Gen X and a world that no longer exists
Manila– Some of my fellow Gen Xers say we are called "Generation X" because we refuse to be defined. Just like the quiet but indignant middle child, we were born after the self-assured baby boomers and before the upbeat millennials.
The term was popularized by Douglas Coupland, author of "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture." In a 1991 interview with the Boston Globe, Coupland said, "I just want to show society what people born after 1960 think about things. We're sick of stupid labels, we're sick of being marginalized in lousy jobs, and we're tired of hearing about ourselves from others."
I think I missed the day when historians and anthropologists suddenly grouped everyone, dead and living, into the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. We all went with the flow, agreed to the labels and looked at where we belonged based on our birth years.
I don’t have any complaints with that, because I’m more fascinated by how we grew up, how we lived and what we witnessed.
As the generation that has lived through crucial world events, we witnessed everything in every aspect of life: the horrors of the past and the promise of a future that was delightfully unknown. We lived through an entire world that kept changing.
In geopolitical history, we beheld colossal shifts such as the final years of the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that was said to have been inspired by the peaceful, pro-democracy uprising that started back home with the Philippines’ People Power Revolution.
In technology, it was fascinating to witness the birth and ascent of the computer, after a childhood and early schooling filled with chalkboards, paper notebooks and pencils, and homes with rotary phones and television sets that signaled us to go to sleep when they signed off for the night.
We wailed as rock-and-roll faded out and we readied ourselves to face the era of dial-up, with our soundtrack changing to hip-hop, new wave and metal.
Our adolescence and early adulthood witnessed the shift from analog to digital, from dance-pop with big hair and loud colors to the darkness of grunge and alternative rock, and from vinyl records to cassettes to CDs.
On a personal note, one of the most enduring memories I have growing up in a town that had the urban-rural mix of paved roads, mountains, rivers, trees and the vast ocean was the freedom to play outside after breakfast, disappear somewhere and then come home by sunset.
At times during the dry season, we were also allowed to play after dinner and tell each other ghost stories during moonlit nights, when there were still fireflies—I think we were the last generation to see fireflies. In the morning, we woke up to the rhythmic chirping of crickets, not the pings of a smartphone.
I don’t remember the last time I played outside with friends, but I remember the lessons of valuing freedom and enjoying it responsibly, because our parents gave us that trust as well as the resilience and resourcefulness we developed when we were left alone to solve our problems and navigate the world.
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On the funny side, the childhood memories we miss are making prank calls on the rotary and corded landline phones– our own version of trolling.
We wore slogan shirts that said, “Choose Life,” and read books written many decades before we were born, such as “We the Living” by Ayn Rand.
We stood outside appliance stores and watched in awe as the TV sets showed Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” or A-ha’s sketch-turned-live-action “Take on Me” and other “cool” and “groundbreaking” videos that transformed artists into icons and defined MTV's bygone era.
So what we had—a world that no longer exists—was something so grand and great, a world we can only recreate and choose to stay in, like lighting up when we hear Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” because they are our anthems.
Diana G. Mendoza is a freelance journalist based in Manila.
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