I Am Generation X

I was born in 1974, which was a bad year all around. People have different opinions on this, but most demographers estimate that all people born between 1965 and 1981 are members of Generation X. Being born in 1974 means I am pretty much smack in the middle of it.

Generation Xers are a cynical bunch. I am friends with a bunch of Xers on Facebook, and people like to trade memes about how we were the last generation allowed to play outside until dark. This is true. I rode my bike, drank from a garden hose, was a latchkey kid, and got into all kinds of trouble—without the grown-ups knowing. Some people might interpret this as freedom—we had libertarian Boomer parents who had a laissez-faire attitude towards parenting and figured that we would flourish if left to our own devices.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that we were abandoned by our Boomer parents, the most self-absorbed generation in the history of the world, who were spending a lot of time finding themselves and hooking up and not spending much time parenting. Boomer parents didn’t go to Little League games, spelling bees, school plays, or graduations. To say that Xers have frosty relationships with their parents is an understatement. Many of them are estranged, not on speaking terms, or express open hostility. The abandonment has continued into adulthood. About eight years ago I talked to a local woman about my age, who expressed bewilderment and anguish about the fact that her Boomer parents had less than zero interest in spending time with their grandchildren. What were they doing? Watching TV. The result of this is that as Generation X matures and ages into their 70s, they are going to be some mean, tough old birds. And conservative as hell, too. The “things were different when I was a kid” impulse is strongest in Generation X.

The result of this is that Generation X is a generation that is almost completely detached from politics—instead, focusing on their careers and families. I don’t have the statistics at my command, but I can tell you that Generation X is severely underrepresented in Congress, which is filled will Millennials and Boomers, who all want to change the world. Xers just want to be left alone. It is highly likely—no, probable—that we will never have a Generation X president. There is simply nobody in our generation who cares enough to try.

I think this sentiment is shared by a lot of Xers—there is a lot of stuff I did as a kid that today, would have landed me in jail. For a period of time, I was going to public parks in the middle of the night with a bunch of other guys dressed as ninjas to frighten the lovebirds who were making out in the parking lot. Parents co-signed this, tacitly. This continued until we messed with the wrong car and a guy jumped out and chased us into the woods with an axe. I’m sure by now the statute of limitations has expired, but yes, I would have gone to jail. I also hacked into the school’s phone system and changed all the teachers’ outgoing messages to burp and fart noises. I ended up down at the police station for that one. But they let me go—just kids screwing around. The headmaster of the school made me do community service. People didn’t take things so seriously back then. Which was a good thing! Now, we have zero tolerance for these sorts of things, and a minor transgression committed by a 14-year-old can affect their employment prospects 30 years later. To me, our present society is dystopian.

Like I said, I was a latchkey kid. I lost my virginity six days after my sixteenth birthday with a girl who was nineteen. My mom was at work, or something. She came home and was none the wiser. I think about this sometimes. Without parental supervision of any kind, we were basically adults. We were free to make our own decisions and make our own mistakes, living with the consequences. Today, children are so carefully monitored that they would never have an hour of unstructured free time alone with a member of the opposite sex. You see this in the polling data—sex among adolescents has gone way down. So has drinking. The days of Sixteen Candles-style raging parties are long gone. The John Hughes movies of the 80s are pretty instructive—kids were living in their own world, and the adults were like the teachers in the Charlie Brown cartoons, going wah wah wah wah wah.

Parents today attempt to truncate bad outcomes. Nobody wants their kid to end up dead or in jail. Nobody wants their kid to be precluded from going to college for something they did on social media. Generation X may have been abandoned, but we had a much, much lower incidence of mental illness. I’m not saying anything that everyone doesn’t already know. Millennials had far less freedom and Zoomers even less than that. Being trapped in your bedroom with only a mobile phone doesn’t sound like a recipe for sound mental health. Xers are a very emotionally healthy generation, and it’s because of the freedoms that we enjoyed. I rode my bike all over creation. I got a car as soon as I turned sixteen, and within a week, I was driving out of state, unbeknownst to my mom. The car was a source of great personal freedom, especially for going out with girls. Kids don’t date nowadays, and they don’t drive, either. Just alone in the bedroom with the phone.

The funny thing about the Millennials and the Zoomers is that the helicopter parenting continued into adulthood. They had Parents’ weekend at my college—nobody came. When I was at Lehman, I was having a discussion with a woman from HR—she said that our competitors were having Parents’ Day on Wall Street. Lehman elected not to do that—that is where they drew the line. You’re 25 years old, and your mom and dad are showing up to Wall Street? How embarrassing. And that’s another crucial difference—Xers were embarrassed by their parents. The millennials are best friends with their parents. I see this on Instagram—some 28-year-old woman will take a selfie with her mom and caption it #bestfriends. What? Unthinkable. At no point in my life was I best friends with either of my parents. I don’t even know how to compute this. The best I’ve been able to achieve is some sort of détente.

As I write, we’re getting down to tag ends in Season 20 of American Idol, and the clear frontrunner is an 18-year-old Hawaiian kid named Iam Tongi. Tongi is a 350-pound Pacific Islander, typically clad in a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals—just a sweetheart of a guy. You might have seen his audition—it went viral. He sang in tribute to his father, Rodney, who passed away two months earlier. The song he chose was “Monsters,” by James Blunt. I have never seen this in an American Idol audition—two of the judges started to cry. I was crying, sitting on the couch, watching. The song was beautiful, but that’s not why I was crying. I was crying because I was jealous of the relationship that Iam Tongi had with his father.

I treasure my childhood—I treasure the freedoms that I had. But I long for something resembling a normal relationship with my parents. My father was something of an amateur stock trader—when I told him that I got a job at Lehman Brothers, I begged him to come to New York and see the trading floor. He would have loved it. He never came. When my first book was released, he sent me a one sentence email. Nothing about the second or third books. When I texted him that I published my first column at Bloomberg, he sent me a picture of a lizard. I haven’t spoken to him in years. What I would give to be a Millennial, and for my life to be complete.