A military incursion into Latin America. A war to control another country’s oil. A corrupt administration engineering spectacle (“We want a show”) to keep the public distracted. A visibly declining president whose background in acting and television turns governance into pantomime. A frozen economy. A pandemic roiling under the surface that the powerful would prefer to ignore.
We’re speed-running the lowlights of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, but worse.
A friend of mine suggested rather than protest, we just build an animatronic Christian Slater to post in the back of some smokey bar (I nominate the 9:30 Club) to mechanically raise a clove cigarette to his lips, repeating, “No blood for oil” and “Eat the rich” until the heat death of the universe.
We are a generation that’s been dismissed as cynical—more drenched in irony than sincerity. But the most important contribution of Generation X to the American discourse is that we dismissed the discourse before it excluded us. We diagnosed the ineffectiveness of working from the inside and governed ourselves accordingly. This may have looked like apathy but it was rejection.
There’s a particular dark nostalgia that attaches to this moment. What I miss isn’t my youth so much as the version of me that thought standing apart meant something. The migraine of recognition comes from having once believed that rejection itself might be enough to stop history repeating. Instead: not just more corporatism, but more consolidation. The exact same war, with worse consequences. Maybe Obama was not so much a breath of fresh air, as he was a prolonged wheeze between two wracking coughs.
I’m a white lady in my 50s; I get misty about the parallel and janky handmade culture that orbited my entry-level jobs. Mutable fashion that criss-crossed subcultural zones. (Are you punk? Goth? New Wave? Some other secret thing?) Photocopied zines with fake ads. Arguing about who sold out. But the insularity and sneers were just a reaction to being born already shut out from the system.
Douglas Coupland’s astringent, quotable novel that gave my generational cohort its nom de guerre, details the sensation of realizing the emptiness of the American promise: “When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality.” Or, more succinctly, from the movie Slacker: “Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.” Most lyrically, from Paul Westerberg nailing a single thesis to the Yuppie materialist church door: “Everything you dream of is right in front of you, and everything is a lie / Look me in the eye and tell me that I’m satisfied.” (This week, the dissatisfaction of Westerberg’s fellow Minneapolitans has been especially noteworthy.)
The television shows, movies, and music of the era didn’t call us to action so much as they translated our rolling disappointment into affect.
The Boomers that raised us built their politics out of exquisite sensitivity to their own feelings: They were the original students of vibes. We saw their self-interest harden into neoliberalism and a willingness to pull up the ladder behind them with a quickness. There’s a straight line from Woodstock to Bill Clinton’s welfare reform.
Our rejection of that hypocrisy calcified into a core belief: that selling out was the worst thing a person could do.
History has since played a cruel trick. Gen X voters are now among the most likely to slide from Democratic affiliation toward Trumpism or outright Republican support. If selling out is the crime, that’s where it happened. Not in irony or withdrawal, but in mistaking grievance for principle.
Still, there’s a hardcore group of us still paying attention. We might still carry a pose of protective cynicism, but I want to argue that this isn’t a liability. For this current era, it’s our remaining advantage.
The contemporary right—its bigotry, conspiracy thinking, white supremacy, neo-Nazism—is fundamentally nihilistic. It rests on zero-sum logic, exclusion, and a pathologically selfish view of the world. Gen X cynicism is something else entirely. It is not apathy. It is not despair. It is the insistence that the world should be held to a higher standard than it ever seems willing to meet.
Cynicism is not pessimism. It’s a refusal to settle. The most important thing about Diogenes’s search for an honest man is not that he didn’t find one, it’s that he kept looking.
What us Gen X survivors can offer at this moment—and to the people just tuning in—is the knowledge that there will be no watershed moment after which everything is different. We know better than to believe everything hinges on one election, one protest, one perfect speech. Change is incremental, fragile, and often invisible while it’s happening.
Cynicism teaches that the world you want will probably remain out of reach in your lifetime. It also teaches that this is not an excuse to stop paying attention. You may not believe in saviors, but you learn to gather people around you who also don’t believe in them.
The pursuit of truth, cynicism, is the most powerful binding agent there is, because it’s always in motion. It is the opposite of spectacle. It refuses catharsis. It accumulates through insistence, through repetition, through refusing to be distracted or dazzled into forgetting what we already know, no matter how searing the memory. Most importantly, it aids in our survival. At times like this—rapacious greedheads in charge, sickening violence on the horizon—our biggest obligation to ourselves and to each other is a Gen X specialty: simply endure.
