My least favorite part of my daily routine in eighth grade was, by far, my morning bus ride to school. It was early morning, no one on Bus 52 had been caffeinated, and as I remember it, it was almost always a quiet, cold, and frankly depressing way to start each day. Worse, it always seemed to take forever. But it was only a ten-minute ride from one end of Overland Park, Kansas, to the other via I-435, which in 1980 was pretty much the border of the exurban sprawl.
There was little to do but stare out the window and watch the new and fancy office park, Corporate Woods, get developed over the course of a year or two, and that sort of contemplative, even meditative act of starting the day by just staring out a window has been on my mind a lot lately. I was thirteen, brand new to a big city, and had no idea the most valuable thing I owned was ten minutes with nothing to do. Even though that was what life was like generations ago, it still feels very close to me and, I assume, to many people my age. And it’s but one of many examples of just how dramatically the world has changed in my lifetime.
Consider a similar bus ride today. Probably every junior high kid on that bus would be glued to TikTok, Instagram, Discord, or some other new social media platform I’m not aware of yet. And smartphone ubiquity is but one example, and honestly more of a symptom, of the massive society-changing developments that my Generation X cohort has been forced to learn and adopt, which, for a bunch of reasons, never seem to get properly appreciated, or even acknowledged, to the degree I think they should be.
I turn 60 this week, and I’m not typically bothered by birthdays, even the big ones with a zero. I’m not the sort to host a big party, though I appreciate those who do and will happily celebrate. My particular pathological pattern is to insist it’s no big deal and have no ideas for friends and family who want to do something nice; then, when the day comes and goes with those very same friends and family following my strict “no big deal” guidelines, I privately feel sorry for myself. Yeah, it’s not something I’m proud of, but I digress.
But this year has led me to a lot of hard thinking about the world today in comparison to the one we grew up in. And how many dramatic innovations, philosophical shifts, and information-ecosystem evolutions have happened in the past 50 or so years. And how our generation, raised by another overlooked “silent generation,” has been remarkably resilient, bridging the gap between the boomers, who never met a decade they didn’t think was about them, and the millennials, whom the boomers raised to agree.
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The list of significant societal changes our generation lived through is pretty unnerving, and one could argue that, even though we were too young at the time to appreciate it, it started with Walter Cronkite crossing over from objective journalist to saying on air that America was mired in stalemate following the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. That was particularly relevant for a few reasons, but mostly because it captures what it was like to be raised in the 70s by parents who had largely lost trust in institutions, especially the US government.
The 70s started with a nation still reeling from a raft of political assassinations, then delivered the first major terrorist attack broadcast live, on ABC Sports’ coverage of the ‘72 Olympics, and Richard Nixon‘s resignation following the Watergate scandal, which was arguably American journalism’s finest hour. There was stagflation, Jimmy Carter, the prime interest rate above 20%, gas lines, and an Iran hostage crisis that, in hindsight, felt like Iran punching up at the US when it was down. Trust in government went from roughly three-quarters of the nation in the 60s to about a quarter of the country by 1980.
But it wasn’t all bad. The US Bicentennial brought a brief moment of bipartisan patriotism and tall ships. Cable television made rabbit ears and TV antennas a thing of the past, and took us from the three networks plus PBS (which gave us Monty Python and Soccer Made in Germany) to 13 channels. When we weren’t roaming around my quiet neighborhood in Hutchinson, Kansas, playing kick the can or hunting garter snakes and bullfrogs, my friends and I were watching endless reruns of Leave It to Beaver, The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island. It was truly a gilded age of rerun television, which probably says a LOT about our generation.
There was also appointment viewing and shows that everyone watched. I distinctly recall hanging out at the bike racks before school started in fifth grade, and there was not one person who had not watched the first night of the landmark miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley‘s book. Kunta Kinte’s on-air vomiting as a result of slave ship seasickness was something we were all discussing because we were ALL living in the same shared reality, having watched the same TV show. That was as broad as broadcasting got, long before it gave way to the narrowcasting world we live in now.
Then came the 1980s and Ronald Reagan, a populist and nationalist decades before the words came back into fashion. He restored a sense of American pride throughout the nation, but looking back, it was a pretty cynical approach. Yes, the economy came out of its nosedive, in part due to his policies, and kids were no longer forced to convert imperial measurements to the metric system. But what Reagan did best was introduce a winning marketing strategy as governmental ethos, while insisting that anything the government did was bad. A generation already distrusting institutions suddenly had a president confirming they were right, and a government that could fail at whatever it did and point to it as proof.
