Are we becoming Generation Xtinct?

We're too young to quit but too old to matter. That makes us dangerous.

One of the most terrifying things about midlife is realizing we've already lived more of our lives than we still have yet to live. This is the phase of life where we transition from going to more funerals than we do weddings and come face to face with our inevitable mortality. While the fear of death becomes very real come middle age, I would argue the deeper fear so many late Gen X, Xennial, and early Millenial creatives like myself are experiencing right now is the fear of becoming irrelevant before we've made our marks on this world.

To be honest, the darkest fear I can't shake when I'm staring at the ceiling at 2am is neither the inevitable future of living out my final days in memory care mindlessly rewatching Friends reruns nor becoming creatively irrelevant someday.

My greatest fear is that at only forty five, I am already irrelevant.

When we began this journey as young adults in a pre-9/11 society barely connected via dial-up internet, we assumed we'd gradually climb the corporate ladder for the next forty years and then eventually be put out to pasture, living out our remaining years playing golf and bingo only after being handed our gold watches and our fat pensions.

Little did we know that since the turn of the millennium we would endure one of the most stark and rapid transformations of society in the history of human civilization. While there is nothing unprecedented about any of the catastrophes of the last twenty five years—terrorist attacks, endless wars on multiple fronts, market collapses, global pandemics, major geopolitical shifts, or transformative technological advances—what is unprecedented is the speed at which all of this is happening…and that it's all happening at the same fucking time.

Yet despite now being forced to play a completely different game with new rules (and without asking our permission first), we've continued to blindly play by the old rules. Midlife was supposed to be our "earning years" where we finally reaped the rewards we deserved after decades of "paying our dues" toiling in our windowless, four-walled digital mines. This was supposed to be our time to buy the bigger house, the fancier gadgets, the flashier clothes, and arrive unexpectedly in the driveway one afternoon with our brand new red 1970 Pontiac Firebird.

If formative films of the 90's like American Beauty and Fight Club taught us anything about what we should expect come midlife, it's that we would feel trapped by abundance and conformity.

Reminder: We are not our khakis.

I'm so Gen X, I can't even afford to have a fucking midlife crisis.

Try telling someone in midlife right now that materialism and conformity are the enemy when we're drawing from our (limited) retirement funds just to cover our monthly nut, we have no sustainable access to affordable health care without full-time employment, we're suddenly managing the ailing health of our boomer parents whose generation is getting walloped by dementia like we've never seen before, and decades worth of skill development and specialized expertise have been rendered all-but-useless over the last two years in the spirit of technological progress.

Fuck khakis. We're just trying to buy groceries and keep our parents from dying alone at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck.

This should be our time to rebel against our Crate & Barrel lifestyles, disown our IKEA living room sets, and embrace the purity of minimalism, yet we don’t have the time to rebel against a consumeristic lifestyle when we're selling our shit on Ebay to avoid going further into debt.

This should be our time to fight back against the conformist system that shoves we the creative round pegs into the corporate square holes, yet here we are unable to even compete for the square holes having been phased out to make room for the TikTok generation and our new robot overlords.

This should be our time to build generational wealth and ensure our children are given the opportunity to build a life better than ours, yet so many of us are now driving DoorDash or working at Trader Joe's just to pay rent to someone else so they can build generational wealth for their kids.

This should be our time to stress out about the rise and fall of our index funds, yet the margin of error in our monthly budgets is so razor thin we instead find ourselves stressing out about the rise and fall of egg prices and Barbie dolls.

This should be our time to stew in the juices of our own narcissism, desperately hoping to die someday as anything but ordinary, yet so many of us would kill right now just to go back to living an "ordinary" life that afforded any sense of job security or long term stability.

This should be our time to mentor the next generation of creative minds where we teach them the business, the tools, and the craft, but because the digital world has evolved so rapidly we need the next generation to teach us which emojis to use (and which to avoid for fear of our thumbs up emoji being racist) in our WhatsApp and WhosYWhatzIt conversations that are devoid of any capitalization or punctuation whatsoever.

This should be our time to pour decades of our lived experiences into the stories we're finally ready to share with the world, yet our media ecosystem has become so fractured and our "content creation" so misguided by the algorithms such that the next generation of timeless stories are ignored for the sake of pleasing the shareholders.

We've spent the last twenty five years obediently pushing the boulder up the mountain, but now with the summit in sight, we've instead discovered the mountain no longer exists. All we wanted to do was triumphantly reach the top and scream "Drago!!!!!!" But the air is so thin up here we can barely take a breath.

I don't know about you, but I haven't taken a deep breath in five fucking years. And I'm just tired.

I'm tired of having to live up to the expectations set forth by previous generations who define us by our job titles and zip codes.

I'm tired of feeling guilt and shame for still renting at forty-five because I lost my home during the housing market collapse of 2009.

I'm tired of witnessing the race to the bottom watching our skills and expertise become devalued to the point where even the work that is still available no longer pays us enough to keep up with the impossibly high cost of living.

I'm tired of being treated like an expendable widget working on the assembly line of someone else's dreams.

Most of all, I'm tired of wondering how I'm going to give my kids a chance at a life better than my own without having to sell my creative soul in the process.

Regardless of whether we chose it or not, this is the new game we’re playing.

This is our life, and it's still ending one minute at a time.

Every time I grief the loss of the entertainment industry as we knew it, I remind myself of one thing:

We are Generation Fucking X.

I have zero fucks left to give about maintaining any sense of the status quo, sacrificing whatever it takes to get back to some semblance of “normal,” or even worse becoming what the algorithms need me to become so I can help our social media overlords harvest our attention for the sake of advertising revenue.

Having zero fucks left to give makes us very, very dangerous.

We may be lost right now.

But don't call us Generation Xtinct quite yet.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

Our survival as a creative species will depend on:

1. Getting over ourselves and accepting that the world we were trained for no longer exists.

2. Realizing our lived human experiences coupled with our unique storytelling skills give us a distinct creative advantage over the TikTok generation and AI.

3. Getting the fuck out there and making cool shit.

To be clear: This is NOT a call-to-action for Tyler Durden-style vigilantism against the mega-globo-corporations that have rendered us largely obsolete.

This is a call-to-action to focus less on creating more “content” for the machine and instead focus more on telling stories that fucking matter again.

Since the beginning of human civilization, stories are what have helped us make sense of the world. In a world that makes absolutely no sense right now, there is no generation better positioned to become the great storytellers of our time than us.

At the crossroads of being too young to quit but too old to matter, we are left with two simple (but not easy) choices:

Option 1: Get busy living.

Option 2: Get busy dying.

I know which option I’m choosing.

How about you?

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