Ode to Generation X
Now in our 40s and 50s, we’re too old to be young, but too young to be old.
There’s a lot of content on social media these days (at least in my feed) about Generation X—those who were born between 1965 and 1980—and how gritty, self-reliant, skeptical and misunderstood our generation is.
Image: NapoliRoma
As a Gen Xer who grew up in Honolulu in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s been reassuring to see how similarly aged people have had similar experiences, even if we came of age thousands of miles from each other. When I meet fellow Gen Xers, I feel a bond, like we were cut from the same acid-washed cloth. While we may have had nothing in common back then, we’re now completely aligned in this confusing era of existence.
One influencer, @alex.abrandt, who posts Reels and other Instagram content focused on Gen X life, recently had this to say about why so many of us in our late 40s and 50s are feeling discombobulated in the current AI- and TikTok-driven world: “We grew up without phones and turned out fine (mostly). We sent our first email in our twenties, at work, terrified of the send button. We faxed things. Google, it was not an option. We learned every job before LinkedIn, Google or YouTube tutorials existed. We just figured it out. We are the last generation that remembers work before the internet, and we STILL adapted to every wave since. … And here’s the crisis nobody’s naming: We’re the most experienced people in every room and the first line in every restructure. We are not young potential anymore. We’re sandwiched.”
Google’s AI came up with this one-sentence summary: “Generation X faces a heavy mix of financial stress, midlife caregiving demands, and career burnout as they enter middle age and approach retirement.”
Geez.
I graduated from high school in 1985, when chunky IBM computers were appearing in school libraries, but they were curiosities that “brains” gravitated toward. We went to the library to research and write reports, scouring books found in the card catalog. We used typewriters, and if we had to make an edit, we used Liquid Paper, sometimes a lot of it.
When I was starting out as a newspaper reporter covering town meetings for the Shoreline Times in Guilford, Connecticut, I used a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 “laptop,” if you can call it that. I transmitted my stories via a nearby pay phone using “cuppers.” Sometimes, I had to wait upward of an hour for stories to go through. I felt so high-tech mastering this clunky machinery.
A few years later, at a much larger media company, we all had desktop computers. Then the internet arrived and email followed, along with smart phones, wi-fi and all of the other technologies that are now ubiquitous. While I always kept up with the latest in tech and gadgets (I waited in line at the Kāhala Mall Apple Store for the first-generation iPhone), and got on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram early, I’ve been feeling the pain of being too old to be young and too young to be old. It’s like being on a treadmill and running comfortably, but then suddenly, it speeds up, and you’re clutching the handles to stay on.
Plus, I like a lot of things from the past that are being discarded or deemed old-fashioned, and I don’t like a lot of things that have taken over. I’m finding myself asking frequently, are we advancing and is life getting better? Or are we just adopting without evaluating the merits of an advancement?
I know this sounds like something an old person would say. And yes, I don’t care! (Gen X is notoriously obstinate.) It’s just how I’ve been feeling lately: nostalgic for the past—yet not wanting to go back in time—and wary of the future. Anyway, thank you for indulging my musings this month, and to all my fellow Gen Xers out there, I’m with you.
Diane Seo is the editorial director of HONOLULU Magazine.
