Gen X Ruined the World Too
May 14 2014
Reality Bites Screenshot via YouTube user thecultbox
If you were born in the 1990s, odds are you don’t even know what Gen X is. In short it’s your fortysomething cousin or uncle who drives a Hybrid, sports a Dinosaur Jr. t-shirt on weekends, and occasionally busts out the old hacky sack to the dulcet tunes of Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains. Gen X invented grunge, the commercially viable cousin of punk rock. They popularized Doc Martens, briefly turned MTV into a drum circle with the Unplugged series, and made indie cinema a thing. Their existential search for a cultural identity was glorified in meandering offbeat comedies and dramas set in coffee shops, record stores, minimarts, and other sites where a white twenty-something might make a comfortable if Sisyphean living while expounding bite-size philosophy and snarky one-liners. Jaded Gen X slackers nihilistically accept the machine of which they are a part, and can dissect its fundamental facile and evil nature with all the clarity and urgency of a nineteenth-century Romantic poet.
Anyone born between 1965 and 1980 is a member of Generation X, a term that was popularized by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which revolves around a group of young outsiders critically examining consumer society and Western culture. Coupland has built an entire career of dispensing drolly bleak prognostications from his vaunted Gen X perch; in 2010’s “A Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next Ten Years,” he promises: “We'll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back…You're going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought.”
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