me and my data archive
In the end, there is only one winner in a generation war, and it’s not millennials or boomers or Gen Z—it’s capitalism.
These essentialized, whitewashed stereotypes impede the intergenerational organizing needed to create meaningful change.
If Jean Michel-Basquiat poured his pain onto the literal canvas of the masterpieces that he created (and sometimes destroyed) during his brief career, DMX turned his personal battles with alcohol and substance abuse into music that explicitly grappled with addiction, self-medication, depression, anger and grief. In doing so, he powerfully showcased Black male vulnerability in an industry that too often relied on a one dimensional view of masculinity to sell records and project subjective notions of authenticity. And his humor, dark and subversive, shone through his frank talk about sex, drugs and violence.
Gen X is the last generation that remembers life before the internet. At this point, we are at or beyond middle age. We are the lives that we have made. This makes us perfect marks for nostalgia. And Cobra Kai makes the mistake that most white-driven shows make: It ties nostalgia to whiteness. It gives us the token Black student, the token Asian student, that one, stereotypical Latinx family as signs of progress. As if it’s okay that the series is built on erasure, racism, appropriation, and people of color in service roles, because the original storyline was too. In the middle of season three, Daniel says, “I am the same age now that Mr. Miyagi was when he met me.” This realization could have become a moment of interrogation or possibility, but it passes. Because the show, like the movie, was never really about Mr. Miyagi.
By the way, the words don’t mean what most people think they do. “Reality bites” wasn’t meant to be “reality sucks,” though it’s usually defined that way. In the summer of 1992, ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Childress kept hearing references to “sound bites,” which made her think of Lelaina’s recorded vignettes of her friends—“little bites of reality,” Childress calls them. Now the phrase is everywhere—and of course it’s everywhere wrong, because that’s the Gen-X plight: to be sold out. “There are so many things I would change,” Childress said of Reality Bites. “But in a way, what’s great is, I don’t think that movie could have been written by a 30-year-old who knew better.”
It’s not that we don’t hear about the youngest generation’s financial woes: One in five “millennials”— defined by the Pew Research Center as people born between 1981 and 1997—are poor. Almost 50 percent are either unemployed or overqualified for their jobs. Two-thirds have long-term debt. But these problems are often framed as “failure to launch” rather than being part-and-parcel of a deep-seated economic divide. These studies don’t parse out who grew up poor and who didn’t. But considering that half of Baby Boomers have not saved for retirement and only 35% of Gen Xers have a college education, statistically it’s safe to say that many of their twentysomething children grew up poor or economically struggling.
You’d never know this by reading most “millennials” media coverage.
We’ve been called Generation Catalano, Xennials, and The Lucky Ones, but no name has really stuck for this strange micro-generation that has both a healthy portion of Gen X grunge cynicism, and a dash of the unbridled optimism of Millennials.