Dunno what to write. I’m empty. Just finished a 10,000-word story. Sucked everything outta me. Dried me up and tossed away my husk. Now here I am, trying to revitalize. Trying to regain my wind and start from scratch. I know it’ll take a few days. But I want it now. That’s my generation’s defining complex. Perversion of entitlement, I call it. That’s us, that’s Generation X. Subsequent generations, too. But we started it.
(Warning: sweeping generalizations to follow. Maybe one or two already.)
As children, we had everything we could want. Our baby-boomer, doctor-lawyer-executive parents had caught a virulent strain of the (North) American Dream, and we Gen Xers grew up with the symptoms: two-car garages, cottages, kidney-shaped pools in the backyard, two- and three-figure allowances, computers, video games, VCRs, pay-tv, bitter divorces, two birthdays, two Christmases . . . in short, excess. And lots of it. So we Gen Xers coasted into “adulthood” in the recession-riddled nineties, and it was like the carpet being pulled out from under our feet. We may have been educated up the wazoo, but really, we were facing a dead end: no job prospects, no savings, no property, nothing. Just that education up the wazoo, maybe a corresponding student debt, and the parent(s) we could always go back and live with for a while, just until the cloud passed . . . yeah, yeah, the deceptive lure of home’s stunting comforts . . . How could we establish new places to call home when we had neither moolah nor moxie enough to leave the homes of our parent(s) for ones of our own?
(Warning: totally arid and possibly spurious generalizations to follow.)
The answer: We rented. Rented for years. Put close to a hundred grand into someone else’s mortgage over the next decade without coming close to actually owning anything. Lived paycheck-to-paycheck, knowing that if the bottom ever fell out, we could always — sigh — move back in with the folk(s). But so long as we didn’t, so long as we could afford to stay away, we Gen Xers forged homes of our own. Even if we didn’t have two-car garages or cottages or kidney-shaped pools in the backyard, we had the Internet. We had video games. Home entertainment systems. Satellite TV. Five- and six- and even seven-figure salaries. Bitter divorces. Two Christmases (plus Hanukkah and Kwanza). Cellphones and ATMs and fast food on every corner, for every other meal. We had everything we wanted. Because we’d been conditioned to want shallow and technological and sarcastic and chemical distractions. Not just want them; expect them. Even with time, such early and effective conditioning is tough to break. Some of us strive for advancement or enlightenment; many of us avoid any attempt at improvement if it requires real effort, falling back on a default assumption that without lifting a finger, we’ll somehow still get what we want: shallow and technological and sarcastic and chemical. (Perhaps there’s an equation in nature, a ratio — crudely put — of deadbeat citizens to conscientious citizens. The relation seems to be consistent across human populations.) That’s us, that’s Generation X. Which now we can presume stands for Generation Expectation. Perversion of entitlement. We started it.
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