Lost In The Generational Noise

The Films that Explain Gen X—and a love letter to Gen Z

Thanks to author Herbert Nowell for important crits and pointers on this article.

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The Insanity of What Was

If you were there, you knew.

And if you weren’t, you’d think we were crazy.

And you wouldn’t exactly be wrong, but you’d be missing the larger point:

It was crazy.

It?

Yeah. “It.”

The big, ultimate “it.”

Here’s what it looked like:

There was money everywhere, but nobody knew what to do with it, so everyone just bought shit. Lots of shit. Status-symbol shit. Gadgets. Nose candy. Top shelf clothing that lasted only a season. Plasma balls. Arcade cabinets.

Oh, and most of the money was fake, so it didn’t matter anyway.

The Fed was printing gobs of cash, just like it had during the previous decade. But instead of pouring it out in welfare subsidies, it poured it into business subsidies on the theory that doing so would control inflation and encourage growth. And, like any new strategy, it worked really well for a while, until everyone adjusted to the new rules and figured out how to game the very game-able system.

The older generation, the one that was in middle-age and held the levers of power, had spent their youth being idealists and lost in a world that was going to blow up “any minute now.” In their late twenties they figured out that life was starting to pass them by, so they started forming families and accumulating wealth in earnest, and they got very wealthy indeed.

The world, though, was still on the nuclear knife-edge.

Which made for an interesting problem:

The older generation’s youthful idealism meant that they believed wealthy old people (i.e. those north of thirty) were evil. Their entire culture was based around it. Now they were wealthy, and over-thirty, and they were in power. The best they could do to salve their guilty consciences was to blame everything they didn’t like on their ancient President with a spotty memory—the one they elected in a landslide.

They also, through innumerable stunning feats of rhetorical judo, perfected the defining morality of their generation:

Rules for thee, but not for me.

Sure, they played around with strange religions and some really impressive cults—like the multi-million dollar juggernauts that became Jamestown and Scientology—but their children were flirting with Satanism when they played Dungeons & Dragons, and that was a bridge too far.

Yes, they had their sexual revolution, but their kids were singing songs about gay blow jobs and playing around with gender-bending archetypes—that was something even the one famously gender-ambiguous pop star of their era eventually backed off from.

The political corruption in the old Democratic and Republican machines was horrific—how could they possibly not have seen that it was wrong to make alliances with the Dixiecrats and take payoffs from arms dealers and special interest groups? People of conscience should instead form lobbying firms and think tanks and non-profit NGOs to give the people a voice! They should pass laws that would encourage the right sort of behavior, not by government payouts, but by tax rebates and subsidies!

And yes, they knew, they’d screwed around with drugs when they were kids, but not these drugs. These drugs were horrible. Today’s pot was much stronger than real pot. Cocaine was for bankers—crack was just way worse and only thugs smoked it anyway. So they weren’t just gonna join the War on Drugs, they were gonna make sure that their kids’ lives and entertainment were packed to the gills with anti-drug propaganda so that nobody, anywhere, would ever touch the stuff again. Except the poor kids, who belonged in jail anyway.

And sure, they’d had all kinds of sex, but that was different. Today sex was dangerous and people had to understand that wanting to have sex with someone you weren’t married to (or at least in a committed relationship with) was exploitative, wrong, dehumanizing, and maybe even literally a kind of violence.

Sounds kinda familiar, doesn’t it?

That was what life was like forty years ago.

Well, there was one more wrinkle that actually made a big difference:

That older generation? Back then they were too new at the power game to know how to lie to us in a way that would convince us to be quiet.

But they didn’t want us there, and they wanted us to know it.

They weren’t just holding onto the reins of power and refusing to let go, like they are now.

They really didn’t want us around at all.

Our individual parents loved us (some better than others). But their generation had no place for us, even in the entry-level jobs in their companies. Our wild, impudent, ungovernable natures—hard-won by having to raise ourselves—were not welcome. And they wanted to make sure we knew it, both through constant messaging and message violence,¹ and by trying their best to keep from us our cultural inheritance (i.e. any intellectual, artistic, and spiritual traditions that pre-dated them, except for the few we were required to encounter in school) by showing us how problematic it all was.²

So when we started making our own culture—and, worse, reaching back to older models for inspiration—they threw a hissy fit. The art of our generation was dismissed as “smug” and “empty.”³ And, because we were already used to their bullshit, we simply didn’t care.

