Lisa Loeb's Glasses

The superpower of introverts is we don't mind being ignored. You want credit for things you make an effort on, sure, but when the Birthday Crew at work starts marauding the hallways, assaulting the monthly gaggle of victims with warbling song and a Costco cake, you can keep your headphones in as they herd past your cube on their way toward poor, defenseless Janet, betrayed already by her instinct to be friendly.

It turns out that this dynamic can be extrapolated on a generational level. I remember how embarrassed I was when Reality Bites was in theaters. I was 20, so I was a few years younger than the stars of that particular film, but it was packaged and sold as a reflection of burgeoning Generation X young-adult culture. I was old enough to realize that anything presented as such would have had to be green-lit, produced and marketed by people decidedly not of my generation in a cost-benefit calculation attempting to draw ticket and popcorn money out of me, not as an individual human but as a demographic. A swath of the culture coming of age, moving out and getting jobs, testing and cultivating a societal and existential independence complete with the first adult rush of disposable income. The result was a thin, slapdash capitalization attempt with thin characters and contrived situations where everyone can only come across as either whiny, cynical and pre-emptively defeated or slippery, cynical and gormlessly calculated. Either way, nothing wasn't touched with too-insistent ironic detachment and pessimism, where the only visible trace of earnestness was in the application of ironic detachment and pessimism. The dialogue, hairstyles and filmmaking techniques have not dated well. But every year, the rest of it somehow gets more accurate.

What we've ended up with is a generational space between our parents, the Baby Boomers, and what should have been a transitional half-generation, the Millennials, between us and our own children. It's a natural process of growth for children to strike out in opposition to their parents in an attempt to stake out a cultural stake distinct, their own, won, shaped and understood on their own terms. Here in 2019, where many of us in Gen-X are pushing 50, it looks like a lot of us... kinda skipped that? We grew up on the cusp of an era of unprecedented safety, fighting through the scourge of AIDS and crack and the Cold War to an era of political stability so milquetoast we actually had to make up bullshit to impeach the president over mostly, it seems now, out of boredom.

As a result we've ended up kind of lost and forgotten, happy to receive culture instead of risking the embarrassment of trying to form it. At this point, I think Obama is the closest we're ever going come to having a Gen-X president, and even he was a tail-end Boomer. Right now apparently the main requirement for serious consideration for the office is to be 70 years old. By 2024, the youngest people age-eligible to be run for president will have been born in 1989. Taylor Swift is going to be president before Andrew Yang, the only unambiguously Gen-X candidate in the field this year. We all, as a generation, deserve to be portrayed by Ethan Hawke.

Behind us a generation has been politically acculturated in the 2008 financial collapse and the undeniable affects of climate change threatening life and property, kiln-fired by urgency and threat, hardened and sharpened by fear. There's an impatience among them that is driving action and advocacy, expressed online and (shudder) in public.

The result has been open conflict with the older generation, the one they see as both responsible for the state of things and indifferent to solutions; or worse, beholden to the powers of global profiteering that purposes their literal destruction if there's a dollar in it. And the generation in question is... definitely not me!

Over the last few months, the "ok boomer" phenomenon has become a thing. On the one hand, I guess I should be more offended than the Boomers as the Millennials have apparently determined that my generation isn't even worthy of their scorn. On the other hand, fuck it, I'm over here trying to figure out how not to end up eating cat food when I retire. Y'all talk amongst yourselves.

If I have to pick a side, obviously I'm not siding with the Boomers. All they did was completely fucking surrender. All that promise of societal assessment and reordering in the 1960s not contemplated since the French Revolution completely abandoned in the face of... what exactly? The retreat of the '70s and '80s was so comprehensive, they left the exact same power structures in place, the same military-industrial complex Dwight Fucking Eisenhower warned us about. Except now the power structures were global and expanded into an awareness that they needed to focus on marketing the message better in order to pacify any nascent protest culture. And now in most cases, the marketing is the message. Manufacturing and consumption of manufactured goods is all but passé. There's nothing actually being sold but the sale (see: FACEBOOK).

Sure, you want to make the argument that we didn't do a fucking thing with our bite at the cherry, with our youthful energy and wakening political puissance when we had it? That the lack of Gen-X candidates is a direct reflection of a generation-wide disengagement, preferring an inward focus on a security and safety in family and employment in the largely nonthreatening transitional world we were socialized in?

OK, Boomer.