With Generation X starting to turn 60, we finally get to be the seniors we’ve been acting like since our youth

Jeff Gordinier is a Los Angeles-based journalist and author of X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.

We drank water from a hose. We launched our motocross bikes over plywood ramps in abandoned lots. We subsisted on Lucky Charms and Hot Pockets. In movie theatres and at home, our developing brains soaked up images and phrases – sharks gnawing on limbs, an alien bursting out of a human chest, Richard Pryor’s uncensored comedy routines – without the benefit of trigger warnings. Unfettered, unsunscreened and unsupervised, we children of the 1970s and 1980s roamed the alleys of North America like wild dogs, casually exposing ourselves to danger, equipped with nothing more sophisticated than a dime if we wanted to let our parents know where we were, which of course we had no intention of doing.

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Or at least this is how Generation X seems inclined to mythologize itself through memes, as you may have noticed on social media. When it comes to cross-generational rivalries, Gen X likes to cast itself as the tough guy, the wizened survivor, the shaggy latchkey sage who actually remembers what reality felt like before the infinite jest of the internet. Helicopter parenting? More like the helicopter combat in Apocalypse Now.

In other words, we grew up fast.

There’s a thick sheen of romantic revisionism to these memories, yes, but there’s some truth, too. I’m 58, and I remember travelling in airplanes that fogged up with cigarette smoke. (There were smoking sections for air travel, but you’ve probably noticed that smoke has a tricky habit of moving around.) I did spend entire weekends roaming around unsupervised on a bike. I listened to a lot of punk bands whose lyrics would never pass muster with the sensitivity readers these days. I confronted the terror of Jaws in a theatre. The movie came out half a century ago, in the summer of 1975, which means I was eight years old.

Years later, after graduating from college, I wandered around Europe and North Africa for four months with no smartphone (they didn’t exist) and a few hundred dollars in cash. How did I find my way around? How did I book flights? How did I let my family know when my plane home would arrive at LAX? Looking back, it’s all a blur.

A formative blur, though.

The underlying theme of these memes and memories – with their geriatric glaze of “kid, I used to walk five miles through the snow to get to school” – is that we Gen Xers were old before our time.

I’d take that another step. Gen X was born old. We’ve always been geezers.

And now that we’re officially old, with the first wave of Xers turning 60 (we’re usually defined as people born between 1965 and 1980), we’ve reached the stage of life where we feel most at home. This is our moment. We finally get to be the senior citizens that we’ve been acting like since our teens.

I recently read an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, who is 52; she talked about how she likes to get ready for bed at 7:30 p.m. – and she climbs under the covers soon after that. Did I mock her for that? No, I did not. In fact, I heard from a surprising number of friends that they do the same thing. As do I.

Sleep is my favourite pastime these days, and I’m no outlier in that regard. Consider the work of Gen Xer Tricia Hersey, the author of 2022’s Rest Is Resistance and the founder of the Nap Ministry, an organization that promotes restorative siestas as an escape from (and repudiation of) grind culture. “Naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal,” she writes.

Actors and models in their 50s such as Halle Berry, Pamela Anderson and Paulina Porizkova seem relieved to have passed through the maddening ordeal of youth and its preposterous beauty standards.

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The zeitgeist novel of the moment is Miranda July’s All Fours, a madcap exploration of perimenopause. Look around and you’ll see a greying Ethan Hawke (the erstwhile heartthrob of Reality Bites) expounding on the restorative properties of poetry, or a greying Jon Stewart (technically a late-phase Boomer, at 62, but spiritually always one of us) trying to bring some gosh-darn civility and common sense to the circus of 21st-century politics.

We’re the grown-ups now, and it fits. The thrift-shop cardigans and bowling shirts that we used to wear ironically? They make a great impression when we swing by the diner for the early-bird special. “My favourite discovery is that so many people are having much better experiences later in life than our ageist culture told them was possible,” says editor and writer Sari Botton, who founded a growing Substack newsletter called Oldster, whose very name tells you where it’s coming from. “I’m pretty much the oldest you can be as a Gen Xer – 59, born in 1965. My generation is made up of latchkey kids who grew up too fast. Our experiences of, and attitudes toward, getting older are very different from those of our parents and grandparents. They’re even different from those of the generation that came right before ours.”

