Generation X is the first generation to master the art of walking down the stairs by climbing them. Everybody knows the door to the basement leads to the attic. So what are you doing actually engaging the kid who's sticking his tongue out at you across the Jr. High cafeteria? You didn't even engage that kid in Jr. High.
Why start now?
This post lasted less than half an hour, but I made a screenshot of it so I don't have to write it again. I hated the phrase "Gen X" when it came out, and wasn't impressed by Generation X, the self-consciously unmemorable book by Douglas Coupland. All I remember from the book was that I felt like someone was trying to make me feel like a character in Trainspotting, and that the way it was printed on floppy, landscape-oriented suede was intentionally appealing in a way that was transparently unappealing. I preferred scouring used bookstores for Bukowski, Kerouac, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I scraped inspiration from Blake, Rimbaud, and Corso like a fry cook will scrape black grease from underneath the deep fryer at the end of the shift. But I choked down the literary pigeonhole eventually. And in time I warmed to the "Gen X" tag. To the point that now, I like it.
I don't care about it, but I like it.
When a comedian gets on stage and solicits laughs by repeating the trope "Gen X doesn't care," I don't laugh. Not because it isn't funny, but because it's a Pavlovian trigger employed to elicit a feeling of camaraderie, or school spirit (or something), a process which I loathe. To laugh at the observation that I don't care, would be to care that I don't care, and therefore care. The only acceptable Gen-X response to self-referential middle-aged humor is to see a homeless joke in a Pavlovian dog costume, begging for my laughter on the sidewalk.
Shall I give this dog a penny, or kick it in the face?
Whatever I do, I will resist the yuppie singularity, and the crushing social gravity within, and stay off of TikTok at all costs. If you are tempted to forget yourself, remember a time when you were cool, and "Trend" was a noun to be avoided. Feed all the homeless dogs you want. Many of the jokes indeed are funny. But don't "rise up" in a manufactured social-engineering experiment for (against?) kids. Rise down. Don't be ridiculous. You were cool once.
Age like it.
