Am I part of Generation X?
Over the years I have pondered this question.
The fact that I have pondered this question for years is probably a point in favor of me being a member of Gen X. And yet, in the past when I’ve considered all the evidence, I always lean toward not being a member.
I was born in 1961, in Hawaii (at least we can agree my birth year certainly rules out “Gen Y”), but lived all but one year in California. My parents are still happily married and are approaching their fifty fifth wedding anniversary. And I’ve always had a great relationship with both of them.
My older brother (by five years) and sister (by three years) definitely were not Generation X, more like the tail end of the baby boomers. They abhorred by parent’s music (Big Band and crooners like Perry Como), but made fun of the music I listened to as well (Pink Floyd, Queen). My brother loved Marvin Gaye and my sister loved Joni Mitchel and the Supremes.
Growing up, I had nothing but fear when it came to drugs. I believed all the cheesy movies we watched in school were real. I really thought that if I just took one puff, I would look into a mirror and a monster would be staring back at me! So I never experimented with drugs (or drinking) until well after I had gotten out of college.
Another area where I didn’t do any experimenting was sex. I had always been in love with girls so being with a guy was not ever seriously considered, though I will admit to some “man crushes” on favorite teachers and a few male relatives I looked up to.
I will also admit to going through stages where “depression” experimented on me. In fact it did more than experiment on me, calling the shots for a while after I graduated from college. Because I couldn’t get a job in my chosen field of study (Media), I ended up working in a factory making credit cards, a job I was totally over qualified for, which resulted in a two year period where I was depressed most of the time. Do you think that alone might grant me Generation X status?
The reason I’m yet again contemplating this issue is because Douglas Coupland, the guy who popularized the phrase “Generation X,” recently wrote an article for the New York Times Book Review. As it turns out we were both born in the same year. The author of “Generation X - Tales for an accelerated age” (his first book), actually entered this world on December 30, 1961, a little over ten months after I was born. I never knew this until recently despite the fact that “Generation X” is one of my favorite novels of all time.
I’m not sure what to make about the difference in our ages? Could those ten plus months be critical in separating one of the founding members of “Generation X” from a mere pretender? Or are their other factors at work?
Recently one of my daughters wanted to borrow the book but I turned her down. There was no way I was going to let her toss it around her room like it was a beer bottle or a bong.
Coupland was raised in Vancouver, Canada, by parents who were apparently very strict because of a religious background that ended up kicking in only when they had children.
I also spent my formative years on the west coast, but in the U.S., in a small (at least in the 70s it was small) town, Simi Valley. My parents had a strong value system, but were also very tolerant. As my siblings got older, my mom and dad became even more progressive about such issues as sex, drinking, and politics. But all along they made sure we were kind of “sheltered” when they raised us. I’m talking the real clean, wholesome “suburban,” upbringing that probably went extinct around the time I graduated from high school in 1979.
And so, years later (1991), when I read “Generation X” the book definitely rocked my world.
It wasn’t just the philosophy or the writing; it was everything, including the look of the book itself. If you ever get a chance to see the original copy of “Generation X” you should go out of your way to do it. You will be amazed at how the entire presentation is still so hip and cool. The book was written over twenty years ago, and yet has this green color running half way across the front cover that pretty much predicts the glow sticks the kids would be wearing at raves more than a decade later. It has a Lichtenstein type cartoon in one of the first pages, way before the masses would take to defining the reality of their lives through the melodrama of comic art. And the layout has bits and pieces of text or phrases in the “margins” that highlight, define, and illuminate the main content. In fact the layout of the book’s pages so reminds me of “facebook” I always wondered why the twins sued Mark Zuckerberg and Douglas Coupland chose not to?
I still have my original copy of the book, moving it from one house to the next over the last two decades because I love it so much. Recently one of my daughters wanted to borrow my copy of the book but I turned her down. There was no way I was going to let her toss the book around her room like it was a beer bottle or a bong.
I kept this book in pristine condition all these years for a reason. The novel was a true original because of the style of the writing, and the philosophy behind the style. Coupland’s characters felt so real, and yet so different than almost everyone I hung around with at the time. But I knew they were real… because for a period of time I felt like I was one of them.
Despite expensive and/or hard earned college degrees, the characters in the book struggle to make it in a world where companies have zero regard for creative ideas or innovation, and their only interest is in keeping people working as galley slaves.
Coupland was able to capture perfectly the ennui of his generation because it wasn’t just the dehumanizing aspect of their jobs but also the struggle with their personal lives that made his characters feel like they were drowning. Despite the fact that the characters have super sophisticated intellects, (which is usually focused on the smallest, most telling details in people [including themselves] and everything else in the immediate vicinity) and are hyper aware of everything going on around them, the mystery that ends up eluding most of them is coming up with any goals worth pursuing for the rest of their lives.
Admittedly, the way the characters often deal with their bleak future is to “complain.” Usually to each other, but also to the “older generation,” as if any of their complaints would do any good. The book confronted the problems Coupland’s generation suffered through in reacting to the previous generation’s obsession with getting ahead while holding on tightly to a value system that no longer made much sense in the context of a world rapidly changing.