Later on they’d get better at throwing hissy fits—you’ll know some of them as “The PATRIOT Act,” “The Global Financial Crisis” and the “COVID Lockdowns.” Back then, though, Boomer hissy fits were kinda hilarious, as they were just displays of strutting superiority by people who were, at least on the point of contention, obviously and desperately lame, hypocritical, and consumed with envy for their younger counterparts.

Films that Explain a Generation

Every identity group—and this is as true for generations as it is for any other sort of social cohort—has a core set of common memories and experiences that helps define how they understand the world. As I talked about in Life Inside a Glass Box, those things which define us can imprison us or they can empower us, and often do both.

When attempting to explain their view of the world (and general vibe) to those outside their generations, Boomers will often point to the Kennedy Assassination, the 1968 summer of madness, Watergate, Vietnam, and duck-and-cover drills, but really, none of those things communicate well outside their own bubble. To understand why such events were defining, one must look deeper.

The reason the Boomers experienced those events as defining is because they grew up in an historically unique bubble-period, where an entire continent suddenly shared a formative, identity-defining experience (World War 2 and its aftermath) that coincided with the rise of mass media. Nothing like it has happened before or since, and it is unlikely that anything like it will ever happen again.

Growing up in such a world, one can be excused for being so naïve as to be shocked—SHOCKED—at discovering in one’s teens, twenties, and thirties that the world can be a cruel place filled with self-interested actors who will use deception, violence, and corruption to advance their own ends.

A person from such a world might also be excused for imagining that the world-weary cynicism of their early children (the Xers) is due to one’s own failure to wrap them in the kind of protective bubble that “all children deserve” (since we all calibrate our “shoulds” by what our “is” was where parenting is concerned), and then attempting to correct that mistake by micromanaging the lives of their younger children in order to create and enforce a similar bubble and the ignorance it produces (as happened with the Millennials).

Similarly, if I wanted to point you to the events and artworks that defined my generation, I could point at Star Wars and War Games and The Goonies and Back to the Future and a dozen others, at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Internet, at the Iranian Hostage Crisis and Iran Contra and Pablo Escobar, at Dahmer and Bundy and David Koresh, at Lewinsky’s blue dress and Pat Robertson and the Satanic Panic and the War on Drugs...but really, what would that mean? That whole litany wouldn’t tell you anything on its own,⁴ because it wouldn’t come with the context we were walking through.

So I’m not going to do that.

Instead, I’m going to try to show you what was, and is, going on under the surface for Gen X by pointing to a trio of films, two of which you may never have heard of.

These aren’t the films that defined us. We didn’t grow up on them.

Instead, these are films that the youngest of the Boomers and oldest the of the Xers made for us. They faithfully showed our experience. They let the world see us—and itself—through our own eyes. Now, they can let you see these things through our eyes.

St. Elmo’s Fire (1985)

Directed by Joel Schumacher—who also directed Falling Down and put nipples on the Batsuit because gay chic was big in the 90s—this drama follows a group of seven recent college graduates in Washington D.C. who are trying, desperately, to figure out how to grow up in a world that doesn’t want them or need them. Strewn unevenly across the social classes of the day, they self-sabotage their way to enlightenment as they find that the world they’ve been prepped for and dumped into is not a land of promise and meaning, but is instead filled with empty people desperate to drown out the noise with cocaine, money, booze, sex, and careerism, because the alternative is looking oneself in the mirror.

One by one, each of our characters are forced to look in the mirror, with varying results. The occasional present-day reactor on YouTube whom I’ve seen watch this film invariably complains about how all the characters are “terrible people,” as if we didn’t know that at the time. Of course we did—they are horrible, and desperate, and lost, just like we were. And, just like the rest of us at the time, they don’t know how to move, or who to be, while straitjacketed by their narrow inherited vision of right-and-wrong which funneled them into an empty existence. It’s a two hour session of people thrashing about in a trap until, one by one, they find their way out to one degree or another.

Zero Effect (1998)

The auteur debut of Hollywood scion Jake Kasdan, this film re-imagines the Sherlock Holmes tale A Scandal in Bohemia, setting it in then-modern Portland and Los Angeles. Daryl Zero is the world’s greatest private detective—a reclusive deductive genius who has the social skills of a three-day old Louisiana bus crash in which all passengers were killed and left to rot in the bayou heat. Zero spends his life in isolation except when he is hired to do undercover work, where, adopting the artificial persona of his undercover role, he can flourish while on vacation from himself.

