I'm turning 40 this summer, and looking back on life as the very last of Generation X (1961-1981), I haven't always felt 100% a part of the forgotten "middle child" generation. Squeezed between the loud and proud Boom Generation and the super-special important Millennial Generation, I know what I'm not. But in an era of identity politics, sometimes it's hard to know what I really am either.
That's why my life, and that of many on the border between Millennials and Xers, is kind of a mix tape: a special blend of old and new, a bridge between analog and digital, and a snapshot of the moment when change translated into difference that only we will remember. Some people say it's the same for everyone, and that's why social theories like the generational saeculum are bogus. I would say the opposite: it actually proves them correct, if you can take the long view.
JUST PUSH 'PLAY'
In the summer of 1981, a full-time music television channel launched in New Jersey, signaling the end of radio as the dominant method of music consumption. For kids like me at the tail end of Generation X, we've never known a world without MTV. As a child, I vaguely remember records right before they were replaced with cassette tapes. As a young teenager, we got CDs, and in college we traded MP3s on our computers (thanks to Napster). Then after college there was the iPod and Zune. Now we have streaming, Spotify, Pandora, and podcasts, but of all these, none quite beats the cassette tape.
Cassettes were the most versatile of the these. They were easy to record on. You could press that tiny red circle on your stereo and copy a favorite song from the radio or a CD. If you had a two-deck stereo, you could even record from another cassette tape. All you needed was a blank tape, a label, and a pen, which were all pretty inexpensive.
But the mix tape-- ahh, that was art. The perfect blend of songs, carefully ordered with all the craft of a composer, and each chosen for its exemplary aspects in music, lyric, and meaning. A good mix tape, though low in physical cost, represented hours of labor in choosing and recording each track onto the cassette. It was a gift. It meant something. And for a generation who has trouble connecting with others, it was the best way to say "I care about you" without being vulnerable enough to speak the words.
DEFINING A GENERATION
It's this experience, this zeitgeist, that so clearly demonstrates how we belong to a generation. For years, I couldn't understand why my parents revered WWII veterans but not their own Korean War-era parents. I didn't know why my outlook on life was so different from my younger siblings. I questioned how the upperclassmen of my high school and college were people of such wild, creative individuality while the underclassmen seemed to approach life with mild-mannered blandness. I wondered why I shelter my own children so much, when I know the importance of freedom and choice.
Reading The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe was the lightbulb moment in decades of questioning. I had heard of generations before, but only understood them as 20-year groups of people, without knowing what those groups had in common. Now I could see that my parents, and many other Boomers, would love the G.I. Generation of World War II because they were taught that these people literally saved the world. On the other hand, they disliked their own Silent Generation parents for getting divorced-- a pretty tough break for the kids caught in the middle. My Millennial siblings and all those underclassmen had a "blander" taste for life because they're a HERO archetype: they've been protected and expected to be safe, conformitive, and rationalist. Meanwhile, as the driving age was being raised in my state, I was grandfathered in with the rest of the Generation Xers, those wild upperclassmen who took risks in youth (typical of a NOMAD archetype) only to become overprotective "Always wear a helmet" parents of their own Homelander (ARTIST archetype) kids.
Just like me.
SPINNING WHEEL
Being last of Gen X has given me a front-row seat to the transition between my generation and the next. Being a student of literature, politics, and socioeconomics has also given me an appreciation of the way these experiences, as described by Strauss and Howe in Generations and The Fourth Turning, repeat throughout history. This pattern, referred to as the "generational saeculum" is somewhat like those old-fashioned hoop-with-a-stick toys:
Imagine the hoop as a wheel divided into four quarters like a pie chart, one for each generational archetype (HERO, ARTIST, PROPHET, NOMAD). Now imagine the wheel rolling straight down the sidewalk of linear time, past to present. As the wheel rotates, one section of the pie chart touches the sidewalk for a time, but soon transitions to the next. Similarly, one generation will become the dominant influence on the "sidewalk" of history for a period, but as it ages out, another generation will age up into its place*. And so on, throughout time.
So when I'm reading The Big Money, John Dos Passos's masterpiece about the Lost Generation (NOMAD), I see the all too familiar tropes of a wild youth and a disillusioned adulthood: sex, addiction, abortion, rape, big wins and big losses, personal disconnection, the rise of socialism, and a cynical sense of detachment from world affairs paired with extreme individuality.
When I read 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart, I saw the Gilded Generation (NOMAD) caught in the middle of two warring economic ideologies, with patrols of "Wide Awakes" all around, a flurry of over-information and fake news, an incredibly tense presidential election, and citizens actively denigrating the American flag over questions of racial equality**.
It sounds familiar, because it is.
But this too shall pass.
My mix tape is a little bit of everything: pieces of past NOMAD experiences that have shaped my present (the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II), my own decisions and experiences of life in the crisis, and a glimpse of the future from the Millennials who are aging up just after me. By God's mercy, my tape has held together during the Unraveling, though someday it will wind to a stop. But I won't forget the music-- how it sounded, how it felt-- and neither will you.
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*Each of these four periods where the wheel touches the sidewalk is called a "turning" (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis). It is for this term that The Fourth Turning is named.
**From 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart:
Warring ideologies: "The war described here was not just a Southern rebellion but a nationwide revolution--fought even from within the seceding sates--for freedom. And while the South's rebellion failed, with the Confederacy fated to become a historical dead end, this revolution--our second as a people--reinvented America, and a century and a half later still defines much of our national character. It was a revolution that engaged both the nation's progressive impulses and, at the same time, some of its profoundly conservative tendencies [...]. (quote from p. 18; see also p. 19,)
The Wide Awakes: (p. 47; 448-49)
Mass media saturation: "By bringing the wide world and its pageantry into young Americans' lives with such unprecedented immediacy, the new media of the 1840s and 1850s made once-distant adventures and opportunities seem achievable." (quote from p. 200, my emphasis; see also p. 28-32)
Fake news: (p. 49; 73-74)
Tense presidential election: (p. 35; 125)
Denigration of the American flag (p. 43)
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Hey! This blog has a mix tape soundtrack too. Check it out on YouTube here.