McLife: A Gen Xer Looks Back at 50 Years
“I turned 18 last week.”
Louden Swain informed us of that personal tidbit during the opening monologue of Vision Quest back in 1985. “I wasn’t ready for it,” he admitted, “I haven’t done anything yet. So, I made a deal with myself — this is the year I make my mark.”
How many of us made deals with ourselves thirty-plus years ago, especially after Louden beat “The Shute” and inspired us to make our mark? How many of us still make deals or plan vision quests? I make deals with myself all the time, and I’m a pretty consistent New Year’s resolution type of guy, though one who also fails to reinvent himself each year with those silly plans and promises. So, I turned forty-nine last month, and I wasn’t ready for it — in fact, I hardly noticed how close that number is to the mid-century mark until a few weeks later when I said it out loud. Fifty? Seriously? Well, if Paul Rudd can do it, I guess I can, too. But in thinking about Louden, I wonder if I’ve actually “done anything” yet. Have I made my mark? Even though I never saw that high school soccer career through to fame and fortune and I didn’t become President or a Senator or even a City Council member by the age of forty and I’m not a rock star or even a competent piano player and I haven’t published a New York Times bestseller or an Oscar-nominated screenplay, I have managed to carve out a respectable career in public education, and I get up each morning and go to a job I enjoy and that I appear to be reasonably good at. And, with two successful and well-grounded high-school age kids and a marriage coming up on twenty-two years, I guess I’ve done a fairly decent job becoming who I am. And, that is the story of Generation X at mid-life.
For the slacker generation of misfit latch-key kids who typified a nation at risk as divorce rates rose while test scores and expectations dropped, I tend to believe that for the “breakfast club” graduates of a John Hughes’ adolescence, reality no longer bites. A few years back, writer Whitney Collins described that new reality, noting how as Gen Xers hit their forties we’d moved “From Jaded to Sated” in middle age. Certainly, it has been a bumpy ride, and the hits have kept coming for the generation that learned early on from Rocky to just take a punch and keep coming back. And, though other critics like A.O. Scott chronicled Gen X’s supposed midlife crisis a few years back, and Claire Dederer lamented how “reality was still biting,” the twenty-somethings of the 80s and 90s have actually reached fifty-something surprisingly intact and grounded. For most of the people born in a short window from the early 1960s to about 1981, the reality that was supposedly biting was just life as we know it, and the caricature of whiny twenty-things at the coffee shop never really reflected the work being done and the lives being lived by people who chuckled as they rolled their eyes at Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. For, as seminal Gen X singer Beck told Rolling Stone about the song Loser and its reflection of his own journey: “Slacker, my ass. I never had time to slack.” That was the reality for most of Generation X: rather than goofing off and playing video games in our parents’ basement, we were actually working our butts off from that first job mowing lawns to the second waiting tables to the first inklings of a career in the string of entry level and temp jobs on our way to careers and general stability.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in a small Midwestern town outside of St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi was for me, in retrospect with naive and idealistic rose-colored nostalgia, the last best time to be a kid. We tell ourselves now it was just different then. And it probably was. Generation X may be the last group of Americans to grow up as simple human beings before the world became media saturated and technologically complicated. Sometimes we all sit back and try to recall just what it was like before there were 200 channels and streaming services and text messaging and computers in our pockets with an endless supply of silly games, breaking news updates, and access to all the information in the history of the world. When there was still a sense of mystery and ambiguity because we didn’t and couldn’t know the answer to everything all the time. Instead, it was a time of Schwinn ten-speeds and Mongoose dirt bikes and waiting endlessly for hit songs to come on the radio and Wiffle ball games that never ended and where we didn’t even keep score and frogging in the creek behind the neighbor’s houses and frisbee golf using mailboxes as the hole and really just spending a lot of time feeling comfortably bored and forever looking for something to do.
Defining a generation is always tough, but it’s mostly about the things a group finds familiar. Basically, you’re of the X demographic if you recognize on a deeper, personal level the music, the movies, the fads, the moments, the attitudes, and the vibe from coming of age in the late 70s to mid 90s. Being born in 1970 means I grew up in the very heart of Generation X, just old enough to remember the economic and psychological stagnation of the 70s but young enough to have been a teen during the New Wave of music and the explosion of teen-oriented cinema typified through the movies of John Hughes. And, there are sounds and scenes that accurately capture the cultural moments of the era. A simple example: I still vividly remember the release of Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” when my classmates Amy and Debby played it for my ninth grade homeroom class and urged us to buy it. And to this day, it’s still doesn’t feel like the holiday season until KOSI101 plays that song, and the emotion hits me all the same as I smile in recognition of those voices — Bono and Simon and Sting and Boy George — and I still get a knot in my throat. And, I fondly recall how I sat at home all day, watching and taping Live Aid, knowing it was one of the greatest moments in music history, and how I naively but truly believed that music was going to change the world.
