“We’re the fuck around and find out generation.”
“We raised ourselves.”
“We are the last generation of feral children.”
“We had no timeouts. It was a belt and you better not cry for long.”
“Most of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
“We were the latch key generation.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of this on TikTok over the past couple of years regarding Generation X, especially when it comes to pushing back against the current generations of twentysomethings and teenagers. With all of us being middle-aged, it seems like thumping our chests about our childhoods as a response to getting dragged (or Gen Z TikTokers wondering why we aren’t getting dragged) is a favorite sport. And why not? It shows our inherent strength and our ability to be resilient as well as get things done, especially when nobody is looking. And for a generation who spent its formative years either being ignored or dismissed as “slackers”, it’s as good a response as any to our parents and their generation, who decided that we were a vast disappointment and our younger Millennial siblings were worth more attention.
There is something that really bugs me about this, though. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have as much of a hardscrabble, feral, latch-key kid life as some of my friends and peers, but Gen Xers posting videos where they say these things makes them sound like the Baby Boomers we have all grown to loathe. Isn’t “We were feral” just a different version of telling the kids that you walked uphill both ways through a foot of snow in order to get to school? I could have sworn that at some point, we told ourselves we weren’t got to pull that sort of toxic shit when we got to be our parents’ age. But here I am, seeing it on TikTok, in memes, and in copy/pasted Facebook ramblings from former classmates. Why are these people acting like they survived The Great Depression when they were simply a bunch of middle-class suburban white kids who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s?
Well, to answer this question, I’m going to break down what I quoted at the top of this post, starting with …
“We were the fuck around and find out generation.”
This is one I actually like, although credit where credit is due, we weren’t the original “fuck around and find out” generation. Our Greatest Generation grandparents, after all, fought a war against Fascism; equally important to our society were their older siblings, the Silent Generation. That generation–which actually makes up a good portion of the older set of Generation X’s parents–started or led the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s. We learned from their example that risks were worth taking. Now, some of our risks were mundane shit like flying over concrete on a skateboard without wearing a helmet or any other protection, but many other risks we took were significant. My peers and the older members of my generation have been vocal for environmentalism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and a number of liberal and progressive causes and reforms since we came of age during and at the end of the Reagan era. We’re not without our problems, of course, but being shoved aside by Boomers who sold out and were fucking around without a care of what would happen to future generations led to us calling upon other past examples and taking a stand,. We are passing that on to our Generation Z children.
But then there’s …
“We were the latch key generation.”
“We raised ourselves.”
“We were the last generation of feral children.”
Did we forget that “latch key kids” was literally a “concern topic” for talk shows like Donahue back in the 1980s? Now, I didn’t “raise myself” and in fact could have done with more independence because I have a major permission complex, but these statements aren’t always the flexes people think they are. The lack of parental supervision for many of us contributed to our resourcefulness as a generation, but forced maturity was not entirely beneficial. Some of my friends in junior high and high school spent a lot of time “raising” their younger siblings and keeping their households running smoothly. In most cases, that was out of economic necessity and I can’t faulty their parents for working as hard as they did to keep everyone’s head above water, but let’s recognize that this made childhood tougher and shorter. I wonder if some of my friends wish they had some of that time back or if they have even fully processed it as they raise their own kids. Which brings me to …
“We had no time outs. It was the belt and you better not cry for long.”
In defense of the TikTokers, a number of videos acknowledged how fucked up this was. In one video, a woman addressed how a lot of us have never fully come to terms with this because we suppressed our feelings and solved it by “moving on”. This led to us having pretty dark views on the world as well as very dark senses of humor (which I think is a slightly positive side effect). But I’ve also seen this expressed a number of times on social media as a point of pride and each time I see it that way, I’m puzzled because in my view, it’s not. My generation was one of the last where spanking and other forms of physical punishment were considered acceptable. I’m not saying that Millennial and Gen Z-ers didn’t get hit, but during my formative years there was a massive debate over spanking that led to it falling out of favor and largely out of practice.