Zero’s boredom is interrupted when he’s hired by a lumber magnate to locate a blackmailer. He goes undercover in the Portland gym rat community and finds the blackmailer, who has a tale of her own which adds more layers to the mystery with every new revelation. As Zero looks into her life, he finds a mirror that forces him to face the lies he uses to protect himself—he can only finally solve the mystery when he faces the truth of his own nature, feelings, and cowardice. The result is a poignant and sensitive romance buried within a hip, sarcastic, and surprisingly dark detective story.

Zero’s domineering insecurities, meanwhile, threaten to drive his only friend away—a friend who is facing his own choice between a lucrative career and marriage to the woman of his dreams.

The rocky relationship between Zero and his friend provides one of the two great points of moral tension in the story, with Zero hiding his moral cowardice behind self-righteous romantic tales of saving his clients from the plots arrayed against them, while his much-more-realistic friend, fed up with this routine, smashes his idealism, leaving Zero to face his own complicity in the monstrous acts of his high-powered clients (who are not, after all, being blackmailed because of their sterling characters).

In the end, Zero, having solved the mystery, realizes it is his own life that has been changed by the blackmailer, and that, in terms of the moral balance of the universe, he himself has had zero effect.

Fight Club (1999)

First of all, if you don’t know Fight Club, where have you been? Go watch it now, or be prepared for spoilers. This is an infinitely-memed antihero tale of an emasculated longhouse-bound consumer worker drone who wishes he could be killed in a mid-air collision just to alleviate his boredom. He finds consolation by sneaking into group therapy sessions, where he’s able to lie about who he is and cry on the shoulders of strangers, giving him a temporary release of the pain and frustration he doesn’t realize he feels.

This feminine path to meaning and connection, though, does not satisfy, and the Narrator eventually finds himself sucked into the orbit of the charismatic anti-establishmentarian Tyler Durden. He and Durden found Fight Club, an underground bare-knuckle boxing mixer where young men beat the shit out of one another, finding camaraderie and meaning through resurrecting the warrior ethic and building a brotherhood.

After getting involved with suicidal ubergoth Marla Singer, Tyler works to transform Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a revolutionary cult militia intent on bringing down the Boomer commercial establishment by destroying the credit reporting agencies and the credit card companies. The militia conspires to bomb the corporate headquarters of these companies with the help of the companies’ own staff—key members of which are part of Project Mayhem.

As the worker-bee Narrator races against time to foil Tyler’s plan, he discovers to his horror that Tyler is Mr. Hyde to his own Dr. Jekyll—the night-time anarchic projection of the frustrated, unbridled masculinity buried deep within his own psyche. In the end, he accepts his responsibility for Project Mayhem and makes a sacrifice of himself in order to end the reign of Tyler and knit back together the shards of his own soul, presiding with a newly-integrated mind over his terrorist empire with his equally-deranged lover, Marla, who holds his hand as the buildings fall.⁵

It’s easy to see how such a story has become a kind of bible for very-online frustrated young dudes, but, as with these other Gen X films, it is not exactly what it appears on the surface.

In fact, if you tilt your head and look at them the right way, all three of these films tell essentially the same story.

The Uniting Themes

So how do these three films “explain” Generation X?

Despite having almost nothing in common where tone, or pacing, or plot are concerned, all three of these evoke a weirdly similar feeling on an almost subliminal level. They are all Nietzschean “abyss” films—the characters are staring into the gaping maw of nihilism, and trying desperately to avoid falling in. That abyss has an outward face and an inward face. When looking outward, it sees the spiritually empty world with a used-up culture that Gen X found itself bequeathed. And on the inward face, it finds a yawning pit of dislocation and pain fueled by the desire to belong, yet which conformity does nothing to ameliorate.

And within that abyss we find a certain core set of themes.

Crass Materialism

All three films are caustic in their view of what my childhood church would call “worldly success”—wealth and power and especially respectability—because the movies take place in a world where such things are most readily accumulated by those willing to steal them and abuse them instead of those who work for them and/or use them wisely.

The Narrator in Fight Club is a mindless functionary in a soulless car company that balances human life against the cost of a seat belt recall—and, up until he first stands up for himself, he’s an active and willing participant in the machine that eats lives for lunch, because it pays for his Ikea addiction.

Gregory Stark in Zero Effect uses his inherited wealth and entitlement (and obvious business savvy) to rape, murder, and buy the silence of the witnesses against him.

Alec in St. Elmo’s Fire chases success by selling out his principles, getting his friends jobs with the Korean mafia, and cheating on his girlfriend, while in the same film the character Jules embraces “fake it till you make it” to the point where it nearly costs her her life.

