Embracing the #GenX suck – it’s better than the alternative

Last night, when I was supposed to be going to bed at a decent hour, I got pulled into a Twitter thread that, well, spoke to me. It was about the world not giving a fuck about GenXers or what we wanted, and a bunch of people responded in kind.

It’s funny, I’ve actually been thinking a fair amount about how being purportedly part of GenX has affected my life and shaped it differently than, say, the Baby Boom did, or the Millennial years. We really were sandwiched in between two very dominant generations, if you care to divide up the world like that. We still are. And it has had a fairly defining role in terms of our collective outlook, our expectations, our characters… you name it, the times nurture us, even as our nature makes itself known.

Nature vs. nurture is always a fun debate – if you like the sorts of debates that go nowhere and don’t result in any conclusion that everyone on earth can agree on. Obviously (to me), there’s a bit of both. There always is. But in the case of generational differences, I think nurture (i.e., extenuating circumstances that shape you by their input) tends to win out. Because it molds us in certain unique ways that are definitely part of “the times”… in ways that other people don’t get molded. Or is it “moulded”?

Eh, whatever.

As an aside, can I just say that I HATE THE BLOCK EDITOR. It is slow, it is not responsive to my typing, and it makes blogging so much harder than it has to be. ALL I WANT TO DO IS TYPE WORDS AND HAVE THEM SHOW UP QUICKLY AND CORRECTLY, AND THE BLOCK EDITOR DOES NOT LET ME DO THAT. AUGH!!!!

Anyway, where was I …

Oh yeah – the world not giving a flying EFF about me and my generation. It doesn’t. It doesn’t necessarily give a rat’s ass about any generation, come to think of it. And it begs the question (for me, anyway), why the hell do we even think in terms of “generations”? Why do we chunk out our demographics that way, when there’s really no clear-cut line between them, and they all kind of blend together… and anyway, there are different types of people in each “tranche” of humans that get released into the wild on a regular basis?

But I digress.

What I set out to post here, originally, is that I realize now that so many of the “wrinkles” that make my life so exciting have to do with being GenX, as well as being autistic. It’s an interesting mix, actually – being part of a generation that the people before and the people after don’t much care about… and being the kind of person who tends to engage differently with the world, regardless of whether others make room for me or not.

Even if I were surrounded by people who understood and loved and cared for me and made room for me and my quirks, there’s no guarantee I’d been particularly interested in interacting with them, anyway. I have my own way, my own path, my own little bubble where I’m perfectly content to NOT be part of a “bigger picture”.

So, meh – whatever. It’s all an adventure.