Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What do you love about your generation?

With all due respect to Tom Brokaw, my grandparents may have been called “the greatest generation“ but Gen X was the best generation!

I am proud to say that I am a card-carrying member of Generation X! to be honest, I have to say I love just about everything about our generation. No, we’re not perfect, and I’ll get to that in a bit. But all the means that you see on social media about us are true.

All the Gen X memes are true

We really did drink water from the garden hose when we are playing outside during the summer. And spring and probably even into the fall as well.

Most of us really weren’t allowed indoors during nice weather days. We were told “go play outside. Be home when the light goes on/before it gets dark”. During those days on our own, we really did ride our bikes for hours going into the woods, going to the local convenience stores. Performing jumps on our dirt bikes. We did all of this.

And we really were the original latchkey generation. I personally grew up in a home where only the old man award. But that was essentially because mother heard her back when I was very young. I was unable to work full-time. Nevertheless, I think I was in second or third grade the first time I heard to “latch key“. It was an afterschool program primarily for Kids who had both parents working. And many of the kids did literally wear their house key around their neck.

I was born in 1974 so my memories are a little vague of this time, but we really did have ads that came out the three major networks at 10 PM that said “it’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?“ Seriously. Generation act jokes about this, but our parents sometimes had to be reminded that they had kids and that they needed to check in on them.

The most diverse music of any generation

I love the music of my generation. All of it! Spun, new wave, early 80s pop. Rap music went from being a club thing to going mainstream in the 1980s. I was, for the most part, a rock guy. Yes, I did even like some other hair metal But we also started getting thrash, metal and speed metal, which some people might consider the same genre during this time.

Generation X remembers when the letters MTV literally stood for “music television“ the idea of a 24 hour old music video channel was absolutely revolutionary. Unfortunately though, as time is shown us, there’s no money to be made in playing music videos. That, and the fast majority of the music videos of the time really were kind of cheesy. It’s funny for me to say this because kid two watches MTV classic whenever he’s with me now. We didn’t have social media. An MTV typically had its finger on the pulse of what was cool sooner than mainstream media did. If we wanted to know what was in, we watched MTV. 

The toys

My God, the toys! I know I will miss a few of them here, but some of my favorites were, probably in this order, Star Wars, G.I., Joe, the transformers, he-man. I wasn’t as rough and tumble as my other members of my GenX brethren were. I probably played inside as much as I played outside. I was definitely one of the dreamers. The story tellers. And all of the different action figures I played with throughout my childhood or rocket fuel for my dreams!

The TV shows, the movies. The explosion of cable television. The introduction of home video: first as the Betamax and ultimately as VHS. Stanley, we had no idea how good we had it.

We had our warts too

But for all of the great things I remember about my generation, Gen X certainly had its warts. There certainly were a lot of things that we said and did that would not be considered appropriate today. And the truth is, they certainly weren’t appropriate in the 1970s or even the 1980s. Some people like to say the society has gotten too soft. I think that society has gotten a little bit more sensitive and empathetic to the needs of others. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And I find it interesting that we have reached a point in time where we can look back at and say “that’s something you wouldn’t see/here today”

Making a better world for future generations 

And for this, I truly am glad. As a school teacher having taught millennials, and now Gen Z students, I think that the world has become a lot more sympathetic and understanding than what we grew up with in my generation. Whenever I’m talking to my contemporary, I’ll say things along the lines of “I see kids with Marvel backpacks, Toy, story, backpacks, and things of that sort“ back in our day, we would’ve gotten beat up for having something like that in middle school let alone in high school. But today’s kids, while they are more complicated than we were with social media, do you seem to have a lot more empathy for one another. That’s not to say that they don’t have clicks and things of that sort. But they are a lot more sympathetic than Gen X was.

I could go on and on calibrating books about my memories growing up as a GenX. But I think you get the idea.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
• Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)
• The Muscle of Empathy
• Where Do We Go From Here? Five Years Since January 6.
• Bugs, Boundaries, and the Art of Not Being Invisible

The “the best generation” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob