Generation X Still Casting Shade

A confession: I’m a boomer, on the younger side of the cohort, and I’ve always wished for a different identity. But, got to face facts.

In his book, A Generation of Sociopaths: How Baby Baby Boomers Betrayed America, glib GenX author Bruce Gilbey asserts that boomers have turned the world into a weathered, barren travesty that won’t be fit for the generations that follow. He’s right, of course, although the boomers have had some help from everyone else. Still, Gilbey lays the blame solely at the boomer doorstep.

“They’re gonna die before climate probably has a very significant impact on their lives. So if we the American people are the principals, if our agents don’t share the same goals and time horizons as we do, then there’s a risk of a serious mismatch,” Gilbey has said.

God bless Generation X, perhaps the generation with the biggest reputation for sadness. Gilbey’s correct in saying that the baby boomers have set us up for the current crisis, with their cars, plastic, men in charge of oil companies and belief in the redemptive powers of mid-life crisis products. GenXers are famous for ennui and disaffected approaches to life, including their easy acceptance of the fact that they are so rarely pondered these days, compared to all the think pieces devoted to boomers, Z’s and whatever the kids now coming up are called. Maybe Douglas Copeland, the inventor of the term Generation X, should spin a new generational term.

Generational feuds aside (along with my tendency to stoke them), no matter what year you were born, as the seconds pass, you either get older or you die. I’ve yet to see an alternative path, although some in Silicon Valley are hunting it. And getting older turns out to be bad for the environment, according to a new study that finds that people consume ever increasing amounts of energy as they age, with the rate accelerating as people enter their 70s. The study is inconclusive about the reasons, though guesses include that older people set their heat and AC higher, watch more TV, travel more and live in bigger house all alone as they age. (This makes me less judgmental of a central tenet of the movie, Midsommar, in which a Swedish cult insists that members jump off a cliff on their 72 birthday, because they no longer serve a purpose.)

Older people also suffer and die more often from the heat waves that Gilbey blames them for. So let’s hope that GenZ, of which Greta Thunberg. is a part, will turn things around. And the millennials are now giving birth to Generation Alpha, which gives me great hope for the future.

Greta Thunberg, GenZ world leader

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