The Boomers may have preceded us chronologically, but they will never surrender to the advancement of age. The entire Boomer ethos, in fact, boils down to The Who’s shopworn “hope I die before I get old,” which is totally achievable as you approach 80 as long as you pour plenty of energy and money into the pursuit of plastic fantastic juvenescence. Meanwhile the Millennials, having drifted foot-stompingly into their 40s, continue to display the ignorant certitude that you usually associate with toddlers. Once you embrace the magic of cultural amnesia, it’s easy to pretend that you “literally” invented everything, from cannabis to gender fluidity to parenting. (I am the father of four children, so I know a little bit about sleep deprivation, but it turns out that no one on Earth had ever experienced it before Millennials began producing offspring.)

Oh, do I sound cranky? Therein lies my point.

The Gen Xers in my orbit have no problem with getting old and ornery. We’ve been waiting a long time for this. Complaining about other generations is part of our skill set. In recent years, as we’ve eased into our dotage, I have noticed a curious refrain among my fellow Xers: As Ms. Botton says, we’re embracing it. Because the upside of getting old is that you might get to be viewed as an éminence grise, a sort of professor emeritus in your chosen field or at least in your neighbourhood – and, well, that part of growing old sounds awesome. That’s the gig we’ve been training for all our lives.

You have Spotify’s algorithms to create playlists for you so that you don’t have to lift a finger? How delightful. We used to make our mixtapes by hand, fastidiously recording tracks onto flimsy physical cassettes, a process whose inherent tedium became a kind of Jedi mind training. Maybe this helps explain why so many prominent Gen X musicians seem to have several DJ crates of albums stored in their brains. Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of Wilco, has carved out a second career as the Cool Music Teacher, tapping into the limitless database of his own head to give his students stories and songwriting lessons in bestselling books like World Within a Song and How to Write One Song. Down the hallway an even cooler teacher, Pharrell Williams – who’s 51 but seems impervious to age – uses his spidey sense to, like, discover Maggie Rogers before he dashes off to 17 other engagements at which his encyclopedic sagacity is in demand. I suppose it’s likely that Questlove and Dave Grohl became musicians in The Roots and Nirvana, respectively, because they enjoyed and excelled at making music, but it’s also possible that their goal was to make music so that they could appear in – and produce – countless documentaries about music.

At a time when apocalyptic fires and floods threaten to obliterate entire cities, it is encouraging to see Gen Xers stepping into the role of griot, determined to keep songs and stories alive. (A basement flood wiped out most of my lifelong collection of vinyl albums a few years ago, and I ugly-cried so hard that it distressed and bewildered my wife. She’s 41.) Digital records of culture may be convenient, but they can be deleted en masse with a keystroke – how’s that for totalitarian catnip? Xers are the generation of the record store, VHS rentals, faded concert T-shirts, used books, used shoes – we like to have a hard copy. We’re used to that. What’s old is gold.

Have you enjoyed the renaissance of cocktail culture over the past few decades? You’re welcome – Gen X bartenders are largely responsible for dusting off those old bottles back in the ‘90s. Have you been amazed seeing lost footage of a star-studded Black music festival in Harlem in 1969 and hearing lost recordings of songs by Detroit musician Sixto Rodriguez? Gen X documentarians – Questlove and Malik Bendjelloul – hustled to bring those cultural relics back into the light with Summer of Soul and Searching for Sugar Man, each of which won an Oscar for best documentary.