Looking back I ponder whether it was a time of promise or despair. Or is that a silly dichotomy because of course it was both and neither at the same time and always. Was the world out in front of us full of potential with new music and technology and prosperity and progress, or were we simply foolishly partying like it was 1999 because there was such uncertainty about the future? I was on a college campus at the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Gulf War began, and we told ourselves it felt like the 60s all over again, but it really wasn’t even close. Following my years described by the Indigo Girls as “prostrate to the higher mind,” I “got my paper” and went off to see the world, living abroad and traveling with my future wife as we taught English in Taiwan and bummed around Southeast Asia and Europe like so many young expats putting off the careers we now embrace. I realize now we were “gap year” before it was a thing. In fact, Generation X was everything before it was a thing. Through it all, we remained grounded in our healthy distrust of institutions and authority figures influenced by our earliest television images of one President resigning in disgrace and another imprisoned in the White House rose garden unable to right the economy or bring the hostages home. That ingrained skepticism and existential whatever-ness has been the hallmark of the X generation.
Generation X is an adulthood bookended by major falls — the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001. Our path into adulthood has been an oscillation of elation and despair, as promises and opportunities have been tempered with tragedy and disappointment, a reality engrained in the generation of school kids who grew up quickly when we sat in classrooms watching the space shuttle Challenger explode and disintegrate. Our space moment was the literal manifestation of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Those failed promises have steeled Gen Xers with a detached pragmatism, as we’ve always known things have never been all right, but they’ve never been all lost either. I was a year into college when the Cold War came to an end, and I was six months from becoming a father when the planes hit the towers and the landscape of New York and our lives changed forever. On either side of those events, I had moments of existential wondering, but they were inevitably interrupted by the necessity and even desire for just getting back to the dailiness of life. And just getting on with it has been the essence Generation X, nodding casually as milestones come and go. My dad passed away recently, just short of his eighty-fourth birthday. And that was hard. But his dad died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two. So, I count my blessings for every day the two of us got past the final year of the grandpa I never knew, and in that regard, approaching the mid-century mark is really quite exciting and rewarding. In a sappy memory for a child of the 70s who now lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, I try often to remember the sentiment in the song Poems, Prayers, & Promises where John Denver sang “it turns me on to think of growing old.” Last summer, my little family went on a twenty-nine day road trip which was one of the greatest times of my life, and with one child heading off to college next year and the other starting high school this year, my wife and I know it’s another ending as well as a beginning. So, as Generation X reaches fifty, we can collectively look past the many falls we’ve taken and seen, as we slowly change course into the upward trend of the U-curve.
I’m still planning my Act III, my reinvention, my vision quest, my goal of living more deliberately and artfully and finally getting around to living the life I have imagined. With the purchase of a keyboard, I’m trying to finally be musical, intent on creating music in addition to consuming it. With Duolingo on my phone and Rosetta Stone on my laptop, I have dreams of biliteracy or even tri-literacy, as I seek to resurrect the high school French buried in my mind, and to recall and cultivate the snippets of Mandarin Chinese from the days in Taiwan. Heck, it might actually be fun trying to keep my mind sharp while hopefully staving off dementia as long as possible. I want to take an art class and shamelessly prepare for my days of lazy afternoons painting watercolors while listening to the Violent Femmes. I’m trying to work out regularly and maintain my best pace in 5Ks, doing my part to remain Generation X-ercise. Though you’ll never see a 26.2 or a 13.1 sticker on my car — that’s just too far. No one’s body needs that kind of abuse. Mostly, I’m reminding myself to live deliberately and remember it’s about lifestyle over everything else.
At the end of the day — a phrase we all use but many of us profess to hate — it comes down to the wisdom Elmo shared with Louden before the final match with Shute in Vision Quest — “It’s not the two minutes (or the fifty years, for that matter). It’s what happens in the two minutes.”