The trappings of the good life, it would seem, are not enough to make life good.

Self-Loathing and Self-Delusion

At the heart of all three films is also a tension between one’s self-image and the reality of one’s own character.

Kirby in St. Elmo’s Fire thinks himself mature and sophisticated, but he discovers through his journey of romantic obsession that he’s just an entitled, ashamed, and cowardly little boy who only finds self-respect when he lets go of his romantic aspirations (this dynamic is mirrored in several of the other characters’ journeys).

The Narrator in Fight Club is so filled with self-loathing that he creates an alter ego called Tyler Durden who can help him LARP as a revolutionary until he finds the courage to step into the role himself.

Daryl Zero in Zero Effect fancies himself a god of rational detachment, but discovers that he is, in reality, a walking pile of wounds who is desperate for another human to see him for who he really is. Being truly seen will show him that he’s a real person—but only if he has the courage to show parts of himself that he tries to pretend aren’t there.

While heroes in more traditional films get to grow into their aspirations, and in 21st century films often find out that their dreams of being the chosen one are not dreams at all, the characters in these films (an in other Gen X films) do not get to escape their worst selves. They must face their weaknesses and/or their darkness, and reap the consequences. They are, invariably, plagued by a certain level of lameness, whether that lameness is played for drama as in St. Elmo’s Fire, or laughs in Zero Effect, or as darkly humorous horror in Fight Club. And, most importantly, they know it. No ego gets out alive—all must eventually face their limitations and sins without hope of absolution.

Which makes sense for a generation that, by dint of demography, had no hope of saving the world by any means other than saving themselves.

Relativism and Respectability

“Fuck damnation, man, and fuck redemption! We are God’s unwanted children? So be it!”

—Tyler Durden

All three films also exhibit an astonishing contempt for the values of the civilization in which they’re set. It is hard to leave the theater (or the couch) after viewing them without the suspicion that the world they show—which is not all that different from the world in which we live every day—is empty and soulless, having traded its ancient birthright for a bowl of lentils.⁶

In St. Elmo’s Fire, both careerism and the family-pressure to do things “like we’ve always done them” for no other reason than that they’re traditional are shown to be wanting. Not because careers or families or tradition are bad in-and-of-themselves (indeed, by the end of the film the characters largely make their peace with all three), but because when such things are done without risk, and when they are done to fulfill the expectations of others, they lose their ability to impart meaning. That which is done only because social pressures demand it is not often done with the commitment and focus required to make that thing meaningful.

In Fight Club, every value of modernity—consumerism, self-improvement, peaceableness, conformity, meekness, careerism, and respectability—is measured and found wanting, as all of them form the teeth of a trap that emasculates the Narrator (and his friends) and turns human life into something safe, dull, and slavish.

In Zero Effect, the very notion of there being a right side of history—or even of the moment—comes under fire in the central two philosophical moments of the film:

1. In justifying her vigilante actions in extorting Zero’s client, the blackmailer says in a quiet and indomitable voice “I just do what I gotta do…I have to try to feel right,” suggesting that she is clawing her way through a moral jungle, using her conscience as her only guide.

2. Zero, meanwhile, is confronted by his best friend for his claim of being the good guy in the morally dark world of his power-abusing clients: “What are you talking about?! There aren’t any good guys! You realize that, don’t you? I mean, you realize that there aren’t ‘evil guys’ and ‘innocent guys?’ It’s just a bunch of guys!”

Modernity, in other words, is a lie. The world we live in has weaponized both virtue and vice to keep us chasing our own tails so intensely that we can’t slow down, make our own decisions, and take ownership of our own lives.

“[We are] working jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need.”
—Tyler Durden

The “social standards” we’re encouraged to worship and conform to so that we can all work together, in the end, seem to only really work for a few. The rest may go through the motions, but the out-of-control isolation, consumerism, and status-seeking shows us that merely “fitting in” is not enough.

Every time a character in one of these films finds respectability in their accustomed role, they do so at the expense of their conscience, their satisfaction, and their self-respect. This is true whether those standards are those expected by family, by mass media, by career, or by internalized romantic aspiration.

It’s a theme which resonates still in our era where the gap between “social standards” and “a life worth living” can feel cavernously wide, and ever-changing. The “Karen” class, who enforce social standards, can now leverage virality to supercharge their cultural scolding. This class flourishes in a technological environment that unleashes their worst attention-seeking censorious tendencies, and yet the benefit the rest of us might reap from their behavior (a more stable, norms-driven culture we can navigate) never seems to materialize because their priorities keep chanigng.⁷ All three of these films exhibit bottomless contempt for the gap between respectability and meaning, and sympathy for the lost souls swallowed by it.