We’ve always felt attached to the old stuff, but we were in fact granted a brief season of being the hot young thing. According to the dominant media narrative, the Belle Époque of Generation X can be squeezed into a cluster of months: 1991. That palindromic year produced a series of pop-cultural breakthroughs that loosened the vise grip of Boomer nostalgia – at least for a few weeks. In March of that year came Douglas Coupland’s first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which attached a name and a sensibility to a free-floating demographic. In July, Richard Linklater’s Slacker appeared in theatres, and its documentary portrait of Austin weirdness (way back when Austin used to be weird) nudged that sensibility out of the margins: it meant that Xers (a.k.a. slackers) would forever be associated with a specific strain of bohemian drift. Then, at the tail end of September, 1991, everything exploded. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit video made its debut on MTV’s 120 Minutes, the band’s Nevermind album soon screamed to the top of the pop charts, and the shift from the margins into the mainstream was complete.

It couldn’t last. Kurt Cobain himself acknowledged that two years later with the opening lyrics of Nirvana’s 1993 album, In Utero: “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old.” From the first moment we met them, Andy and Claire and Dag – the three central characters of Mr. Coupland’s novel – already seemed to be living in a retirement community: In case you don’t remember, Generation X takes place in the sleepy elder-care wonderland of Palm Springs, Calif., meaning that it’s a book about young people who act like old people. This is a continuing theme. Our genesis is rooted in retirement.

Consider Swingers, the 1996 indie film in which Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau and their friends like to play golf, drink martinis and listen to 1940s jazz as if they’re pensioned lieutenants in the Rat Pack. (“Cocktails first, questions later,” to quote one of its taglines.) Even the two American musical forms that are most readily associated with Generation X – gangsta rap and grunge – came out of southern California and the Pacific Northwest with none of the youthquake fizz that would later accompany Millennial acts like Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Sullen, leaden, blunt, raw – grunge and gangsta rap emerged from their cradles like revenants carrying dark truths about how the world really is.

Someone had to. Let’s be grateful for that. It’s worth pointing out that gangsta rap and grunge have aged really well. It’s also worth pointing out that Gen Z, the kids who arrived after the Millennials, have a bottomless appetite for stuff from the 1990s.

Years ago I wrote a book called X Saves the World. It came out in 2008, and it was meant to be a “manifesto for a generation that’s never had much use for manifestos,” as one of our promotional phrases put it. The thesis of the book was that Generation X, with its small-batch/fair-trade/motocross-biking/seed-saving/thrift-shopping/college-DJing/riot-grrrling/indie-rock/gangsta-rap/film-festival/middle-child mindset, provided a much-needed corrective in the face of a vast encroaching corporate monoculture. (Or something like that. When I wrote it I had recently become a father for the second time, and that aforementioned sleep deprivation really messed with my brain. I apologize if parts of the book don’t make any sense.)

Looking back, I think that X Saves the World arrived at least a decade too early. It has come to my attention that, at press time, the world remains unsaved. In fact, the world seems to be moving relentlessly in the wrong direction. But the thesis of the book probably has some juice in it, and we Gen Xers on the cusp of 60 are uniquely positioned to help snap the world out of its psychotic trance. We know how to slow down, buy less, stop talking, do the work, and go off the grid. We can speak to you about a realm beyond TikTok. Our superpower is we’re the last generation to remember life before the oceanic idiocies of social media. We’re the last generation to remember when Austin and Seattle were weird. We’re like the people in the forest at the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 who keep books alive by memorizing passages from them and reciting them on command. We’re a hose-drinking punk-rock version of the Irish monks who saved civilization, as the story goes, by preserving human learning on sheets of vellum. We’re museum docents, trivia collectors, defenders of the analog, curators of quirk – which is another way of saying that this is our time to shine!

Xers are poised to make an impact now, at 60, by tapping into their aversion to monoculture and making a case for the crucial nourishments of marginalia. Consider Clare Dolan’s Museum of Everyday Life in Vermont – a place that views domestic debris as a form of cultural expression. (When I started reading about this fascinating museum, it took me about 15 seconds to guess that Ms. Dolan was an Xer.) We don’t really know how this retirement thing is going to work out, no, but if old age involves collecting random stuff and talking endlessly about old bands and movies, we’re down with it. Maybe in retirement we’ll finally get to slack.

Anyway, the sun is going down now, so I need to get ready for bed.