Welcome to my mid-life crisis. Let’s examine the triumph and tragedy of looking back.
What else is there to do but look back?
In our stupid present, does our best chance of happiness depend on how well we can recapture a feeling from our past?
Throwing aside all the real problems we faced as children – bullying, loneliness, the fear of nuclear annihilation, emotionally unavailable parents, flying through windshields (who cared about seatbelts and car seats?), getting impaled by lawn darts, terrible Atari games – we view childhood and adolescence now as a golden period where we figured out the pace and purpose of life.
We might sometimes think about the freedom we had as young adults when we finally drove our own cars and could go to bed whenever we damn well pleased. But mostly we’re searching for that specific feeling, wrapped in dusk-colored armor, that insulates us from the terrors of the modern world: Wandering through the neighborhood on our bikes when suddenly the streetlights shimmer and flicker to life to call us home, so we shake off the grass stains of a day well spent, excited to bask in the warm glow of the dinner table, enjoy an episode of our favorite show, play with our Transformers toys, forget to do our homework, and then fall asleep with dreams of a glorious Saturday morning right around the corner – a Saturday filled with cartoons, MTV, and getting lost near a creek somewhere.
Or something like that.
These are the depressed thoughts of a cranky member of Generation X, someone with aches and pains, someone who hurts themselves when they sneeze too hard, someone who has reached the age of fifty and now sees the world for what it really is. These are the feelings of someone who remembers the comfort – and the exhilarating danger – we found in watching a new video premiere or absorbing the aura of a paneled basement as Purple Rain blasted through our ridiculously oversized headphones.
Whatever that feeling is, it’s gone, and it’s not coming back.
As we Gen Xers (born between 1964 and 1980) try to deal with that reality, we frantically search for something to recreate the rush: A TV show (have you seen Severance?), a who-done-it paperback — or maybe hitting “shuffle” on a recommended playlist of new songs, hoping to find a diamond in the rough, something that will help us forget another day in this “successful” life we’ve made: a life of corporate-speak, endless heat, noisy traffic, hair-trigger tempers, frustration, information overload, and the latest news about our sick and dying country.
The Importance of Pop Culture
We’re desperate because we’ve aged right out of pop culture, but it’s still the most important thing in our lives, the only thing we reliably talk about when pressed (other than the weather). All we do is make time for entertainment and distractions – those things have become our reason for living or at least the way we fill up our limited time on Earth.
Things were better, though, weren’t they? Maybe these feelings started as the usual “in my day” claptrap that makes us feel superior to these crazy kids, but something has happened to our collective psyches. We all want to get out of here. We all want to go back. No one wants to stay to see how this plays out. We root for the asteroid. We welcome civil war. Even Millennials and Gen Zers ache for a time they weren’t even a part of. There’s nothing here for them now, so why not?
Nostalgia can be dangerous and blinding. But we feel like we almost had it figured out – and then then it slipped away like everything else. In a profound kind of executive-level avoidance, we cope with the end of this American experiment by spending four hours reading comments under a YouTube video that ranks the best TV show theme songs from the eighties. (I’m partial to Cheers or Miami Vice, but Golden Girls and its incidental music that plays as the opening credits conclude over a still shot of the lovely ladies’ house is the most evocative of the era.)
I only beat this game once.
We dive into that old record, and for the briefest of seconds we are there: Where we first heard it, who we were with, our tight-rolled jeans, the hairspray brand holding our curls together, the store where we camped out at the mall – when there was a mall before they tore it down, before our little hometown got run over by religious fanatics and political imbeciles, before any of that made any difference.
It’s not hard to see the pattern, a story of our lives told through our entertainment, an examination of our generation fueled by soundtrack cues as if we’re still living in a John Hughes film. Something eats at us that our lives never really outgrow our adolescent cinema expectations. After all, that was how life was supposed to go. Those songs of our youth have shaped us, taught us what to expect and how to process information.
Unfortunately, our music has turned bittersweet: Just read the comments on You Tube: Under every dusty classic seventies radio staple, under every eighties video featuring a pale English dude, under every flannel-flecked grunge god of the nineties we get endless variations of:
“Take us back, we want to go back”
“I don’t think we’re meant to endure this”
“Reminds me of a summer day”
“I feel so lost now”
“Best memories of my life”
“Where has the time gone?”
“I wish I could live there just one more day.”
So, we’ve decided: Good or bad, we want to feel five more minutes of happiness back when the music thrilled us, lifted us up, filled our summer days with extra sunshine. Something made sense there.
It’s not frivolous anymore to want to watch the video for Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” – it’s like the most important thing you can do each day. Forget yoga, forget wellness, hell, forget nutrition: This is the only thing that feels good anymore.
This Gen X Music Thing
We need to fully explore this Gen X-music thing if we ever want to figure out who we are and what we’re supposed to do now. Because those songs – they felt magical, honest, inspiring. Why? Was there some spiritual alchemy, a perfect collusion of culture, sound, and image, or is it that we were better then, too, to match the hope of the times we took for granted?
I want to reclaim a lost feeling, turn it over in my mind a little bit, find some ownership over my past, and express how I feel in the most definitive ways (I’m tired of ambiguity and endless backtracking) before I tumble into dementia, before our latchkey kid ethos disappears completely.
TL;DR: I want people to know me. I’m a mystery to myself because I’ve kept it bottled up for so long. Maybe they might learn a little about Gen X along the way because we’re a mystery, too. We just want to be heard. Our memories matter.
Before politics and bad attention spans ruin everything – before we run out of time – here’s a bit of our story that details why we cling to our music and images with white-knuckled ferocity and why we don’t want to let it go. Because nearly everything is right there in the music that made us.