As it should have. Hitting your kids is horrible and I’m not going to debate it. I have memories of getting yelled at and smacked with a wooden spoon as a kid. The hitting stopped early on, but getting yelled stuck around for a while. I don’t think I have fully processed all of it and I can’t tell you if I am ready to do a deep dive into it with my therapist either. I don’t classify is as abuse even though it was traumatic, because some people I grew up with were actually abused by their parents in an “I’ve seen this on an After-School Special” sort of way. These are the types of things that leave scars that never fully heal because when it came to our mental health as a generation, nothing ever got addressed. We were taught “not to talk about these things.” And therapy? Well, that might reflect poorly on our parents, so it never entered the conversation. Even if we wanted to get help, we didn’t know how. This led to …
“Many of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
I will come out and say that this was never me. I didn’t have my first beer until I was 17 and aside from a couple of cigars in college, never smoked anything. Okay, I tried pot once and didn’t like it, but my dad did me a solid by quitting smoking back in 1987. However, my teetotaling as a teenager was because of a combination of not being popular enough to drink and being deathly afraid of the consequences of getting caught drinking. There’s more to that sentence that I’m not going to get into; instead, I’m going to address the statement above because while it is a bit of a brag, it has a very sharp other edge.
Drinking has been hugely glorified in television and movies for decades, with the party scene being a teen movie staple. With this glorification came a lot of destructive behavior and the amplification of toxic masculinity and rape culture, especially in the Eighties. As the Eighties became the Nineties, we learned more about rape and more women began to speak up about their experiences, but my generation still has a horrible track record when it comes to sexual violence. In fact, the current generation of youth appears to be learning from our mistakes; there’s certainly work to be done, but what I see on a regular basis has me optimistic.
But if we weren’t chasing the Platonic ideal of Animal House’s toga party, many in my generation were drinking and smoking by the time they were 14 because they were self-medicating. Like I said, nobody landed in therapy, and when they did it was for substance abuse because they had turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with their mental health issues. Some of my classmates went through rehab before they graduated, some eventually got help as adults, others wound up dying way too young, and a number of them continue to struggle. While I am sure the majority of my peers have a healthy relationship with alcohol, bragging about getting drunk at 14 simplifies this to the point where it ignores the very serious issues. But I think that for some of these TikTokers, it’s kind of the point because of one more line I want to discuss …
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
Now I know why my Spidey Sense tingled when watching these videos. I’m not sure what the political leanings are of every TikToker I watched, so I can’t lump them all under one umbrella …
… BUT …
… complaining about trigger warnings and safe spaces has become a favorite pastime of right-wing trolls for the better part of a decade. The image they like to conjure up is a kaleidoscope-haired, multi-pierced, multi-gendered, pride-flag-bedecked student at Berkeley or Oberlin frothing at the mouth about a professor assigning a short story where the main character gets a hangnail without warning them about said hangnail because reading about the hangnail made them curl up in the fetal position as they flashed back to the time they got a hangnail in the third grade.
I’m kidding.
Sort of.
Right-wingers are fucking insane when it comes perpetuating fallacies about the fragility of young people who refuse to go along with their ideals, and a number of these Fox News-viewing, QAnon-following choads are Gen Xers. This should surprise absolutely nobody; despite MTV’s efforts in the early 1990s to frame Generation X as largely liberal, we’re not a monolith because no generation is. But I can still be disappointed by the number of people my age or slightly older who agree with Tucker Carlson or Alex jones and were led that way by social media algorithms. I’m not being ridiculous; it’s not hard to go down the rabbit hole that begins with “Kids these days …” and ends with a membership in a Moms for Liberty Facebook group.
To quote one of our generation’s heroes: It’s a trap.
I mean, all of it really is. Generational discord is a construct that exists for media hits. I have fond memories of the decades in which I grew up and I love reveling in nostalgia for the simplicity of my childhood, especially on the days where the problems of the world are overwhelming. We should all be able to do that. But as a generation, it’s our duty to avoid the trap it presents. We’ve done a good job at starting to break cycles of toxic behavior and culture; let’s be the generation to break the cycle of losing perspective in favor of mythology and ego.
Pop Culture Affidavit 
I read this when you posted it, but kept forgetting to reply on the blog, and didn’t want to get political on the Discord.
As an able-bodied straight white guy, I’m hesitant to claim any disadvantage as part of the latchkey generation. I can relate to the “feral” sentiments, but I actually did have two legal parents at home. It’s just that they were selfish corrupt incompetent morons, and I was the rare teen that actually did know more (and better) than them. I was routinely left home alone for long periods at age 8, and had to fend for myself when the light and water bills weren’t paid, or what little food we had was in an ice chest full of melted water. I always felt a Generation X kinship with what was perceived as a disaffected but socially progressive cohort that was largely neglected by their society, and abandoned any obligations to meeting expectations placed upon them.
