This post contains a lot of things that I don’t want to go unsaid. But you’re free to skip it if you don’t think it’s interesting.

When I was a kid I once read something that referred to the Baby Boom generation, and explained what it was. I asked my father, if that’s the Baby Boom generation, what generation am I? (I was born in ’71.) He thought about it and said, “I guess you’re part of the extreme tail end of the Baby Boom.” That didn’t sound right to me, and my father didn’t even sound convinced, but I can see where he was coming from. First, both he and my mother had been alive for the end of World War II. Therefore their kids must be part of the postwar baby boom, right? Also, the Boom was the only generation anybody knew about at the time. There were Boomers, and then there were, you know, all the other people.

Skip ahead to my university years. One of the things I did in university was to get way big into Ayn Rand.* As such I read Jerome Tuccille’s book, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, which is about the New Right movement in the 1960s. The upshot of the book was that those people were crazy.

And this didn’t make sense to me. I knew that the hippies and leftists on campuses in the sixties were crazy. But I had thought–as an Ayn Rand type, of course I thought–that they were crazy as a result of the ideas they held. But Tuccille’s book showed me rightists, who had very different ideas, but were crazy in the same ways. Furthermore, I could look around my own campus, which had both leftists and rightists, and none of them were crazy. I mean, not really crazy. So what was going on? I couldn’t figure it out. I concluded that there must have been something in the air back then. Again, not really satisfactory.

But then, a few years later, I found Strauss and Howe’s 13th Gen in a bookstore. It caught my eye because it had cartoons and margin quotes; good job, marketers and layout artists. Eventually bought and read it, and from there went on to their first book, Generations, where they laid out their whole cycle theory in full. And it answered a lot of my questions. The students on campuses in the ’60s weren’t crazy because they were leftists or rightists; they were crazy because they were Boomers. (I am simplifying.) The students now are different because the generations are all different ages now. It made a lot of sense to me.

It still does, but: I’ve always kept one foot back out of complete immersion in the generational cycle theory. Yes, it makes sense, but lots of things that seem to make sense turn out not to be true. Yes, it seems like generations are a meaningful idea, but you can’t tell anything about anyone from what generation they are. And, yes, there seems to be a historical pattern, but how much of that is confirmation bias? So I think Strauss and Howe are on to something, but I’m open to the idea that they’re not.

When it comes to this project, I am relying on two basic, indisputable facts and one proposition that I am confident about. The facts are

1. It is possible to study the people born between 1961 and 1981 as a group
2. It is possible to study our current time period, starting in 2001, as an era
   and the proposition is
3. It will be interesting and worthwhile to do this.

Some more ground I want to cover here… One criticism of generational studies is that the stereotype of a generation is formed by the upper-class white people and celebrities of the generations in question. And it is a true criticism. It is a known problem. I will do my best to work against it; I’m more interested in stating facts than reinforcing stereotypes. I will try to cast my net widely. But the famous and the infamous will probably still get more coverage than the non-famous.

The birthyear range I’m using for Generation X is 1961-’81. That’s because those are the birthyears Strauss and Howe use. Other sources use 1965 as the start of the range, because they define the Boom as running from 1946-’64, because they are treating the demographic phenomenon of the postwar baby boom as the definition of the generation, and they are not looking at the generational personality. I don’t expect to change anybody’s mind about this, but anyway that’s my reason.

It should be obvious by now that whatever this all turns out to be, it’s being shaped by my personal point of view. I am aware of that, and up to a point I’m comfortable with it. It’s an experiment. But it’s also playing to my strengths. In 13th Gen**, Strauss and Howe say about GenX that while we are “…notably weak analysts and logicians, [we] are notably good diarists, good at describing [our] feelings and observations. (That’s precisely what open education taught [us] to do.)” Whether it’s true for you or other Xers I leave as an exercise for the reader. But it is at least partly true of me. And, just to be clear, my personal point of view does extend to politics.

I wrote earlier that I wasn’t going to introduce a whole lot of generational-cycle jargon here, and I’m not. I think the last thing I should mention, at least for now, is that Strauss and Howe see this era, this about-twenty-years-long period, as a Crisis era. By which they mean it’s a time of drastic societal change in which society has to come together and try to solve one big dangerous challenge, renew its institutions, and sweep away all the remains of old stuff that doesn’t work anymore. These Crisis eras happen about every eighty years; the most recent one before this was characterized by the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s been over 23 years since September 11th, 2001, and the Crisis is still going strong. These eras are usually around twenty years long, but this one is already somewhat longer and may turn out to be a lot longer. How can this be resolved? I will first note that Neil Howe, in his 2023 book The Fourth Turning Is Here, says that the Crisis started with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I disagree, but Howe’s timeline fits his theory better. Anyway, these are the possibilities for what’s going on:

• Howe is correct, the Crisis started in 2008, and it will presumably end sometime around 2028
• the generational cycle theory is wrong and we shouldn’t expect any of this to fit any pattern
• the generational cycle theory is valid but we don’t know as much about it as we think we do and this long Crisis isn’t a problem
• the generational cycle theory is valid, but something happened to break the cycle and we are now in uncharted territory
• the generational cycle theory is valid, the Crisis started in 2001, it has already ended, and we are just having an unusually rocky start to the next era

We will find out together. That’s one feature of generational analysis: it’s much easier to do it in retrospect. Let everything happen, and then, twenty or thirty years later, look back at it. But I think there’s also something to be said for on-the-ground reporting.

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*That’s me. Never met a crackpot theory I didn’t like. It’s neither an interesting nor a necessary story, but, just so you know, I’m not way big into Ayn Rand anymore
**Page 77

Here’s how I decided to create this project. One of my correspondents e-mailed me once to ask me if I knew of any good quotes or passages by anybody in the Lost Generation, advice for the youngsters, type of thing. (The Lost Generation were born from 1883-1900. They’re the same generational type as GenX.) I had some stuff around by Groucho Marx and Cornelia Otis Skinner and others, and looked through it all, but didn’t find anything good. Fun to read, but it didn’t let you in on anything. I eventually sent him a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay which was kind of what he asked for. But the real problem was that the Lost Generation just didn’t seem to pass on advice like that.

In their GenX book, 13th Gen, Strauss and Howe have a section on the Lost generation, where they have some sidebar quotes from Lost figures about their people. I read some of those sources too: Malcolm Cowley, Randolph Bourne. And it was the same. They were very concrete and day-to-day, without any reflection or abstraction. Nothing you could really get a lot out of.

And I wondered. What have we learned ourselves, that we would want to pass along to those younger than us? (To be sure, anybody who comes to GenX looking for enlightenment deserves whatever results they get.) Despite our reputation we really have picked up a thing or two in our times, and some of us may even be still learning. Someone should collect that material. And I’m someone. The idea evolved from there, but I hope that that original core is still visible in what will come: the collected wisdom of Generation X.