Why X=Cynic

What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. That's what we learned of Shakespeare in high school.

Still, I’m not crazy about the name Gen X. The name was OK back when I thought it sounded kind of mysterious. You know, Zorro, the masked rebel hero had his Z; we, the teenagers who had big hair, have our X . . . kind of different and intriguing. When I realized we have an X because no one could think of anything better, the name lost its adventure. Then I encountered other names we’ve been called based on how older generations have seen us: the whiny generation, the tuned-out generation, the numb generation, the generation of gripers, the generation adrift, the Busters, slackers. Maybe our particular rose smells a little sweeter with the name “Generation X.”

Speaking of Shakespeare’s writings, during Gen X’s childhood, a writer who likely affected our upbringings topped Shakespeare on the American best-seller list in 1976. Pediatrician/professor, Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had been embraced as he told parents in the 1950s to trust their instincts by openly loving their children found himself on trial in 1968 in official courts for conspiracy of counseling young people to avoid the draft and in the court of public opinion for somehow having undermined patriotism by encouraging permissive parenting. In 1976, when his American book sales were surpassed only by the Bible, he wrote that his previous books had been sexist and that fathers actually should participate in parenting.

The way Gen X (born between 1965 and 1981) was raised was reflected in other names we were given over the years: The Latch-Key Generation and the MTV Generation. Many of us were raised by single parents, divorced parents, or two-parent working families, which meant that, for a chunk of our childhoods, many of us lacked quality time with parents. Preschools and daycares hadn’t really come on the scene. Adults in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s seemed to be preoccupied with matters other than children: the Vietnam War, jobs, marriages, politics, the price of gas, telephone conversations, protests, soap operas, bills. We were sent to school or told to play outside while our adults tried to move up in the world, do better than the neighbors, find themselves, put food on the table, or do something they enjoyed for a change. Frankly, many Gen Xers more or less raised ourselves and each other. And we didn’t leave our teenage years looking like we’d particularly done a stellar job, which is no surprise. If you’ve ever read The Lord of the Flies, which American generations since the Boomers probably had to read at some point, you know that little good can come of children being left to fend for themselves.

We weren’t exactly alone. We had babysitters. We had 80's pop culture that grew into the 90s. We watched lots of television with reruns, commercials, and some cartoons. Many of us, at some point, lived with or visited people with cable TV that brought us HBO and MTV. Plus many of us either owned or knew someone who might let us play their Atari or Nintendo game systems. And eventually we grew old enough to become the babysitters, old enough to move from bicycles with banana seats to old cars our parents let us drive or that we paid for ourselves. 

From teachers, we heard that we didn’t meet up to standards set by the older crowd we knew as hippies or Mom and Dad (depending on the age of our parents) who cared about society, who wanted to make things better, who had a bigger sense of their world than what they saw in movies. We were told to vote, to be more involved, to care more . . . but we didn’t understand why we should care for a society that didn’t seem to care about us.

Around the time of Whitney Houston’s hit recording of the “The Greatest Love of All,” in 1986 and Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy in 1987, America looked at those of us trying to imitate drugged-up hair bands, and realized that society may have just lost out on the opportunity to effectively guide a generation of children. America started trying to figure out how to change, to make things better for the next generation.

In 1999 Movie Fight Club (a movie I haven’t actually seen), character Tyler Durden apparently tries to explain how Gen X felt stepping into young adulthood, “Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War . . . our depression is our lives . . . we were raised on television to believe we’d all be millionaires, movie gods, rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re starting to figure that out. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

In Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, Tom Beudoin cites Rob Nelson and Jon Cowan’s list of 100 harshest facts for Generation X in which the following trends were noted as greeting Gen Xers in young adulthood: “a decline of real wages . . . and an increase in the length of the average workweek; an increase in young adult poverty and a concomitant decline of real income; the devastation of AIDS . . . ; the continued socioeconomic crises of many minority communities, particularly of young African American men; continuing crises of divorce and suicide; overqualification of college graduates for available jobs; unacceptable levels of violence in schools and neighborhoods; a steady drumbeat of drug abuse; and a high percentage of young adults without health insurance.”

Do we sound like whiners? Yes, I think we likely do from the perspective of other generations who had big trials such as the Great Depression, World Wars, Vietnam, etc. But our experiences are our experiences. The way a generation is raised affects the way it approaches life. And we are living as Generation X, whatever that means, and up to this point, we have been a cynical bunch.

So yes, we can be sarcastic, non-participating naysayers who throw movie quotes and song lyrics around, but I like us, and I hope to show you our good side another day. I also hope to look a bit at the generations we stemmed from so as not to have you believe I’m promoting discontent between parents, children, and grandchildren. In fact, I'd wager that most of us GenXers are actually much more pleasant and loving than descriptions of our generation depict . . . in spite of that cynical-something inside us. 

Question: Gen Xers . . . are you just going to lurk out there, reading this, and say nothing to defend us? Or perhaps you can add more insight into our common psyches?


This blog post is part of a series of writing (April 3-May 14, 2011) by Tammy Fletcher Bergland about Generation X facing midlife.   tbergland.blogspot.com