They have no idea what’s coming, do they? Generation X by Douglas Coupland
Being a millennial, I guess I’m somewhere between Gen X and Z if we go with it alphabetically. In my social media, in daily conversations, in anywhere, the conversations of generational differences are becoming more and more common. I get reels these days on the Gen Z lingo, some which I often use not knowing that I’m about a decade too old to include them in my daily conversations. Lingo aside, there are always the difference of mindset between generations which set us apart from one another.
Except, not so much. Coupland’s Generation X isn’t necessarily the Generation X that we are familiar with who are born between 1965 to 1980. Coupland refers to yes, the subset of those who were born during this period but who had also rejected the rat race and try to find life’s meaning in their own way, with the people who are trying to do the same thing. It is still, a generation who had been long sold the American Dream but quickly finding out that it’s a giant fucking sham.
It is also a generation who had no ears to listen to their discontent, save each other; a generation addicted to the screens for lack of things to do and an abundance of apathy; a whole clan with money on the back of their minds and though wanting to get out of the vicious cycle of money, recognised its evil necessity. Sounds familiar? I could replace the X with the Z and the result would come out the same.
Bitching about life a la Canterbury Tales in the middle of a Californian desert
Except that in Canterbury Tales, they were all going towards Canterbury. Generation X really had nowhere to go and this narrative cul-de-sac is kind of the point. They might go to New York for an off chance that the person they want to sleep with is the love of their life; or they go back to their family for Christmas. It’s all quite demure. Oh sorry, wrong lingo.
There is not much of a story, save for the stories that Andy, Dag and Claire tell each other. We find out about their origin stories: Dag was working in corporate marketing before a disagreement with his boss and being shut down in humiliation by a colleague; Claire was traveling with the twenty something members of her family (as in the amount of people, not their age) still having no clue what she’s supposed to do before deciding to settle in Coachella for a while.
And our narrator, Andy himself, well he used to live in Japan, even having picked up the language. After an awkward encounter with his Japanese boss, who showed him an indiscrete photo of Marylin Monroe, he stormed right out of his office and as Dag did, left everything behind. There are other side characters that come and go, all of which are just as lost. Tobias is Claire’s pseudo-boyfriend, a finance bro who really despised what he does and longed for the life of Andy, Claire and Dag. Elvissa, who wears the fashions of the past to stay trendy and like the rest, thus rejecting the status quo.
Gen Z: the new Gen X? There’s a lot there.
But what is the status quo, and why would these drifters want to shun it down? In all honesty, it looks very bloody similar to what we have now, but what we have now is much, much worse. When Coupland wrote Generation X, a generational rift was forming between the boomers (born between 1946 to 1964) and the next generation in line, that is Generation X. The boomers who were bred out of the euphoria of World War II had only known a period of growth which guaranteed them jobs, landed property and a big fat retirement fund.
Gen X, bred by the belief that education guarantees you a good job, that a good job guarantees a livelihood and the livelihood guarantees happiness, was becoming quickly disenchanted by this empty promise. Though they are able to get a job and earn a living, what they find is a culture of dissatisfaction, perhaps through their own fault. It is a colourless life with little reward, and a heavy feeling that something just ain’t right. For Andy, this is his Japanese boss obsessing over Marylin Monroe’s cunt; for Dag it’s working under a former hippie with no clue about marketing; for Claire it’s being pitted between her family’s divorces, resulting somehow in more reproduction of more and more family members.
Coupland also writes his novel in a form similar to how Gen X would consume media — with comic panels, truisms masked as inspirational signs and dictionary definitions of trending words. It’s fit for a mind already used to the distraction of TV ads and billboard signs while driving. Language is evolving to suit human behaviour and vice versa. Some of these vocabulary is apt for our times and arguably even more apt for ours than for the author’s time of writing:
Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient as to bolster its own collective ego: “Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.
Safety Net-ism: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life’s hurts. Usually parents.
Historical Underdosing: To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcast.
Historical overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcast.
There is no outlet for their angst, for a droning discontent where they are unable to find meaning in the mutation of the American Dream. The rat race that they were a part in no longer guarantee them the ability to own a property, to live as carefree as their parents and to be entirely independent. Yet, in the times of trouble, they will return to their parent’s nest. To add fuel to the fire, they also have issues committing to a relationship and would opt for fleeting or completely platonic ones. Lost, unhappy and struggling to form their own identity, they resort to the desert to work menial jobs, tell each other stories mixing their own experiences with the absurd. Some of these best stories won’t have a conclusion or resolution.
Yet, reading this book in 2024, where the job market is bleaker than your great-grandfather’s funeral, owning a property in your twenties is as possible as landing an elbow on Jon Jones’s head and buying groceries is as shit sure as losing your money in Vegas, I can’t help thinking that Andy, Dag and Claire should just harden the fuck up. The current Gen Z is going through the same shit as the characters in the book, but if we compare one to the other, one is going through a drizzle while the other is in New Orleans bracing for Hurrican Katrina.
But we have the vantage point of hindsight. We can see now that Gen X would get their shit together to find jobs and eventually buy property, maybe a bit further from downtown but still owning one. This trickles through my generation, the millennials who are still doing alright, though safety is never guaranteed. We can conjecture how Gen Z is going to wash up — in twenty years time we may have hit the Malthusian number where the population is decreasing, they will be in their forties still struggling in the gig economy (if AI still hasn’t taken over their jobs) and my guess that I’d love to be mistaken about is that they might have the highest suicide rates out of the X, Y and Zs.
I feel the discontent. I get it. I think all generations would go through this sort of existential crisis at some point, and that’s fine. History had told us that the majority overcome existential obstacles, the minority who couldn’t may rot in the desert. But I feel bleak for the Gen Z and Gen Alpha coming up behind our tails. Looking at the dire situations in wealthier countries such as Australia or Canada, it is no wonder that this young generation looks like they’re in their forties while still in their twenties, they barely have sex and procreate and they’re stuck on their screens glued to Tik Tok.
I would love Coupland to write about this young generation, though he is not part of it as he was a Gen X. The situation is dire and we are only on the ebb of the start of a great social decay. Generation X now seems soft, but at the time, the novel was a warning of things to come — perhaps a cultural rot that had already festering for some time. It is still an apt warning bell for us to find a way to stop the rot. I can’t think of anything more necessary than this for humanity’s sake.
Two more definitions, eerily relevant:
Poorochondria: Hypochondria derived from not having medical insurance.
The plight of the American health care system. Luigi Mangione recently arrested after gunning down United Health CEO in cold blood.
Bread and circuits: The electronic era tendency to view party politics as corny — no longer relevant or meaningful or useful to modern societal issues, and in many cases dangerous.
Trump’s second term anyone?
Further reading / watching
- Coupland taking on a boomer interviewer — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvZB0_kAMpE