So imagine my shock and horror to discover, after also detecting a troubling trend in social media Gen-X pride memes, that my cohort is the most far-right red voters. As a generation, we disproportionately vote for the most extreme alt-right QAnon nutjobs. It makes sense that people who claim to have raised themselves would be bootstraps types. I’m reminded of my half-brother, who despite coming from a “broken home” was still raised in affluent suburbs with plenty of material goods. My podcast Comic Reader Resume used to be able to cover the titles I read growing up in 15+ minute chunks, but once I hit the point of spending time with him and his comic collection on weekends, my most recent episode was closer to 45 min. He experienced adversity, including an absentee substance abusing father and a sometimes violent and neglectful drunkard stepmother, both of whom dumped an infant half-sister on him to essentially raise until he left their home. But also, he always had attractive girlfriends and cool gear in his property tax funded upscale schools. And boy, did he enjoy flirting with white supremacy and authoritarianism. I’ll occasionally dump a bunch of un-curated MP3s onto a flash drive for the road or work, and am always worried that one day the Skrewdriver or David Allen Coe racist screeds that rode along when I absorbed his music will somehow find its way into my speakers at an inopportune time (re: any time ever.) We were estranged for a number of years, then got back into each others orbits, when he liked to explain to me how insuring gay couples would bankrupt that industry. When his wife created a situation where a renewed estrangement would be easy, I went for it, and haven’t looked back in about 15 years.
I myself was raised in a conservative, pro-gun environment, but the Iraq War and escalating mass shootings shook me loose of that. I’m deeply embarrassed to have still at least considered Republican candidates as late as 2008, although I was initially interested in John Edwards and ultimately voted for Obama. Read that sentence again, and consider what kind of brainwashing would allow me to even briefly spare a thought for Rudolph Giuliani or Mike Huckabee, after having cycled from Howard Dean to John Kerry in ’04. How does that in any way rationally compute?
One of my best friends, a sane and rational fellow, still leans Republican/Libertarian. Like me, he grew up poor, but having gotten through it has been hardened by the experience. He’s very critical of people making obvious life mistakes and doing things the “wrong” way. We do actually commiserate on that front, because we know the sacrifices and experienced the traumas that kept up from being poor whiter trash. But also, as the most liberal of my immediate friends, I’m very conscious of the “white” part of that equation. Yes, I’m smart, caring, and reliable, but my skin still got me into rooms that I otherwise would have been barred from to display those features. I know for a fact that I’ve had opportunities denied others, because getting in those rooms, I’ve heard how white bosses talk about non-whites. Hell, I’ve heard Latinos denigrate and professionally limit other Latinos, and seem Blacks demonstrate prejudices against the degree of contrast in their complexions. Racial superiority is insidious and internalized. Misogyny, too.
So I guess I’m observant, and bothered by my privilege. One of my favorite things is when people basically tell me “I’m one of the good ones” when it comes to how I wield or discard those privileges. One of my least favorite things is thinking about where I’d be without them; how well or not I’d suffer the indignities and inequalities I’m spared. I don’t think, given the abundant evidence, that’s a common self-interrogation or conclusion drawn. And so Twitter and Facebook are full of “look at how great I’m doing, thanks to the belt scars along my upper back and neck, instead of collecting participation trophies.” Sure, buddy. You bet.
just came across this searching “feral gen xer” and…I mean I’m glad you had a good childhood. Sincerely. I’m sure that part of that good childhood was that your parents just didn’t leave you hanging around with the kids who effectively had no parents, and were finagling free packs out of the cigarette machines, and had keys on shoelaces, and genuinely were supervision-free. Like nobody knew where we were, and nobody cared. Not when we were roaming the neighborhood, and not when we were three states away. Your parents did right not to let you hang around with us, but it doesn’t mean we weren’t there. A lot of us were seriously victimized as kids, too, because that’s what happens when you’re 13 and roaming around the Port Authority on your own. Roaming anywhere on your own. I’m glad that’s less common now. At least I hope it’s less common now.
As for what it sounds like, I don’t really see why we should care. Don’t know about FAFO, but I do know that in general no, people do not fuck with us, usually for good reason. It really isn’t worth it.