What is a Gen X
Written by Christopher Pentecost on January 14, 2024
Welcome back! There was a great debate amongst myself as to what should be the second post. Should we dive into all the things that are wrong with me on an ADHD level? Are we supposed to delve into why I believe that there was a message? Should we figure out why, you know, through Freudian Theory, why my parents were the way they were? And then I thought, let’s check out the one thing that if social media has taught me anything, is the standard form of Generation X or Gen X for short is really questioned a lot, mainly by Millennials and Gen Z, going like, “Who are these people and why do we care?” Which, quite possibly if you ask a Gen Xer, it’s exactly what we thought the Boomers thought about us… kind of weird. Everything comes back around type deal.
So where do we start? Gen X as defined are people born between the years of 1965 and 1980. Being born in 1979, that’s where I am. I’m right there, and we’re not going to get into the characteristics of the micro-generations or the fact that people like me would be a good balance between Gen X and Millennial. I feel as if I’m more Gen X because I do, and we will get into that.
So there was a lot of upheaval in the time that Gen X started. You had the continuing fight of the civil rights movement in the states. You had communists in Russia. You got a Cold War going on between the Russians and the West. You had Vietnam. You had a lot of turmoil. But then you also had the Beatles. You had the Summer of Love. You had a lot of good things post-war going on, and everyone was trying to find their own sort of space, sort of a place to be, a place to live. The term Gen X, as quoted in the familysearch.org, the term Generation X had been used in a couple of earlier ways, but the primary use of the term now is used to define the generation following the Baby Boomers. The X was used to give the idea that the generation resisted being defined with reference to the variable X rather than some other characteristic. Generation X, or Gen X for short, was also known as the Baby Busters, the latchkey generation, and the post-Boomers. It’s a lot to take in. I like the idea of the variable X because, well, I didn’t like being defined. Who does? As a kid growing up, I was bullied, so of course, I was defined by the people who would call me a lot of pejoratives for a lot of different types of people. We won’t get into the R or F words, but I like the idea of being a part of the latchkey generation. The first generation of kids in which coming home meant coming home to an empty house. This was not Leave It to Beaver; this was parents both needing to be outside the house to bring in income for everyone to live. I would return to my home, unlock the door, go downstairs to the basement, and chill out until my parents got home. But it also meant that I came home and had to fend for myself. I had to make my own snacks; I had to maybe do chores around the house. I became the person who cooked most of the dinners because by the time my parents got home after 5:00, which wouldn’t be around until like 5:30 almost 6:00, they were tired after working 8 hours a day and didn’t really want to cook. So, it was sort of up to me because my sister was too young.
Our characteristics were independent because we needed to be. We’re flexible because we needed to be. I learned at such a young age how to cook with what you had on hand that, as a home cook and not anywhere near a professional, I could probably go kick the ass of some cooks on the Food Network’s Chopped. And times weren’t the best. We went through the ’80s, which saw a massive recession. We dealt with conservatism and the free-market triad of hell known as Brian Mulroney, Ronald Reagan, and The Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. We grew up being critical thinkers with everything going on around us in the world. We had to start questioning things, and especially with me and my parents, if I asked a question and they didn’t know the answer, they would refer me to the Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelves about the piano, and even then, those books were about five and a half to 10 years out of date, so I still had to think for myself. At some point, the library became my all-time favorite place to be, mainly because most of my bullies didn’t go to the library, and it allowed me to read. I was a kid, 12 years old in grade seven, doing an entire public speaking speech about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Why? Because I found it interesting. Everyone else in my class did their speeches on their dog, their family, their favorite hobby. Not me, just about a guy driving through Dallas getting his head blown off. The teachers were impressed; most of the other students were not. And I don’t think we were ever taught this. I think we learned it on our own to be self-reliant. How being self-reliant and independent is different, weird, but the fact is we were independent because we were self-reliant, and let’s just go with that.
I like to think my generation and maybe some of the later baby boomers were able to push pop culture forward in a better way than my parents’ generation. I say this because in our generation, we saw more inclusion of people and culture mingling together. I refer to things like the birth of Hip Hop, the birth of punk, both of which ended up coinciding in the melting pot that is New York City. And that even within that, you also see cultures mingling together that you hadn’t before. Take, for example, Beastie Boys, three punk rock white kids who ended up staying true to their punk rock roots but also combined it with the early stages of hip hop and rap to create something that was new and fresh in the ’80s. Other Gen Xers would come to form alternative rock, the Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, bands that would bring more angst like those in heavy metal. Bands like Metallica, Slayer, Exodus and Testament, the angst that we all felt as a generation going, how do we deal with this life when we’ve grown up on our own. We also became the first generation that was forced into continuing education because that’s how you got better jobs. Finally, it was not just go work in a factory; it was go out and try to do something better with your life, like our parents constantly told us. We’re doing this so that you can have a better life than what we had growing up, which is hilarious to say because at least they had parents at home when they got home, and they weren’t the ones needing to cook dinner constantly. My generation also brought about and made popular skateboarding. We would go out and meet friends at the park, ride our bikes, skin our knees, play on park equipment made of 4x6s, and get massive splinters in our fingers. We would ride down slides made of shiny sheet metal that, left in the sun, would take the skin off of you. We would come home when the street lights came on.
We still try to find a way to balance the traditional values of our parents with the cynicism of our upbringing. We try to raise our kids with the values that we were taught but also the values that we taught ourselves. We learned a lot from the world around us socially, politically, environmentally. There were some of us who turned out just like our parents, there are some of us who turned out better than our parents, but we all fought for the same goals. I think we carried the rebellious spirit that our parents couldn’t carry with them. I know that for me, I combined the traditional values of my parents, crossed with the Gen-Xness of my babysitters, and the rebellious nature of my friends, and all of that mixed in with a little bit of ADHD and a lot of time left to my own thinking has made me, I would say, a more well-rounded individual, self-reliant human that believes in a greater good. Now this is just me sort of rambling and throwing in some examples of what it was like for me growing up. I will delve more into the social, political, and cultural aspects of being a Gen Xer when I discuss more about how I ended up this way.
Knowing that we’re going to delve into the social, political, environmental, and cultural experiences of most Gen Xers from the time they were born through the time of the Millennials and the Gen Z, I figured I would leave you with something that was incredibly familiar to, I would assume, most of us growing up in this generation. It’s a Spotify playlist called the Gen X mixtape. If you’re wondering what a tape is, you’re almost too young to be here. If you’re going, “I remember one of those, used to have to rewind it with a pencil,” you’re definitely in the right spot. I looked over a bunch of different playlists; this one pretty much encompasses a lot of the music that we grew up with. I think it crosses a lot of bases. As a person who is eclectic in their musical tastes, I think this covers a few of the bases, maybe not as much New Wave Punk as I would like, but still, it’s a feel-good list, as we like to say, and I appreciate you stopping by for this next post. The next one, I hope to actually delve into more of how I came to believe that I was never diagnosed with ADHD. Now press play and dance like no one’s watching. And if you make it to the end and you end up with someone you wouldn’t mind dancing with, throw on some Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. It’s the only surefire way to end a high school dance, in my opinion.