Growing Up (Falling Down)

The challenge of the "senior year" that wraps up the four years of GenXmania in 1995 is trying to give some narrative sense to the downward spiral of the hype. The media is a fickle beast, and it's as if they had used up its supply of shallow stereotypes, oversimplified generalizations and empty prognostications. Trends -- particularly those based in a bunch of tenuously connected assumptions -- are bound to fade.

That the books dissing Xers -- such as those by Sacks and Rosen -- continued to come out after the clock struck 12 on the media obsession of all things GenX can be played two ways. On the one hand, it shows that the stereotypes became part of a lasting body of thought. On the other, it challenges the idea of doing a neat starting point in 1991 and a clean end point in 1995. We could argue that those who continued to try to sell books with X stereotypes in the years since really never "got" X, as Coupland said of so many people when he wrote the "obituary" for the hype.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, Coupland wanted to kill the monster he createdwhen he wrote an essay titled "Generation X'd" for Details magazine in 1995 (although it's quite possible he also wanted to market his new book Microserfs). "And now I'm here to say X is over," Coupland said at the conclusion of the piece. Along the way, he adds additional fuel to the generational warfare angle, saying when boomers felt "pummeled by the recession and embarrassed by their own compromised 60s values," the older generation "began transferring their collective darkness onto the group threatening to take the spotlight." In the end, he posited that the hype was empty and based on a false notion. The whole commotion showed that everyone missed the point, he explained, as "marketers and journalists never understood that X is a term that defines not a chronological age but a way of looking at the world." Put another way, if you ever said you were a member of Generation X, perhaps you never were.

Aiding and abetting this attempted murder was New York Times Style section writer John Marchese. He connected dotted lines to try to outline the corpse. He noted that one of the generation's most potent political machines, the organization named Lead or Leave, had chosen the latter option, closing its Washington headquarters (although this was at least in small part due to mismanagement). Generation X magazines were no longer licenses to print money, and movies wrapped around this once-overexposed demographic flickered to a near standstill, Marchese added. St. Martin's Press Executive Editor James Fitzgerald, who inked Coupland and published the book that gave the generation its dubious handle, concurred that the Generation X phenomenon could now be filed under "history." "Everything gobbles itself up in the media now," he told Marchese. "At least this got four years."

To paraphrase Social Distortion, it'd been four years and a thousand tears and look at the mess I'm in. A novel, a film and a musical trend had spawned a thousand misunderstandings, marketing campaigns and manufactured "facts." But how do we get out of here?

I guess somewhere in here we can finally graduate Jenn X, our mythical and/or symbolic student. I'm thinking of looking for a good commencement speech -- or a few speeches to lift ideas from -- among those delivered by notables in 1995. May not be that hard. Newspapers or magazines often print roundups of snippets of speeches by newsmakers, so maybe I can work backward to find more of those speeches online or elsewhere. It's a vague notion until I do some research ... but the idea of commencement, the generational hype ceasing and all of us getting on with our lives, is a tempting way to wrap it up.

And what of actual real-world events? The recession had lifted at last. The Xers who were unemployed -- simply because there weren't many opportunities in the early '90s -- finally could put their degrees to use in professional position, not mere McJobs. A 1995 Forbes piece rebranded us as "the most entrepreneurial generation in American history." The Meredith Bagbys of the world had the ammunition of successful Xer role models to tout to the world.

Collectively, we were seen (by society) as either physically or symbolically moving out of our family's basement, cutting our hair and trading in flannel shirts for business suits. Magazines whose glossy fronts were previously darkened by worries over slacking youth were now graced by the members of the same generation becoming instant IPO millionaires getting ready to take their private helicopter to their next startup. The old Xer stereotypes dissolving, the media rushed to a younger cohort – the curiously named "Generation Y" – for a new easy way to fill news holes with baseless trend pieces.

Was it over then? Is it over now?

Or did it ever exist?

That's why I plan to write some manner of epilogue, yet it keeps me wondering what I'll put in the "senior year" section and what to save for what we could call the "post-graduate section."

Wrapping it all up in a tidy bowl will be tough. It may, in some way, resemble the following, which I used to wrap up a thesis-proposal project in my Historiography class:

Societies enjoy looking back, particularly when the view ahead is not so pretty, so it is only a matter of time before all things X return to vogue in a tidal wave of nostalgia and navel-gazing. For that reason, prudence dictates that we remember and chronicle accurately the four years of feeding frenzy that represented the heyday of Generation X. Its future remains unwritten – whether it will become The Greatest Generation or The Lost Generation is a judgment that is decades away – but the time is ripe to write about its past, while cutting through all of the hype, the false stereotypes, and the misrepresentations in pop culture. Perhaps this can also provide a lesson that we not typecast future generations and box them in through reductionism, since "X" never really marked the spot for this generation.