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Gen X Was Born for This Shit
A public service announcement
Remember this CBS News graphic, from last year?
The great joke, of course, is that everyone forgot about Generation X once again. That generation, my generation (I was born in 1975, have seen every Richard Linklater movie multiple times, and am currently listening to Pavement), is the one that got skipped over.
The Baby Boomers are living longer than any other generation and have refused to let go of any of the power, and the millennials and post-millennials vastly outnumber us. Having grown up in the internet and smartphone age, they are the ones with all the buying power that corporate America is obsessed with reaching. Us Gen Xers? People briefly cared about us during the 1990s, the most peaceful decade, in which the only real global controversy was oral sex in the White House — but then Sept. 11 happened, and everybody stopped thinking about us all together.
Until now. Looks like you need us now.
Generation X has long been waiting for its national moment, as presidential candidates in the age group get bounced early (sorry, Beto) and the music of our time has been all but forgotten (it’s like no one cares about Built to Spill anymore). And it turns out that the coronavirus pandemic is it. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we’ve been training our whole lives for this moment. The rest of you generations can’t get your shit together. But we’re here to fix it for you. With a shrug, of course.
The central key to slowing the spread of this deadly virus is social isolation, a willingness to be by one’s self for extended periods of time — as we used to say before it became “Netflix and chill” — to “veg out.” This was, of course, the central skill we developed as latchkey kids, propped in front of the television by the first generation of two-income parents, narcotized by the after-school parade of Saved by the Bell and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. If there is one thing we are absolutely terrific at, as writer Lauren Hough pointed out on Twitter, it is “keeping our asses at home without being told… the generation used to being neglected…
