#oregontrailgeneration

I am 41, middle aged and getting older by the nanosecond. I’m not 21 anymore and I’m ok with that. I would be lying if I said I’d rather have wrinkles than none at all, but generally speaking, I’m alright with the advancing years and how they’ve treated me. 

I am a lot of things, just.......not Generation X.

Well, let me clarify first:

Generation X was initially classified as a generation beginning in 1965 and ending in 1984 by Douglas Copeland, the so-called 13th American generation, following the Baby Boomer cohort. As it stands in that form, completely arbitrary, chronological and unyielding, I am indeed a member of Generation X. It says nothing about me other than the fact that my birth year falls into that particular segment of a series of equal, unemotional generational divides.

It was, however, a surprise to me, to find out I was indeed considered Generation X. My whole teenaged and young adult life was lived fully believing myself to be a member of Generation Y, born somewhere between 1975 and 1990. Sometime during school in the 90s, a teacher addressed us with that label, and it stuck with me ever since. By the time I was 20, I knew that Generation X was Winona Ryder and all the 80s teens that came before us and that we, the heirs to the 90s and its technological advances, were something different. It made sense to me. The older kids weren’t like us. The 80s weren’t like us. We could sense the divide and the dawn of a new era. It was upon us.

And then..... one day someone started talking about Millennials. At first I mistook it for a new generation, born after 1990, the next in line, the one that came after Generation Y. Imagine my shock to find that not only was the Millennial generation referring to people practically the same age as I was, people I worked with and hung out with, but that I was also no longer a part of their gang. Suddenly I was Generation X. Not just stalwart 1965-1984 Generation X (which I would have accepted), no - 1965-1981 Generation X, chopped off three years before the actual 20 year divide, AS IF IT MEANT SOMETHING.

What did it allegedly mean? I couldn’t find an answer to that, except descriptions and identifiers - stereotypes - that might stick to someone born in 1970, but certainly not on me. Suddenly I was “cynical”, my idols were from the 80s, and all of my formative experiences and influences belonged to someone 10 years older than me. WTF??  1975-1981 found itself suddenly amputated from the rest of its generation. For no logical reason.

But it gets worse.

Those of us belonging to the island of Gen Y floating in Gen X started talking about it. We noticed the discrepancies in cut off years. We saw that depending on who you talked to, we were either Millennials or Gen X. The verdict wasn’t in, regardless of what Howe and Strauss said. Oregon Trail Generation, Generation Catalano - we saw ourselves everywhere, posting, discussing, putting up a fight.

Enter Xennials.

Yes, I thought. Finally. 

And then I saw the cut-off years.

1977-1983

FUUUUUUUUCK NO.

As a 1976er, there is no difference, absolutely none, between me and anyone born during the 1977 to 1983 time frame. In fact, I share more with ANYONE born between 1975 and 1990 than I do with a single person born in the 60s or early 70s. We can argue about years like 1974 or 1973, but trust me, in all my 41 ancient years here on the planet, living in four different countries, I have not ONCE met someone born in 1965 or 1970 that shares my childhood and youth experiences. Let this be known once and for fucking all, because I am sick and tired of explaining it.

Why?

1. 80s pop culture and music. 

Duh. I don’t really remember the 80s, aside from toys, the first video games and cartoon t-shirts. The 80s were vastly different on a pop culture level from the 90s and I was on the bench in the haze of childhood. Gen Xers had AIDS, world hunger and music and films that I only watched and listened to retrospectively out of curiosity much later on. Anyone who wasn’t a youth during the 80s (at least 15–24) would not have been fully part of that culture.

2. The Cold War: 

When the Berlin Wall fell, I was obsessed with the Little Mermaid. Does my voice sound like Ariel’s? How do you like my Ariel drawing? I couldn’t give two darns about politics in 1989 and really don’t remember the feeling of the environment that preceded it. I came of age during the age of Middle Eastern wars, starting with Iraq, continuing with Iraq and leading up to 9/11. I wasn’t old enough to vote for Reagan or Bush — I am Clinton era all the way. Again, if you weren’t at least 15 before the Cold War started crumbling, you probably don’t have much to say about it.

3. Technology: Now, I am not saying Gen Xers are not tech savvy, but give me a handful of people born in the 60s or early 70s and you’ll find quite a few people who pride themselves in the fact that THEY survived a good chunk of adulthood without the internet, that THEY can live without their phones. You know the memes. I was a teenager when I first got internet and I don’t know what real life is like without it unless you’re talking about My Little Pony and She-Ra. Smart phones were second nature to me and yes, I have my face glued to my phone whenever I am not asleep. I came of age during the whole 90s tech boom and it helped make me who I am.

