Gen X is The Last Generation of Adults

A response to J. S. Kasimir

I said I wasn't going to continue posting every Friday like clockwork. But I had a sense that this announcement of mine was buried at the end of my last post; and Kasimir recently lamented the growing childishness of adults in our society:

A World of Lost Boys

This is a lot of what's on my mind when I poke around in the ideas of historians who write about the rise and fall of civilizations—the decline of civilization has a very human cost. It’s hard for me to fully describe, but blended with the disdain and humor I have for the present milieu, there’s also a poignant sympathy for the struggle people around me have with their own immaturity, hypersensitivity, and general emotional weakness. I doubt so many people are infantile because they want to be. Anxiety and depression are hard to live with, and they’ve both become more prevalent over the past fifty years.¹

When I was as a teenager, I regretted that I hadn’t been born later, so that I could have grown up amidst the amazing games that were just coming out—I wanted to come of age after the technological explosion had reached full fruition. But now that I can see where things have gone, I realize what I loved was at the edge of something awful. And ultimately when I look at what things were like beforehand, I think it turned out that hardship, and particularly boredom, were a kind of Chesterton's Fence that we pulled down without even imagining there might be consequences.

So dear readers, here's a quick reply to Kasimir, and see if you find it entertaining:

The last Generation to Grow Up was Gen X

One of the defining characteristics of my generation is toughness. We were latchkey kids who grew up amidst crime waves and AIDS, which at the time had everybody pretty spooked. Life sucks and then you die more or less encapsulated the spirit of the time. But ultimately we came through the disillusioning post-Boomer years with a resilience that served us very well. Despite the whole cynicism and suicide mentality, by now Gen X has as good or even better mental health than Boomers. What I think was most critical for us in Gen X, particularly compared to later generations, is the way our background was still more or less grounded in what people used to call the “real world.”

Everyone living in Gen X and beforehand anticipated life in a physical environment where entertainment, deeds, and accomplishments—everything that was worthwhile—commonly carried an element of risk. Everyone afterward transitioned to a world of online safe spaces, helicopter parenting, and cell phone addiction. Millennials were hit particularly hard with a parenting fad that specifically pushed self esteem, but while Gen Z escaped this Narcissism trap, after growing up under Millennials in a culture that was already broken, degraded, and infantile, they show a lot of anxiety.

I'm not sure why COVID didn't wake Gen Z up and give them a stronger spine. I'd have thought, naively, that the minor hardship of quarantines and school closures would have given them a situation similar to mine in which to flourish. But I think the trouble was that while Gen X was jumping fences, climbing trees, and breaking into abandoned houses to smoke out at night, Gen Z was stuck at home, glued to their phones, while everyone on and offline panicked and argued about whether masks were a good idea.

It's weird to think that the kind of shenanigans we were always involved with in the 80's was actually beneficial for us, since we learned early on that you'd better not tell the grown ups what kind of mischief you were getting into. Overall the level of mischief I personally got up to was pretty minor—I tried soft drugs a few times, and that was about it—but my friends and I were always wandering around at night on the school rooftops, cutting across private property, or getting cornered by thugs and then talking our way out (which worked because we were conspicuously armed, or because we were able to make it to the vicinity of an ally who could tip the scales in our favor).

Can you even imagine Millennials or Gen Z teens wandering around barefoot with sticks or kitchen knives saying “back off” to a bunch of stoners who have them cornered? Can you even imagine Millennials or Gen Z teens sparring with metal pipes behind 7-11 at night for fun? (Yes we did this, yes it was stupid, my pinky swelled up to three times its normal size, and yes I learned not to do this anymore, or at least, not without padding the metal pipes.) Have you even known Millennials or ordinary Gen Z males gather around their friends' garage and pummel a punching bag? Sheesh, they scarcely ride bikes or skateboards anymore.

I could tell any number of stories about life in the Before Time, but one sticks out in particular. It’s called:

The Story Of Apple Pie And The Satanists

So listen, I was walking home from playing video games at an arcade, right?² It was full dark when I left, and the walk was about three miles through the suburbs. As I was passing through a park, I heard a growl from a copse of pines to my left. At first I wasn’t sure what I’d heard, as the breeze carried in the sound of traffic from a nearby expressway, and the area beneath the pines was swathed in deep shadow.

