The Super Power of Generation X
How Negligence, Storytelling, and Game Theory Equipped Us for a Surreal and Unpredictable World
This is not an article on the, erm, inattentive nature of our childhoods while our parents were off self-actualizing in boardrooms, barrooms, and courtrooms. Rooms and conversations we were forbidden from entering, or, if we were forced to witness, no one was curious about our thoughts on what we were enduring. We were a new kind of silent generation. Existing in the sidelines, eyes in the wood grain of our paneled basements.
We were largely left to figure “it” out. What “it” was was never specified, which played out predictably. There are a lot of good articles out there already on these topics. This is more an observation that we have been drilling for current times our entire lives. I have heard that as a generation, we will never rule. But I am starting to question that premise.
In short, we were built from and for this.
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A few (squared) Christmases back, when my youngest sister was still in high school, my mother purchased a throwback gift for all the sisters — an Atari console with the classic games built-in.
Between the ages of 5 and 10, my older sister Melissa and I (born in 1975 and 1977, respectively) played a stupid amount of video games. And I mean stupid, because we were not good. We were soooo not good. We collectively beat zero games, but still, with the safety of their clear objectives and obstacles, their organized pixel predictability, we sought our escape.
Two decades later, while we sat side by side playing River Raid, our favorite of all time, Melissa marveled at the fluidity of our navigation in a game we hadn’t seen in decades. “Imagine if someone taught me how to play a musical instrument or a foreign language at that age instead. My life could have gone entirely different.”
I agreed with her, but lately, I’ve been thinking — maybe, as the first video game generation, we did learn something valuable: reset.
We would reset that game on a whim. To piss each other off. If the other won too many times in a row. We weren’t good, so it was easy to remain unattached. We were little Buddhists in how little we cared for our games and toys. I mean, we liked them, but it was also easily observable that entropy is real. My father’s archival care of his collections was lost on us. Why keep something safe in a box when it was available to destroy right now?
Kill Your Television: Boomers Got Duped
It has been postulated that our generation adapted to computers in a way that Boomers never could because we were trained to search for invisible cues in video games (think Mario mushrooms, warp pipes, secret passages, etc). Unlike Boomers, who had to learn computers as adults, or the younger Millennials and Gen Z, who grew up in a fully digital world, Gen X and Xennials developed a unique skill set: searching for patterns, hidden paths, and unspoken rules.
Arguably, the boomers are the first television generation. They grew up on the Americana, “father-knows-best” sitcom, and of course, that is what they are all so nostalgic for now. Not actual memories, but the Christmas Special, Sunday Night Theater family room. Entertained, safe, pleasantries and canned jokes, everything packaged and in its place by prop directors and set designers.
We didn’t get that. Our media was more discursive and disjointed. Instead of relating to the constructed television sitcom and 90-minute-movie-plot narrative arcs, we didn’t experience them as a mirror, but as teleporting into a world that was not our own. Why don’t our lives match what we are seeing on television?
I remember reading a 2010 Cracked article called The Karate Kid Ruined the Modern World that I still think about a lot. It’s worth reading, but briefly, it was the critique that modern cinema has detrimentally reshaped our perception. We expect resolution and meaning.
We grew up watching stories wrap up in 22 minutes with a laugh track and a moral, or in a 90-minute hero's journey. This expectation of closure — whether it’s a happy ending, a lesson learned, or at least some kind of narrative justice — has left many of us feeling unmoored when reality refuses to follow the script. We feel confused and disillusioned when we wander off into subplots and ambiguity.
But if we don’t want to walk into the same delusional path of our predecessors, mourning for a reality that never existed, all you have to do is remind yourself that our lives are not screenplays. You are allowed to fuck up and meander off script for years. And then pick it up again in a way that would make zero sense to a movie character, okay?
The only thing that keeps us trapped is the belief that we can’t.
The Double-Edged Sword of Storytelling
- The Constructive Side: We learned storytelling, humor as a coping mechanism, and a sense of pacing. We attempt to structure our careers, relationships, and personal growth in ways that make sense narratively.
- The Not-So-Helpful Side: We crave clear heroes and villains, and when life presents moral ambiguity or unresolved tensions, we feel lost. It’s easy to fall into binary thinking (splitting) because that’s how stories work — good vs. bad, success vs. failure, love vs. loneliness. But life isn’t a movie, and we don’t get a closing montage with a feel-good song.
So here we are, the generation caught between reset culture (from gaming) and resolution culture (from TV/movies). We know we can start over, but we also desperately want things to resolve properly.
It’s no wonder Gen X and the oldest Millenials often feel a mix of meh and WTF is happening? But maybe the most superhuman skill of all of this is to thrive in the unresolved spaces. Maybe it’s fucking bold to let yourself lose the objective — and keep playing anyway.
I keep reading Medium articles published by my peers, who are pressing “reset” on their lives at age 40, or 50, or 60, and I whole-heartedly endorse this solution. Don’t wait for this shit to make sense before jumping back in. You will wait on the sidelines forever.
