Gen X: The forgotten women

Or the things we have lost and why they were important

I was in a client meeting recently (in my day job), and one of the clients was in a similar age bracket to me.

‘How come nobody talks about Gen X?’ she said, ‘I mean everything I read is about younger people! Why is Gen X not interesting?’

I hesitated for a moment and resisted the urge to say: ‘They’re not sexy enough.’

If you grew up in the eighties, came of age just before or during the ‘Summer of Love’, sweated in giant warehouses with smoke machines burning your eyes, looked up to Madonna, watched ‘The Girlie Show’, cringed at ‘TFI Fridays’ (feeling like many of the jokes weren’t right but struggling to identify why), wore a blazer to work, drank pints, smoked inside and on buses/tubes, felt optimistic when Tony Blair came into power, loved ‘Unplugged with Nirvana’, cried when Kurt died, didn’t dread the part in every nature documentary when they talk about the inevitable impact of climate change, had your belly button pierced, remember hair mousse, wore combat trousers with Vans and a cropped top, peroxided your hair, and then had a brown layer underneath, went to Camden and saw Amy Winehouse stumbling home, saw Suede/The Radiohead/Oasis/Pulp/Blur, didn’t take photos of food, didn’t actually think much about food, looked forward to Saturday mornings and watching kid’s TV, spent Sundays doing nothing as there were no shops open and no phones, didn’t think about how big your lips were, thought face lifts were only for women in Hollywood who looked like they were standing in a wind tunnel, loved indie films, fancied Brett/Jarvis Thom/Liam/Damon. If you took E and obsessed about your water intake. If your jaw ached the next day. If you felt like you knew the meaning of life, then forgot it again. If you had a dog but not a dog because it was a fashionable breed. If you had no idea where your friends were. If you were often bored. Like really bored…YOU are likely to be a Gen X woman.

Years later and Gen X are still a weird one. Boomers have their hippie heritage and their wealth (not all of them of course) and for many the world is probably even more incomprehensible these days. Gen X grew up during Thatcher/Reagan era, and the idea that you could buy happiness as long as you worked hard enough. On the other hand we listened to grunge and felt like life was hopeless and we were trapped in a world that didn’t appreciate us. Life did feel bleak at times but it also felt like if we just strived and pushed forward we would reach Nirvana (excuse the pun).

The tug between these two worlds felt hard to navigate.

A lot of Gen X women that I meet are confused. They have spent their lives trying to follow the tried and tested path (job, mortgage, house, kids etc) and realised that it wasn’t what they wanted. It hasn’t delivered the happiness they thought it would. Some of them are just so so tired of working hard and trying to achieve that capitalist fantasy.

They feel…abandoned.

Discombobulated.

Like the promises of their teens haven’t been delivered.

I know in many ways Gen X were lucky in that they got the opportunity to get onto the property ladder in the first place.

‘This younger generation don’t know they were born! They’re so entitled. We’ve had to work so hard,’ that is the common refrain from Gen X.

There is more than a tinge of anger because they have realised younger women don’t want the same lives we’ve had. They are in fact rejecting many aspects of it.

Underlying this feeling is the idea that we had it tough (and many did) and that we didn’t have the sheer abundance of STUFF that younger people do now.

I’d argue however that all the STUFF hasn’t helped. If you can always be conscious of what others are achieving, having, owning, doing- it doesn’t help create a strong sense of self worth. Equally it doesn’t help you forge your own path. You are always aware of others and never left to develop your own thoughts or your own identity.

What if you want to be creative but everyone around you is doing a business degree? What if you every time you scroll you see your friends choosing to do stuff without you? What if you think that it is only through consuming that you can be happy and then discover that it doesn’t work like that? What if you’re too scared to lose control in case someone takes a photo of you and your moment of madness is shared with your entire friendship group?

We have lost the ability to be fully disconnected and to be on our own and okay with that. It has become so so hard to do nothing.

Gen X was a tricky, sandwich generation- the last to grow up without technology. The last to know what it feels like to be totally bored, so bored that it is actually pretty damn glorious. The last to go to a gig and not bother to record it and just get totally immersed in it (without thinking about how the content will look). The last to live a life and anticipate better rather than worse (despite what Cobain predicted we always felt pretty optimistic?)

‘It was freedom,’ I said to my daughter recently, ‘It was absorbing something without having to record it. It was messy. Not checking in, not knowing everything. It was agonising. It was also liberating. I want you to be unobserved. I want you to feel the wind in your hair and not think about how it looks to another person staring at you. I want you to be so bored that you can discover who you really are and what you really want. I want all of these things for you, my love. I really do.’