The beauty of writing about Generation X is that you can start off by positing that as a generation, they're all skeptical and mistrustful of institutions, so when someone says, "I doubt the veracity of many of your premises," you can say, "SEE? SKEPTICAL."
And yet, here I am doubting many of the points made in "Generation X Gets Really Old: How Do Slackers Have a Midlife Crisis?" The point where I said, "Oh, come on" was right here:
It’s about time, he says, for Xers to acknowledge limits and step up to the plate. “These Xers spending their lives with this sardonic view, never taking anything that’s happening in public at face value, but always to find the failing, that expresses a bigger problem with X — they are always outsiders,” he says. “These boomer CEOs say that they are maturing to the extent that they should be heading into leadership roles, but they simply don’t want to accept responsibility to the bigger community.“
How fascinating. Please do tell that to the Gen Xers like Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Mark Andreessen (Netscape, LoudCloud), Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google), Shawn Fanning (Napster), Chad Hurley & Jawed Karin (YouTube), Elon Musk & Peter Thiel (PayPal), Stewart Butterfield & Caterina Fake (Flickr), Ben & Mena Trott (MovableType & Typepad), Brad Fritzpatrick (LiveJournal), Linux Torvalds (Linux), Brian Behlendorf (Apache, Mozilla) ...
I could go on but I think the point is clear.Nobody should be surprised that the same people who brought you DIY culture and zines are -- very broadly speaking -- big into disintermediation and disruption. Entire industries are reconfiguring as the result of Gen Xers who were big into removing middle men.(This has an unpleasant side effect -- in the last recession, clerical and admin jobs got slashed and they're not coming back.)
If "being a generation that came into adulthood during a recession creating its own industries that are worth millions of dollars" is not stepping up to the plate, I would like to know what is. If striving for work-life balance and being pretty happy about how they're doing it is not being an adult, then what is?
And it's not like Gen X stepped out of philanthropy or public policy. Take a gander at the MacArthur Fellows program some time, the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award winners or the Ashoka USA fellows.
My guess is that the people who like finger-wagging at other generations are torqued because Gen X apparently isn't paying homage to prior generations' legitimate institutions. Per this part of the piece:
If they are still with us, many of the great artists and thinkers of our generation have withdrawn. We barely hear from them. If they are active, like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Meshell Ndegeocello or Dave Eggers, they have carved out their own, highly individualistic places, but in many ways all but retreated from the public sphere. Naomi Wolf is writing about her vagina. (In contrast, other generations’ public intellectuals – Mailer, Scorsese, Bruce Springsteen, Susan Sontag, William Buckley, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem – helped question assumptions, steer tastes and cultural beliefs.)
Ignoring for a moment the fact that hip-hop was excluded from that list entirely, which is deeply problematic for a whole slew of other reasons, ignoring for a moment the fact that there are still tons of Gen X artists who won't STFU, let's dissect the notion that Gen X's "public intellectuals" -- a term I fervently hope can be broadened beyond "my iTunes playlist of cool tunes 1990-1999 plus my one semester of women's studies" -- aren't out there.
Because I'd dearly love to know what Ira Glass is doing over at This American Life. Or Jill Lepore over at the New Yorker. Or any one of a bunch of people on TED talks. Or even the roundtable-type shows on IFC where directors, writers and actors dissect the nature of storytelling at this point in culture. People are still chewing on ideas, honing their arguments through conversation, tossing out ideas that take hold in popular imagination. They just have many, many more channels of distribution. There is no need to kowtow to a gatekeeper at an old publication or conclave when you can just make what you need. See also: disruption and disintermediation.
The one benefit to reading the Salon piece -- and I do recommend it, because a little skeptical disagreement is good for the mental calisthenics -- is that it's reminded me of all the good writing about Generation X, however intentional or unintentional it was.
Start with Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture by Kaya Oakes, read the early Thomas Frank stuff (Commodify Your Dissent especially) and then tackle Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic by Daniel Harris, and wrap up with Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarn and Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music by Greg Prato. I really recommend the last two, because the we-were-there stories do a beautiful job of explaining why Gen Xers decided to invent their own media, their own philanthropies and their own industries.
And then go read my pal Mat's "Generation X doesn't want to hear it." Because this Gen Xer really doesn't.
