Minding the Generation Gap: Gen X as the Bridge

Is Generation X poised to become a bridge generation between the Boomers, while holding the memories of those in the Silent generation who were our grandparents, and the Millenials, Zoomers and beyond who are our children and grandchildren? Not many people are writing about Gen X minding the generation gap. Instead they are focused on the way they think AI is going to upend life as we know it. In reality, the continuing decline of the Boomers will be much more impactful. Writer Jeff Giesea is thinking about this topic though, and he wrote a rather thoughtful piece about what he calls the Boomer reckoning, and the way the generational shift is going to affect the United States and the world at large as they slowly let go the reigns of power.

            Giesea calls this the “Boomer Paradox: boomers are holding society back, but they also are holding it together. What happens when they finally fade from the stage? Will we renew our institutions and cultural fabric, or drift into decline and unrest? How will the fiscal math even work?”

            He went on to write a lot about the resentment many of us have for the Boomers. I feel that. At the same time, like Giesea, I had a number of Boomer mentors whose role I really appreciate. There were some less savory types as well. I am a late Gen Xer, born at the end of the seventies, just before the Millenial generation. A lot of my older friends, and siblings, were more squarely in the Generation I identify with, as is my spouse. Punk rock, skateboarding, industrial music and hip-hop were all part of the stew I was influenced by, and these subcultures were born out of the hearts and minds of Gen X. Yet there were Boomers who mentored me, and their hippie music was almost as important to me, though in a different way. I had a handful of Boomer teachers who guided me and coached me in creative writing, on the one hand, and older hippies who inaugurated me into that part of the countercultural world. There was always some older hippie hanging around after all. A next-door neighbor and good friend who would get me stoned and teach me about vegetarianism, gardening, astrology and beyond. There were other older hippies hanging around the edges of the as well. Someone always knew one. Who else were you going to buy the weed and acid off of without actually going to a Grateful Dead show yourself?

            Some of these drug addled deadheads in my circle I never should have had as mentors, but such is fate, and being in a phase of low self-esteem, I let certain individuals have more influence over me than I ever should have. But then that’s one of the issues those of us in Gen X have: sometimes the people who could have been mentoring us, were off doing something else, leading us to find our own way. Right into the hands of people with questionable sense of ethics. At least, speaking for myself. I wasn’t really a latchkey kid, but so many other Gen Xers I knew were, I am sure they can relate to this.

            There were some less seedy hippies in my life as well. A few of them had resisted the psychic reterritorialization that was spawned during the post-WWII boom. While some people were making babies, government agents were thinking about how to best go about brainwashing people, and steering the hippies off course. MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were a big part of that, and to a large degree, they succeeded in their aim. Having a counterculture so tightly woven around the use of drugs made it all the more easier to manipulate peoples minds. Have a look at Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties if you have any doubts. Though his book leaves some threads untied, it points to enough factual evidence and indirect evidence to show just how much MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were up to their eyeballs manipulating minds, hippie minds included.  

            After the Manson murders the image of the hippie had been marred. Then the academic think tanks began a project to rebrand the more radical edge of the counterculture. Black Panthers, Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society and Yippies all became taboo. If you wanted to make it in the world, even talking about such things became verboten. Capitalism could no longer be critiqued by the hippie generation. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and so a large swathe of them sold out and joined the ranks. This slow dissipation of the movement happened during the seventies, at the time when E.F. Schumacher’s idea of appropriate technology was having a moment, and the appropriate tech movement itself was doing its DIY best to address the precarious energy predicament then hitting the industrialized world in an opening salvo.  

​            Doing it yourself takes a lot of discipline and effort, and eventually many of the Boomers turned their backs on their youthful ideals, joined evangelical churches, and joined instead the Reagan Revolution. America was back, for a time. But the hypercapitalist neon dayglo of the prosperous 80s and 90s that followed would soon begin to fade, culminating in not a renewed economy, but depleted energy that lead to fracking and more offshore drilling. The 2008 financial crisis caused by the burst of the housing bubble led to the busting of hope for Gen X and early Millennials as their future was further sold out to prop up the financialized system and property of the older banker Boomers who just didn’t want to let go, leading us into another boom bust cycle and our current state of polycrisis.

So yeah, there is some resentment.  
 
            Living in this kleptocratic gerentocracy has made many of us who are in Generation X weary and wary of the Boomers. Some Millenials have perhaps been even more wary. The postwar Boomer era is ending. But they are still clutching onto more than a slice of the pie until their hands go dead and cold. Yet Giesea says resentment towards Boomers is stupid.  The thing about resentment though, is that it isn’t usually a choice made in your head. It’s an emotion. Every human deserves dignity, including Boomers, but a lot of the resentment comes from the decreased standard of living younger generations have had to endure while our elders continue to hold onto property -hence things like the new round of the “housing crisis” which is really just a greed crisis.