4. The whole latchkey running wild thing: Technically, the latchkey era didn’t end until the mid-90s and by the time I was a kid, only irresponsible parents let their kids run around like free range chickens. We were the post-Adam Walsh, milk carton era and parents were worried. Contrary to popular belief, kids STILL play outside and of course, so did we, but we did not “run out of the house in the morning and come back when the streelights came on”. Oh no. My parents wanted to see me in the yard at all times and actually gave me a physical boundary that I was not allowed to pass (our yard ditch). Friends had to be approved and parents had to be contacted for any kind of visit or playdate. New children and families had to pass the parental supervision test — I was not allowed to roam free with kids whose parents were not home or just randomly pop by someone’s house unannounced. The shift was already there in the 80s — the freedom 60s and 70s kids had was gone. Oh yes, you’ll find a few of these kids (born anywhere in the late 70s and 80s) from divorced homes engaging in the same romantic nostalgia right alongside the Xers and Boomers, but seriously, the times were gone. Although I never read it myself at the time, my parents had IT, thank you very much. They had Wayne Williams, Clifford Olsen, Randy Kraft and John Wayne Gacy. My life at 10 was no 60s Disney live action film. And yes, we loved to stay inside and play video games. Atari, Nintendo, Sega…… those were the days.

5. The pessimism/anti-Baby Boomer thing: What???? I mean seriously, whaaat??? I can’t even write about that because I don’t understand it. Hippy was not a slur to me, in fact, we were very much into that sort of thing during the later 90s. I am not a pessimist, or a cynic or a slacker and I didn’t hate my parents or thought disappointing them was “cool”. I am STILL worried what they think and I’m over 40. I know that’s just me, but again, this particular Gen X attitude was one we always associated with either dysfunctional kids or… older kids. Yep. Older kids. Real Gen Xers. We were actually kind of enemies at the time. I recall “so 80s” (accompanied by a sneer) as a thing. It always seemed to me like they were still desperately trying to recapture the 50s cool during the 90s with a giant big hair, mullet fail.

6. The absurdity of the cut off lines and criteria for these so called “generations”. Who cares if I was born one year before the first Star Wars? Really? WHY? Does the fact that I was born the year Steve Jobs founded Apple count for less? Also, who cares if I can remember Nirvana? How does that negate almost complete comtemporary ignorance (and indulgance) of major 80s bands? I mean, let’s face it: the only reason I know what Depeche Mode is, is because of songs they produced in the 90s…….but then again, wait, maybe it wasn’t Depeche Mode…..Dire Straights perhaps….. or Duran Duran? I have to Google every time. Please don’t hold it against me. At the time in question, I was too busy pretending to be Jem and the Holograms. And grunge…..the one Gen X thing that actually occurred during at least a brief moment of my formative youth, well — Kurt Cobain was dead by the time I started going to concerts. While admittedly being a real common denominator between me and Gen X, grunge was just a fledgling spark at the dawn of budding musical tastes. Bluntly speaking, I am more Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, Weezer, Blink182 and Linkin Park. It’s hardly enough to completely reclassify me and ignore the rest.

None of these cut offs are a strong argument, folks. You might as well say that “you are an Xennial” if you were the same age as one of the actors on That 70s show playing Eric and his friends. Which, incidentally, includes anyone born from 1983 back to……you guessed it: 1976.

Yes, some kids born anywhere during the late 70s or early 80s will have had older siblings or friends that influenced them with all things Gen X, just like I know 90s kids today that know more about Gen X culture than I do due to their Gen X parents. There’s also these pesky socio-economic aspects that play a role — I’ve met ’00s babies down here in the rural south that still don’t have a smart phone or their own computer. That aspect can be quite arbitrary.

I have real Gen X friends. I have Millennial friends. And while I won’t claim to be like anyone born in 1994, I have vastly more in common culturally with my 80s born Millennial friends than I do with my 60s, very early 70s born Gen Xer buddies. In fact, the latter group tends to freely associate with early 60s born “Baby Boomers” as if they are part of the same generation, as their “remember whens” seem to be in tune with each other. There is a generation gap between us that is every bit as tangible as the one that exists between anyone born throughout most of the 90s and I. As adults, it is enjoyable now, this funny little rift — certainly food for plenty of mutual teasing, but it is real. It exists.

The times just moved too quickly in the 90s. Politically, culturally, technologically - those of us who experienced our formative years during the 90s and early 2000s are hard to classify, I get that. But....The least anyone can do is keep us together. 

So stop. I repeat: STOP cutting me off from my generation and shoving me into a group that doesn’t share my experiences. If you want to be fair, keep the clean 20 year cut off — 1965–1984 for Gen X, so that I can at least be grouped with a good decade of people I can identify with. If you’re going to start chopping things up, be a little more meaningful. Might I suggest: Gen X 1960–1974? I have yet to meet a person born in 1974 that identifies as a Millennial or “in between generations”. Not to mention the nifty fact that grunge was almost exclusively produced by this demographic, a demographic which also includes many teen idols of the 80s.

Why does it matter? Well, people do ask — are you a Millennial or Gen X. And even Xennial. I kid you not! Can you imagine how much it blows to have to classify yourself as something you are NOT, suddenly stereotyped with qualities you don’t have, lumped into a category that makes you feel like oil in water, sitting there, suffocating under a label that doesn’t belong to you, while the rest of your people are bonding safely in the 1977 and beyond zone? The isolation is real.