A younger SGer confuses two very, very different attitudes:
I’m trying to think of the Gen-X equivalent of the boomer greed. The “I’ve got mine” mentality but with a different target object. I’ve come up with “selfish insularity.” This is in response to an X post I saw where a Gen-Xer was almost mocking the kids from his youth who didn’t make it. Similar to boomer mentality except instead of money it was life, success, a general pride of having “made it” whatever made it means. It feels very similar to the “I pulled myself up my bootstraps” line from boomers except it “I ran the gauntlet myself”.
I strongly suspect he was failing to grasp the gallows humor of my generation. And I don’t think a generation that genuinely worries about things like climate change and gender identification can understand the GenX perspective or how none of us ever expected to get old. Why do you think we didn’t protest the elimination of pensions just when we were getting jobs, or worry about Social Security going bankrupt? We never expected to see them. After all, we were told we were liable to die in nuclear fire at any given moment from a very young age, alone in a house without our parents.
And then, just as we reached adulthood, we were informed that AIDS was going to infect and kill us all.
Yes, these were lies. Yes, we eventually saw through them. But they left a formative collective mark.
None of us believe in global warming because we all remember the coming global ice age, which didn’t scare anyone because we didn’t expect to survive that long. We’re as concerned about global warming as we are about acid rain, another one of our childhood psyops. Frankly, we’re still a lot more frightened of quicksand than just about anything else.
None of this is to say that our apathy, indifference, and collective inability to worry about long-term changes are good. They are not. They are weaknesses and vulnerabilities that have been exploited, especially on the immigration front. But I think that if you speak seriously with a GenXer about the challenges facing young people today, you’ll realize that we are not unsympathetic to the real challenges they face, we’re just not at all impressed by the retarded ones.
As one female comedian said, once you watch a teacher blow up and die on the television wheeled into your classroom as a kid, and the reaction of your own teacher is to shrug and give you a math quiz because the whole thing didn’t take as long as scheduled, your personal tolerance for trauma tends to be on the high side.
It’s not that we lack sympathy, we just don’t have a penchant for complaining about things we can’t do anything about, and we aren’t interested in listening to anyone else’s whining either. Things are what they are, so focus on what you can affect and don’t dwell on what you can’t. The idea of wallowing in things, or trying to solve them by talking about them, or expecting sympathy from anyone is essentially foreign to us.
I suspect that we don’t like to talk about how we feel about things because in our childhood experience, trying to talk to an adult about our feelings reliably ended by listening to a Boomer pontificating at length about their feelings. Believe it or not, it’s still that way for a lot of us to this day.
I’m not defending the GenX perspective, I’m just attempting to explain it.