But the growl was repeated, and it seemed human in origin, so logically I growled back and strode into the darkness to see who it was.

It turned out to be three satanists—devil worshipers, mind you, not the intellectual LaVeyan kind, but good old I love Satan Satanists with long hair dyed black—who promptly informed me in tense tones that I was lucky I had growled back, because “otherwise we’d have jumped you.” I took it for drug-addled bluster, and they definitely had a lot of advice about drugs; they suggested that if I was having trouble hiding drugs in my home, I should build a Satanic altar and hide my drugs there, as “your parents won’t go near it.”

They also had a few theological interests; they spoke about how if Jesus Christ appeared before them, they would drop him with a punch, but if a demon appeared, they would punch him, and then they would run, but they would be dead. Why they thought Jesus would be weaker than a demon if God was the originator of the universe, and demons were created beings, I’m still not really sure, because questioning them on this point didn’t really seem to return particularly lucid explanations.

Eventually the hour grew late, the conversation wound down, and I felt as though I had mostly explored the depths of their philosophy, so I finished my walk home.

As for what happened to the satanists?

Well, no one really knows. But in my more wistful moments, when I come upon a crudely drawn symbol of evil spray-painted onto an overpass, or find myself on an evening walk and come upon a dark line of trees brooding beneath the stars, I like to think that those guys all worshiped Satan together happily ever after, until the forces of destiny saw them working in mindless drudgery at McDonalds, or serving time at local correctional facilities. The End.

And that Really Was The End

That may not have been the most enlightening conversation I’ve ever had. Life before blogs was, well… the way it was. Yet I have searched the wide Internet for decades without finding anyone as uninhibitedly bizarre as those three people—the closest I’ve come are raving political extremists, but nowadays it seems like their values always blend together with the edges of the mainstream Overton Window. And on some level, possibly because none of us had any fear of being cancelled in those days, and possibly because of the tinge of genuine physical danger that accompanied the interaction, I feel very lucky to have had a chance to talk to those crazy Satanists.

And I would never have met them if it weren’t for video games.

So you can imagine that what really saddens me is the thought that, in actuality, my beloved video games are embedded somewhere within this matrix of infantilization and cultural decline—that the home entertainment system of the late 20th century was the gateway to the world of the 21st century kidult.

After my parents’ divorce, I moved over and over again. My childhood was a long stretch of church, school, more church, and long hours of lonely solitude. Before I could legally drive, it was pretty difficult to meet up with friends; early electronics were a window into something better than the limited reading, the videos I’d already seen over and over again, and the tepid, parentally approved television shows that were available at the time. It was nearly impossible for Boomers to grasp the idea that playing or designing video games could be a meaningful, creative, aesthetically uplifting experience. I loved the classic arcade, ATARI 2600, NES, and early computer games. It’s true that in general they weren’t anywhere near as good as modern games, though there were some titles that have really never been eclipsed. It’s hard to get a hold of a lot of the old pinball classics, but emulators do an excellent job of recreating the experience of Gen X home games—if you’re a gamer unfamiliar with these titles, you should at least take a look at Castlevania I, the Atari 2600 Star Raiders, and Death Sword for the Amiga:

But I also think, often, about what video games at home did to society. At first, when video games appeared on the scene, they were amazing technological marvels, and everybody would gather at the arcade to play, because that's where the games were. Then later on, as the field advanced, graphics and sound improved, developers became more ambitious, and—critically—prices dropped enough for people to own gaming consoles of their own. So everybody would gather at one person's house, because that's where the games were.

But by the 16-bit era, everybody had their own personal game system. Nobody gathered. Nobody took turns. Everybody just sat around oohing and ahing at the amazing graphics, and that was the end of shared experiences of social give and take within a real, physical world.

People blame cell phones. Heck, I blame cell phones. But the way had already been paved by the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo.

And somehow, some way, looking back, it seems that even video games were, ultimately, a part of the decay.

1. Horwitz, A. V. (2010). How an age of anxiety became an age of depression. The Milbank Quarterly, 88(1), 112-138.

2. Probably Mortal Kombat, IDK