Specifically Coupland’s own upbringing seemed to be parental guidance based on rules that had their roots in generations long past. Like the house... community he grew up in was similar to Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” Only this time it was his generation that was drawing the black spot.
It would be the Gen Xers who would put “Irony” on everyone’s lips. And it was Coupland who first mined the creative possibilities behind the concept of the word. Over the intervening years, it has become a creative crutch for writers and artists to orchestrate their wares in an ironic payoff, but now we live in a “backlash” age, post-ironic times if you will, where only the foolish are glib about the state of the world.
In his writing Coupland also managed to capture the dark side of self-awareness. He would depict characters who not only would suffer from a paucity of real life choices, they became tortured by an inward obsession, the self-conscious awareness loop that continues to turn and turn into it becomes the very definition of "depression."
Coupland's writing also marked the arrival of the narcissism drum beat. The sound of one hand clapping… which did make a sound... as long as it was your hand that was doing the clapping, and you were there to hear it.
During this period Baby boomers (or older… or younger) began to exploit the possibilities of divorce not only as liberating, but as a way to escape responsibility for their actions. It even ended up being used as a destructive weapon to be wielded against an ex-spouse. If there were kids involved, then they became human shields or… cannon fodder. There was no hypocrisy (the go-to card for the generation before the Baby Boomers) because Mom and Dad made no such pretenses. Either or both were going to get what they wanted out of life (refusing to end up miserable like their parents) ... even if it meant a scorched Earth behind them.
The brain of the Generation Xers Coupland depicted in his book wasn’t the one depicted on the famous commercial, “this is your brain on drugs.” The brains of his characters were all about that blank spots that show up on MRIs when one tries to spot a sociopath’s emotional response to stimuli. “Generation X” was about young adults who had learned to turn down… or turn off… their emotional response to everything around them because it was the only way they had learned they could safely ride out, endure, stabilize a rocky childhood spent facing… reality.
Coupland’s piece in the New York Times was a review for a book, “Gods Without Men” by Hari Kunzru. In reading the review I was relieved to see that Coupland’s “voice” had not changed after all these years. At one point he writes: “We live in a post-era era without forms of its own powerful enough to brand the times. The zeitgeist of 2012 is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist. I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence, but it’s true…”
For old school Generation Xers… self-awareness isn’t enough, you must also anticipate the reaction from everyone you once stood in the high school quad with… or the printing room/coffee break room. You must beat them to the punch before any of them groan... and one of them says, “cheesy.” That’s why Coupland follows his sentence quickly with “there is something psychically sparse about the present era, and artists of all stripes are responding with fresh strategies.”
His complete thought ends up toying with the potentially cheesy breakdown of a word/phrase, only so he can use it to introduce something insightful and bold. It’s what smart, self-aware writers do really well that emerged from the X generation. They raise a subject that at first seems corny, but then they put a spin on it that illuminates -- “I watched all the Brady Bunch episodes at least a dozen times… (and then before everyone groans)… because my father ended up being gay and I had trouble imagining how difficult it was for him to be hiding in the closet. So I watched all the episodes because I was searching for parallels between what happened to him and what happened to Robert Reed, the actor who played Mike Brady, who was also gay. I looked for anything in his eyes that I might have missed with my own father.”
In the NYTimes editors’ introduction of the piece, Coupland is quoted as saying that “Two decades of profound technological shifts have literally, biologically, rewired our brains. We all know it. We all feel it. I think new work needs to address this astonishing shift. I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn’t help anything. We can only go forward.”
"'Generation Decline,’ is what we all prefer to be labeled if you insist on labeling us at all."
I couldn’t agree more and it was wonderful to read that even the post Internet brain of Coupland seemed as self-aware as the one I fell in love with all those years ago.
Coupland’s review piece was probably written to help promote his art display (he’s also an internationally recognized design and visual artist) at the New York Armory. I want to go and see the show, but right now I’m having to deal with a lot of shit both of my daughters are putting me through. They were just small children when I divorced their mother, but like some TV show that has fallen behind on production, all I seem to get are the same reruns from these two. To be honest, it would serve them right to just let all of their problems float into cyberspace while I checked out Coupland’s show and even take the time to catch up on some of the books he’s written that I’ve missed.
Both of my girls claim to have been paying attention in school, but somehow they missed astronomy class. Each one believes they are the center of the universe.
Get a load of the most recent verbal exchange with my youngest girl. She just asked me if it would be alright for her to stay living in my house until at least her first child was through college. She isn’t even pregnant! That’s the balls on this girl!
I said to her, “What? You’re serious? Fine. Whatever!”
But before she walked out of the room I told her that she would need to work on coming up with a better attitude if we were all going to be spending an additional thirty plus years together in the same house.
“No more complaints,” I said to her. “I’m sick of hearing the complaints. You and your friends have become “Generation whine.”
She responded with her own moniker, “’Generation Decline,’ is what we all prefer to be labeled if you insist on labeling us at all.”
I scoffed at the phrase, “Generation Decline.” As I turned back to my computer I said to her, “Please, how bad can things be? We have a Black President.”
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