Masculinity and Fatherhood

The Boomers—as can be seen by reading the memoirs and literature of the period (as opposed to the glowy aspirational propaganda that broadcast to their television screens)—grew up without much in the way of good fathers. Their parents lived through World War 2 and wanted, more than anything else, to pretend that the world was now a good and happy place. Fathers were present, but were often much more concerned with maintaining the social image of the family—and of escaping its responsibilities through workaholism—than they were with participating in it.

Gen X, on the other hand, were the children of the Boomer divorce epidemic—the lucky among us grew up with emotionally absent fathers. A great many of us grew up with no fathers at all, or with a cycling stable of potential step-fathers. This left the bulk of the generation trying to reinvent both masculinity and femininity from scratch (which is why we, too, had our period of performative gender ambiguity).

Both sexes depend upon their fathers for orientation in the world. As my friend Holly Math Nerd pointed out recently, we all have an intuitive sense that mother-love is obligatory, while father-love is optional. Mothers are bonded to us by virtue of biology—we come from their bodies, we are fed from their bodies, and we spend the first couple years more-or-less hanging off of them. Our relationships with our mothers is automatic. If a mother doesn’t love her children, it is easy to assume something is wrong with her. After all, how could a person not love the child who is literally a piece of her own self?⁸

A father, on the other hand, must choose to build relationship with his children. When a father chooses to connect with his child, the child experiences tremendous validation. When fathers consistently pick their own egos, careers, lovers, hobbies, and friend-groups over their children, the children pay the price of deep, yawning insecurity. This goes double for those abandoned by their fathers outright. A friend of mine once wrote a short semi-autobiographical children’s book about a girl whose father was in the Navy, and who kept a map on the wall tagged with all the ports from which her father had sent her postcards. The story ends with the girl wondering what marvels such places must contain if they were so interesting that her father loved seeing them more than he loved seeing her.

On top of that, the tension between mothers (whose instincts push them to protect their children even when protection isn’t necessarily healthy) and fathers (whose instincts push them to champion independence and risk, and take pride in their children’s success in achieving things for themselves) is essential to a child’s ability to healthily enter and survive in a dangerous world, working their way outwards from the nest in stages like a starling taking to wing.

This tension is far less likely to exist in families riven by divorce.

Thus, at the bottom of the abyss in all three of these films are the failures of fathers who, whether they loved their children or not, couldn’t find it within themselves to do their jobs.

The Narrator’s father in Fight Club, though absent, spoke to him regularly on the phone, giving him instructions on “what to do next” every time he passed a milestone: graduate high school, graduate college, get a good job, get married, and so on. In his despair at not understanding why any of these things mattered, the Narrator declares “I can’t get married. I’m a thirty year-old boy!” And then he replies to himself, as Tyler, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really what we need.”

Daryl Zero of Zero Effect spends his days in isolation playing at being a rock star, consoling himself with the earned (but empty) ego salve of being the greatest private detective in the world. Yet when he finds himself emotionally defenseless before the emotional brazenness of the blackmailer, he sums up the courage to reveal to her—in barely a whisper—the wound at the heart of his egoism and isolation: “My father was an evil abusive man. He killed my mother in her sleep, then slit his own wrists. I was thirteen.”

The blackmailer herself reveals that she was the pawn in a desperate criminal game between her biological father and her adoptive father, both of whom were absent from her life, and that she’s entered their dangerous world in order to show herself that she’s made of sterner and yet more decent stuff than either of them. And yet, it is clear that, at bottom, she is as lost as Zero.

The women in St. Elmo’s Fire all orbit empty fathers. Leslie attaches herself to a man who she knows is bad for her because he reminds her of her absent father. Jules pretends to work in a high-powered banking position while secretly spending her every daylight hour sitting at the bedside of her much-hated abusive and comatose stepmother, hoping that she will awaken before she dies so that Jules can ask her “Why did my father hate me so much?” Wendy comes from a loving family whose father nonetheless can’t bear the thought of pushing her out of the nest, or is indeed capable of seeing her as anything other than the adorably immature scion of a successful DC family.