For my own case, I’ve worked at the library my entire adult life. I started as a book shelver, and stayed in the job for typical Gen X reasons, even when it was difficult over my first decade here to get any kind of promotion. I stayed because I was working for a good cause, the free sharing of information and knowledge, and I didn’t have to work for some corporation with questionable values. It was also a perfect slacker job for a bookish person. I had access to books and a ton of music, two of my favorite forms of intellectual stimulation. I worked with many other Gen Xers who were artists, musicians, poets, potters, writers. The atmosphere made up for the lack of funds. I didn’t generally take my work home with me either, and still don’t. It’s a fantastic kind of job to have while pursuing things like doing radio shows as I did on WAIF, and putting effort into developing my skills as a writer, and working on getting published.

Over time I did get some promotions, and my ability to earn and make it in the world has gone up, but it hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living and now stagflation. My ability to help our own Millennial children is curbed. When I see them paying more money for rent than we ever paid for a mortgage, yeah, there is some resentment for the Boomers raking in the money off of these properties, and yeah some Gen Xers are doing that too. But a lot of that real estate is held in Boomer hands and accounts. How can are kids build a future when they struggle just to make rent. Having a slacker job and doing creative things on the side is less viable, because they are hustling to make it. When they are off work, they are stressed and the way out is into the digital world.

The huge wealth gap doesn’t help matters at all. Most of us are seeing the quality of life deteriorate year after year, and have to make choices over whether to take our dog to the vet or put our car in the shop. Meanwhile Boomers are going on cruises, going on big vacations, and those in the higher ranks are buying yachts, estates, shrinking what the rest of us have access to it, so yeah there might be some resentment there. It’s also why I will always despise such a genre of music as yacht rock

That being the case, Gen X can still be a bridge generation, as Giesea suggests. I just think that what that bridge looks like is going to be a lot different than he does. This is because of a fundamental difference in world view. Giesea says, “The postwar boomer era is ending just as AI and automation accelerate. Over the next two decades, these forces will reshape the world more profoundly than most of us are prepared for.” I disagree with him that AI and automation will have as big of an impact as he suggests, for the simple reason that the environmental resources needed to power AI are not adequate enough to sustain it. That doesn’t mean our would-be tech lords won’t try to pilfer as many of those resources as they can before they can’t. 

Yet a recent article in Fortune has shown that most corporations aren’t making anything on the money they have invested into the questionable tech. No doubt another economic bubble is forming around these LLMs and when it pops the tools people are putting so much unvetted faith in will disappear.

Until that happens though, we are going to see more and more people going off the rails of the crazy train, as Ted Gioia has pointed out in his recent assessment of AI and its disastrous impacts on mental health and the ability to even know what is real.           

 It should come as no surprise that Giesea and I disagree on the trajectory of the future. As founder of the Boyd Institute he comes from a place steeped in the industrial worlds preferred mythology, faith and belief in technological progress. Many of their project’s center around drones, automation and autonomy, space exploration and technology for statecraft. Their name comes from John Boyd, developer of the OODA loop, and while that seems like it could be a useful tool for strategy, it need not be employed towards technological advancement. The OODA loop could also be deployed for degrowth, frugality, and downshifting towards lower-tech tools that will be useful as the Boomers die out, and with them, their world of endless technological progress.

            This is where the bridge of Gen X will become important. We remember how things were done before the internet became as prevalent as it is now. Those of us lucky enough to have grandparents who grew up on farms, and put effort into their home economy, will be familiar with the way they pinched pennies and got things done on the cheap, produced some of the things they needed for their own household. We may also remember the way families stayed in touch by writing letters to each other. This was something I did when I met people around the country as a teen skateboarding in new cities on family vacations. I’d make a friend for a week and we’d become pen pals. That will be a useful skill to revive as the use of the internet becomes more and more questionable. As Josh Datko pointed out in a recent substack note, it is also a lot more secure from being surveilled. We also know how to make a mean mixtape.

The older Gen X crowd also helped build up the indie underground that was all based on analog networking. Many of those Gen Xers took direct inspiration from the hippies, from the underground newspapers, and certainly from the rock music itself. Many Boomers played a hand in developing their own underground networks in terms of the Rainbow Gathering, and the unique culture surrounding the Grateful Dead and the jam bands that followed, pulling in many a Gen Xer into their wake. Now that scene has meshed in some ways with that of traditional music, Americana and bluegrass.

The analog tools we have that helped build the underground worlds of skateboarding, punk rock, and hip-hop, and more niche scenes like noise, goth and industrial, are all useful to rebuild connection as digital culture continues to disintegrate.

All of these groups and their interests famously got mashed up into the ire spawning image of the millennial hipster who drew from all of them while being loyal to none of them. This itself can be a strength. Many a Gen Xer derided the hipster phenomenon as much as they resented the Boomer. Yet we can still be a bridge. If we let go some of our cynicism and the emotional armor of the perpetual skeptic, we can become mentors and mentees in turn. Every generation has a lot to give the ones who came before and after. Each have blind spots, each have skills and memories worth preserving and sharing.  

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