The Confusatory

Generation X Can Get Bent

I’ve had a lot of drafts floating in my head about how badly the world is broken, and how fixing it will require my parents’ generation getting the hell out of the way. Now that a snippy little post called Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It is making its rounds, it’s as good a time as any to talk about the world from the next generation’s perspective. We’re not entitled assholes, we’re just fatalistic, cynical, undereducated kids in a fucked-up world.

… Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.) Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that.

So in return, Generation X fucked every future generation. You lacked the meagre political will required to address urgent and upcoming issues, like climate change and a total failure of financial regulation. You looted the public coffers to fund your pensions and retirements, and didn’t follow through on your parents’ investment in infrastructure and research. You took the budding pharmaceutical industry and lost yourself in boners instead of anti-retroviral drugs, and got fat and lazy and bent the world’s food and energy supplies to feed your waistlines and your big cars.

Generation X is a journeyman. It didn’t invent hip hop, or punk rock, or even electronica (it’s pretty sure those dudes in Kraftwerk are boomers) but it perfected all of them, and made them its own. It didn’t invent the Web, but it largely built the damn thing. Generation X gave you Google and Twitter and blogging; Run DMC and Radiohead and Nirvana and Notorious B.I.G. Not that it gets any credit.

Well aren’t you so damned cool.

In fairness, Generation X could use a better spokesperson. Barack Obama is just a little too senior to count among its own, and it has debts older than Mark Zuckerberg. Generation X hasn’t had a real voice since Kurt Cobain blew his brains out, Tupac was murdered, Jeff Mangum went crazy, David Foster Wallace hung himself, Jeff Buckley drowned, River Phoenix overdosed, Elliott Smith stabbed himself (twice) in the heart, Axl got fat.

Quitters. Generation X couldn’t hack it, so you mic’ed out.

Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone. It just wants to sit here quietly and think for a minute.

Aww, you can’t handle the stress? The impending societal breakdown? The unsolved crises, the forced admittance of your mistakes? Then get the fuck out of our way. We’re going to have to declare bankruptcy, take back your pensions (jesus, do you all not understand how basic accounting works? Oh wait, if you’d funded education instead of cutting it to the bone, maybe you’d know how math works), cut your retirement benefits, and try to salvage what’s left of the world. Thanks for a shitload of houses in useless places, crumbling roads, and a trillion dollar war (you assholes elected both Bushes, let’s not forget).

You did a hell of a job trashing the car, but if you really need a congratulatory pat on the back to go with your quiet moment, well, thanks for not losing the keys?

About Steve

I’m writing about Steve Jobs’s life, but it’s really not for you, it’s for me.

Steve Jobs was an incredible person to watch move through the world, a person to be awed by, to envy, and to imitate, not because of what he did, or who he inspired, or what he created, but because of his relentless pursuit of a better self.

Many stories have been told about the young, brash, passionate co-founder of Apple, and many more about his fine design taste and the fight for simplicity waged since he returned. Far more interesting is his evolutionary arc, sketched out as clear as daylight across the companies he led between his first and second eras at Apple. He continually honed his taste, and constantly questioned what was possible to do with bits and atoms and photons. He refined his approach for convincing people that his vision, grand and beautiful, deserved to exist. He grew personally, first as a father, and later as a messiah of sorts, saving his first company from the brink and creating a world that he perhaps had always dreamed of, but one which the rest of us could barely imagine until it was before our eyes.

My former coworkers and I loved making him the things he wanted: we made them because he asked, and we made them great because he demanded.

I only interacted with Steve twice, but I miss him deeply and severely. I admire his drive and vision and relentlessness, his constant, unyielding search and fight for aesthetic perfection. I dream of growth and maturity and a trajectory of my own even a tenth as meteoric, and know that his vision and passion and fine taste will carry on for a long time to come.