The latter two of these women also orbit Billy, a charismatic lost soul desperate to be a good husband to a woman he knocked up in college and a good father to their infant daughter, yet he nonetheless can’t find a way to settle down in a life with a wife he clearly hates to fulfill his responsibility to his daughter, by whom he he is clearly intimidated. It is his desire to be a better father to his daughter than his father was to him that drives him into a spiral of self-destruction that takes his family with him. To escape his own trap and free the various women from his destructive influence, he must let go of his desire to use them to earn his own esteem and leave town, allowing another man—one that actually loves his wife and knows how to be a good father—to step into the role.

The Dialectical Self

The Hegelian Dialectic has been getting a lot of bad press lately in certain political circles, and for good reason. The notion that history and politics move in a particular direction as the semi-conscious universe tries to resolve the tensions within itself by moving from thesis to antithesis to synthesis is not only obviously wrong to honest students of history, it is little more than a thinly-veiled quest to gain academic respectability for what is, at root, a form of witchcraft.

The problem with Hegel is that he was a very poor philosopher…but a very good literary theorist. He spotted the fundamental human psychological mechanisms at work in tragedy⁹ and in self-actualization, which is where his Dialectic really shines.

Humans grow from being children who are under the control of and on the team of their parents (thesis), to being in open rebellion against their parents as they attempt to differentiate and find their own way in the world (antithesis), to finding that their apple (their true nature and selves) have not fallen as far from their parents’ tree as perhaps they might wish, and learning to accept that difficult reality and make the best of it (synthesis).

The facing of the undesirable within oneself, and finding a way to make peace with it instead of forever rebelling against it, is the essence of maturity. In all three films, every character who has a journey (including some of the villains) must go through this dialectic-of-the-self in order to win the right to their own life in the end.

When you must carve out a niche in a world that has no place for you, there is no final “being,” no happy-ever-after end-of-history; there is only the ongoing struggle to develop your character, to become more truly who you are, and to embody the qualities you admire. While one does grow up, one discovers that each phase of life has new demands, new responsibilities, and new powers associated with it—and those new things require a fresh reckoning with parts of the self that one might not care to face. In this sense, one never quite wins free of the burden to “come of age.”

And, in a world where parents were not parents—in the Gen X world that was mostly because they were absent, while in Gen Z’s world it’s mostly because they were well-intentioned jailers—one must find or invent role models, because damn few good ones were provided for us.

“Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers failed, what does that tell you about God?”

—Tyler Durden

Gen Z and The Future

A strange commonality unites Gen Z and Gen X:

There aren’t enough of us to matter.

We came after the Baby Boom—mostly the children of the early-breeding Boomers and the late-breeding Silents. You came after the Millennials, and you’re mostly the children of the early-breeding Xers and a handful of VERY late-breeding Boomers.

Like us in our early twenties, you’re feeling the first flush of political power and potency.

Like us in our twenties, you’re in a world of transparent and feeble dishonesty.

And, like us in our twenties, you’re just starting to suspect that, because of your small numbers, you’re never going to be politically important as a group. If you’re going to make a mark on your civilization, you have to either become a good party loyalist, or you must resign yourself to a risky life of working outside the system.

A lot of you are angry with us, because some of us were your parents (and many of those parents made a pretty poor showing of themselves).

But if you can see the world we grew up in—which wasn’t all that different from yours where it counts—and the way we flailed about in it trying to find our way, you might just be able to plunder some of our best-kept secrets and improve upon them, to make your lives a little—or a lot—better than we made ours at your age.

Because, despite some big differences between our generations, we’ve got a lot more in common than you think.

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1. i.e. violence that sends a message, such as “making an example” of somebody.

2. Chronicled well in Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a history of the advancement of problematization from the 1960s-1980s.

3. For example, the film review here starting at 5:36

4. Billy Joel proved that in his Boomer version of that same list: We Didn’t Start the Fire.

5. Fun fact: I first watched this film the night of September 10, 2001. Waking up and watching the news the next morning was quite the surreal experience.

6. I had to sneak a deep culture reference in here to make a point. Sorry about that. If you don’t get the reference, read Genesis chapter 25.

7. There’s a whole article worth of notes on this phenomenon in my pile—become a supporter and send a comment if you want to move it up my priority list!

8. This is not to suggest that maternal abandonment doesn’t create its own set of problems—it does—only that these problems were less prominent for Gen Xers than were those presented by paternal abandonment.

9. i.e. The fundamental nature of tragedy is that good things are sometimes mutually exclusive, so we tell tragic stories to cope with the fundamental tragedy of living in a world where all good things cannot exist at the same time/