Reagan’s biggest legacy in how we live today, arguably, was the FCC’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which not only gave rise to conservative talk radio and Rush Limbaugh, as many believe, but also the whole concept of opinion-based news outlets that are no longer the exception to the rule, but the rule itself. Add in a generation of college professors teaching that every fact is really just somebody’s interpretation, an idea that took about twenty years to make its way from the seminar room to the newsroom, and the nation had all the ingredients for the toxic stew of misinformation we find ourselves in today.
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Everything that changed in the newsroom over those decades was dwarfed by what changed underneath it. The technology that carried the news, and the pace at which it changed, are almost impossible to convey.
The home computer and the invention of desktop publishing came first, but they were forebears of what Al Gore called the “information superhighway,” which he was among the first to champion. That, of course, became the Internet, and the World Wide Web that ran on top of it. It suddenly made legacy distribution systems archaic and added weird new words to our lexicon, like disintermediation and aggregation. Editors and content gatekeepers would soon become far less important (for better and largely worse).
Maybe more influential than the Internet itself was the invention of the browser cookie, the first time, as far as I know, that a medium could watch back, and the start of the entire digital panopticon we find ourselves in today. Soon that tracking capacity was wedded to the search engine era, which also brought riches through optimized and monetized search results.
And then came the iPhone, or technically the smartphone, and it was a massive computer that could do everything, and it fit neatly in your pocket. Too much has been said about this, but having a camera, browser, jukebox, calendar and telephone in your pocket was, suffice it to say, a big deal. And that’s before any social games or apps were developed. Union Square in the 90s was always filled with people enjoying a nice day, eating lunch and chatting with their friends. Go there today, and nearly every single person is sitting alone, staring at their phone.
Smartphones helped fuel the rise of social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which were eventually driven by machine-learning algorithms that knew precisely how to optimize engagement, and it turned out nothing engages like divisive outrage. And I’d rather not get into AI in this piece, but of course, AI, which may be the only technological advance that comes with its own doomsday clock.
The biggest difference between today and the bike-rack discussion of Roots is that we no longer share the same reality or even the same set of facts. When “respect my truth” becomes an oft-heard defense, it’s a clear sign that there are multiple truths and no longer just one set of facts. The three broadcast networks we were once limited to have been replaced by a seemingly infinite number of streams and digital options. Everyone has their own customized feed, and no one really knows what they have in common with anyone else, at least not with confidence.
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There is a difference between adoption and adaptation, at least in my mind. Adoption is additive, a new inclusion of a person, place, or thing, or in this case, a new technology, way of communicating, or understanding of how the world operates. Adaptation is what comes next, and it follows the nature of evolution. It’s the idea that the new thing can be not just used but optimized, in a manner that improves or elevates the world around it. Sort of like how a more nuanced or refined use of a tool can be better described as using an instrument. Adoption is the steep learning curve that comes with introduction and initial use. Adaptation is when everyone knows what to do with it.
Historical moments illustrate this perfectly. Take the introduction of electricity in 1882. It took decades for electricity to become ubiquitous in homes, and the rules of its use, the adaptation, took even longer than the wires to reach everyone. Automobiles arrived before anyone knew that society needed an infrastructure beyond roads and garages: traffic laws, licenses, and insurance that made cars safer and better for everyone. Televisions arrived in the late 1940s and were largely a novelty, but government regulations and societal norms didn’t really take hold until the 1970s.
All of these were massive changes to how we collectively lived, and there was no fixed clock, just a messy, contested, and slow interval in which society took the time to figure out how each could best be managed for the improvement of most everyone’s daily lives.
But look at what I just described, and you can find a truly mind-boggling number of massive changes that have occurred with an unsettling degree of frequency, each of which is arguably comparable to Gutenberg’s printing press, without the century or even decades of time to understand each or build societal norms or guidelines around it.
This has happened to everyone of all ages, but I’m here to postulate that Generation X has had to bear the brunt of it, largely because we are the cohort that best remembers what life used to be like in the “olden days,” even as the constant churn of adoption through to attempted adaptation has come at the expense of an appreciation of where we’ve come from and how much has changed.
We are the last generation that grew up inside things that had already been figured out, three networks, church on Sunday, Little League on Saturday, and the first to spend our entire adult lives inside things that haven’t been. In other words, we haven’t been afforded the luxury of nostalgia because we are too busy trying to figure out and survive today.
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All things being equal, our generation had it extremely good. There was no draft in support of a major war, and we all grew up with the basic assumption that you’d reach the same lifestyle your parents achieved, if not better.
If I think about who I was sitting with on that bus to junior high in 1980, I hope most of them are doing well. I hope they're happy. I hope the ones still in Johnson County are coaching somebody's kid. I’m comfortable thinking that most everyone turned out okay.
