out there, and a lot of people who are really brave and out there pay a price that is not super visible.

All my life I have known - partly because I'm a fat weirdo, but substantially because I am queer and gender non-conforming - that many, many people will be uncomfortable around me. It's still true here in a liberal city. It's true at work at a liberal employer. If I'm on the bus, I look too queer for some people to want to sit next to me, which sounds like cool, extra seat, but it gets you down. I know that in life I've put up with a lot of bad situations because I learned very early on that a bare minimum of safety and tolerance was the best I could realistically hope for, and again, that marks you.

This was all enormously worse in the nineties.

I understand that the eighties were a backlash against the seventies and that there have been some times and places in the US where people could be moderately out and face little sanction, and that there is a lot more queer history than people tend to know about. But I really, really want to push back against the idea that being "selectively out" was low stress or very good at all, really. Certainly better than some kind of 1950s Mad Men situation, but just generally garbage.

One more thought: if you realistically think that, eg, 20% of people will be supportive or at least not care about your sexuality, another 50% will be mutedly hostile but won't do much else and 30% will want to beat you into the pavement (and there is no legal recourse at all) then you have to act as if anyone you don't know is part of the 30%.

I remember traveling out west in the nineties and worrying a lot about getting queer bashed. Nothing happened, hooray! But I worried about it, I was on the alert, etc. That puts a crimp in the ol' vacation.

You don't have to believe that queer life in the eighties was one unremitting tragedy to say that homophobia was pervasive, aggressive and extremely damaging.
posted by Frowner at 9:49 AM on August 21, 2023 [21 favorites]

if you're hanging with "olds" who claim that they were always in favour of gay marriage, I'm going to politely suggest you maybe shouldn't just take their word for it.

Or just consider their milieu. My parents and their friends were supporters of gay rights for my entire childhood--the harshest punishment I ever received was a month grounded for calling someone the f-word.

But that's because of where we lived and who they were. My father's job put him in the heart of the gay community in the earliest days of the AIDS crisis. He took what he learned and impressed it strongly upon his friends and family, and so I grew up in a circle that never tolerated homophobia, even the most casual expressions, even in media (as much as was possible anyway). It is sometimes easy for me to forget that wasn't the norm at the time.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:42 AM on August 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

WaPo: Gen X is not the Trumpiest generation
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:44 AM on August 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Archive.today link for the WaPo article above.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:05 PM on August 22, 2023

WaPo: Gen X is not the Trumpiest generation

Yet another thing Gen X can't manage to succeed at.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:20 PM on August 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you don't want to read the whole article, just look at this image.
posted by box at 2:44 PM on August 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Staring into that image I do see gen X getting trumpier faster, while remaining not trumpiest.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 9:16 PM on August 29, 2023

Boomers and Silent Generation and Millennials getting MORE democrat, while Gen X is getting more Trump, this is not at all the save it’s being hyped as. This is an embarrassment and it’s right that people are talking about it and pointing it out.
posted by Bottlecap at 8:14 AM on August 31, 2023

Is Gen X getting more Trumpy or were more of the fence sitting “others” closet Republicans to start with? “I’m not political/politics is not important” was a popular pose to strike in the 90’s/00’s and also a certain strain of internet right libertarianism had a bit of a moment at the same time. I’ll bet a lot of those types were attracted to Trump and/or just kinda gave up and declared they were Republicans all along.
posted by delicious-luncheon at 12:19 PM on August 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

Statistically, every generation tends to get more conservative as it gets older, because:

(1) Many of them eventually make more money, own more property, and have more of an interest in defending those things.

(2) As the world changes, positions that were once progressive become centrist, and some even become conservative -- so it's possible to be liberal in one decade and conservative a few decades later without really changing your views.

And these trends will not exempt millennials or zoomers, no matter how much they may believe otherwise.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:40 PM on September 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

so it's possible to be liberal in one decade and conservative a few decades later without really changing your views.

I'd say it's inevitable if you don't change your views.
posted by philip-random at 1:53 PM on September 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Statistically, every generation tends to get more conservative as it gets older, because:

(3) disparities in life expectancy mean that the rich, white members of each generation are more likely to get old in the first place. So even if individuals didn’t change their politics, the cohort would still get more conservative as its poorer and BIPOC members disproportionately die earlier.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:50 PM on September 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was talking about those info graphics in the link rather than the more generic “you get conservative as you get older”.

For the Gen-X pie graphs, it appears that the Others slice shrunk from a tiny sliver of Democrats but a much larger slice converting to Republicans. The Democratic line seems to have held while the Others converted to Republican. Compared to, say, the Silents where the Others slice got a little smaller but the Democrats clearly ate into the Republicans. Or compare to Millennials where their Others was almost as large to start and shrunk but it seems like perhaps more of the shrinkage went Democratic. In all cases, though, it seems like the Others category had shrunk.
posted by delicious-luncheon at 3:50 AM on September 2, 2023

So Gen X had more shy tories? err, trumpies. Shy Trumpies.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 6:18 PM on September 2, 2023

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