{"id":46705,"date":"2021-11-23T01:00:20","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T06:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=46705"},"modified":"2024-01-30T14:16:07","modified_gmt":"2024-01-30T19:16:07","slug":"qotd-generation-x-and-the-1990s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/11\/23\/qotd-generation-x-and-the-1990s\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Generation X and the 1990s"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When I retired, a retro 1990s fad was just gearing up on campus. It was an Uncanny Valley kind of experience. There they were, dressing like day-glo lumberjacks and listening to knockoff BritPop, but still plodding around campus with that peculiarly late-Millennial affect. You know the one \u2014 half secret policeman, half cringing mouse. Unpleasant, but it got me thinking about my own college years back at the dawn of the Clinton Era. We really screwed the pooch, didn’t we?<\/p>\n

I’m referring, of course, to Gen X’s patented brand of “irony”. We’ve talked about this before, but here’s a quick recap: Every middle-class kid born after about 1965 was raised to believe that Authenticity was the thing, the only<\/em> thing. Just do what you feel. Question authority. Don’t listen to The Man!<\/p>\n

The problem, of course, is that we were told this by The Man.<\/p>\n

It had a weird, telescoping effect. On campus, you were surrounded by people who actually were<\/em> hippies, plus a whole bunch of wild-eyed fanatics who were sure they would’ve made truly excellent hippies if they hadn’t been in elementary school at the time, plus a bunch of kids \u2014 these would be your classmates \u2014 who thought of “Woodstock” as a brand name, a kind of backpacking-through-Europe, taking-a-year-off-to-find-myself experience that everyone has as a matter of course before settling down to the serious business of making partner at the law firm.<\/p>\n

In short: Our parents were stuck in adolescence, and, being adolescents ourselves, we didn’t understand that “Rebellion” wasn’t something the hippies invented. We wanted to experience sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, too, but since the Baby Boomers treated those as their exclusive property instead of what they actually are \u2014 i.e. the natural impulses of teenagers in all times and places \u2014 we had to be all, like, you know, whatever<\/em> about it. […]<\/p>\n

That was the 1990s. Faced with a paradox that everything your parents say, do, and believe is lame \u2014 according to your parents! \u2014 the only safe way is to make sure nobody can figure out exactly what your attitude is at any given instant. You might end up working 90 hour weeks at the office to pay the nut on the McMansion and the Volvo the same way they did, but at least you’d be, you know, ironic about it. The ketman<\/a> of the suburbs.<\/p>\n

See what happens when you listen to your elders, kids?<\/p>\n

Severian, “The Virtue of Hypocrisy”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2019-01-19.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I retired, a retro 1990s fad was just gearing up on campus. It was an Uncanny Valley kind of experience. There they were, dressing like day-glo lumberjacks and listening to knockoff BritPop, but still plodding around campus with that peculiarly late-Millennial affect. You know the one \u2014 half secret policeman, half cringing mouse. Unpleasant, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,41,13],"tags":[407,262,1205,480,1462,504,764],"class_list":["post-46705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-babyboomers","tag-culture","tag-generationx","tag-hypocrisy","tag-severian","tag-teenagers","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-c9j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46705"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87056,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46705\/revisions\/87056"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}