It’s not necessarily because we are some sort of terrific cohort but rather because we were raised at a time when there was little fluency in how best to raise children. Our parents were dialed in enough to know that they needed to love us, but they also didn’t find spiritual meaning in us or worship us. As a result, we were told to rub a little dirt on it, dust ourselves off, stop whining, and move on to the next thing. And that’s precisely the sort of generational resilience that’s allowed us to get on with life despite whatever game-changing societal or technological advance got thrown in our faces. So, proper respect for the Silent Generation for doing it the right way (cheers to you, Mom!)
We also grew up in a time when community was a much stronger part of our lives. Whether it was church, Little League, block parties, the local pool, or parents involved in the PTA, that’s where the norms came from. The Internet and social media didn’t narrate them; your peers helped you navigate them yourself. Now organized religion has fallen on hard times, and many in my cohort live on a spectrum between agnostic and atheist, but my generation is still very much involved in the communities we live in.
We show up for school functions, coach Little League, and some even go to church because they want the quiet sanctuary followed by the coffee-and-donut kicker. It’s a good shot of the quiet, contemplative nature of life we might be missing from the school bus rides we took in 1980. But church and Little League and the PTA were examples of our adaptation, not adoption. These slower institutions tell us what to do with our lives, which the faster technological ones distract us from.
We weren’t raised to narrate ourselves. We instead built the machinery of narration for everyone else. Most of the people who wrote the first browser, built the search engine, and launched the video and social platforms were almost all born between 1965 and 1980, and so were most of the editors who ran newsrooms through the transition and the ones who figured out how to turn cable news into clips (guilty). It’s the one thing on this list our generation actually made, and yet we rarely use it to tell our own stories.
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The massive changes of the last three-plus decades didn’t just change the way we live, communicate, or consume information. They cut three specific ties to things we grew up with: the past, the future, and the present.
Start with the past. Nostalgia needs two things to really work its magic. First, enough time needs to have passed since something happened for us to feel its beautiful sadness or sad beauty. Second, and more importantly, we need the time and space to relish those memories. The pace at which we are forced to adopt new things, and the feed that provides constant distraction, have killed any bandwidth to relive anything. There is also the very real downside of technology: it has left thousands of family photos from the aughts trapped on an outdated iMac in storage, and $10,000 of iTunes purchases stored locally on it. We’ve lost the intervals in which old things were allowed to become memories.
Then the future. Our generation grew up with movies, TV shows, and books that portrayed it as a wonderful, idyllic experience. Jetpacks, Lost in Space, Epcot, and The Jetsons are but a handful of examples. Seeing the not-so-distant future that optimistically turns out to have been a real luxury, and one that has since given way to scary sci-fi dystopia. We fear what we might become in the near future because we are so untethered in how we are living today, without the communities, social contracts, and goodwill we believed in, perhaps naively, back in simpler times. In other words, we are living in the scary future today, and have zero interest in playing it out to see what terrible thing might come next.
And the present, or ourselves. Getting back to that boring-ass bus trip I had in eighth grade. Or traveling cross-country in a Country Squire wagon armed only with the Rand McNally road atlas or a game of 20 Questions to occupy our minds. But thinking thoughts while staring out the window driving across the Great Plains? I firmly believe that did our generation’s brains a lot of good. And today, we no longer feel terribly comfortable just sitting with ourselves without needing to check our phones for whatever our information addiction requires.
In 1980, I had three things without knowing it: a past that was allowed to turn into memories, a future everybody agreed was going to be great, and ten empty minutes on a bus every morning. I don’t have any of the three now.
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I was thinking about this piece while riding the subway to Midtown to support a friend at her appointment with an oncologist. And I found myself remarkably anxious, not because of the scary nature of the appointment, or because I was grappling with what this turning-sixty Gen X essay should look like. I was extremely agitated because, as I got on the subway, I realized I’d neglected to charge my phone, and it was at 2%.
Yes, I am addicted to information, and the idea of being without a phone constantly telling me WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW™ had me beside myself. I worked through all the permutations of whether the fine people at Memorial Sloan Kettering would have a charger, or whether I should just buck up and deal without my phone. None of it made me feel particularly good about myself.
But then I thought about that daily bus ride to school that I hated so much and realized I had the perfect bookend for this piece. Forty minutes on a train, nowhere I needed to be but there, nobody who could reach me, and nothing to do but look at the beauty of fellow New York City subway commuters. I tried to appreciate it, but my addiction didn’t abate so easily.
Which is my generation in a nutshell. Nobody ever afforded us the luxury of nostalgia, and when a subway car finally did, forty minutes at a time, I spent it checking my battery.
We’ve adapted to harder things than sitting still. I’m still not leaving the phone at home, but I might try charging it and not looking at it, which for my generation counts as growth.