My generation did not grow up knowing we were going to be Generation X.

I don’t think we knew about ourselves being part of anything, really. I feel like we grew up almost without definition, which is pretty natural for a kid.

I didn’t really even know I was white. I have any idea about whiteness until I started to see Black, Asian or Indigenous people on TV.

I had a growing understanding that I was Canadian because it was very much in the air, part of a surge in holding a national identity that took place after 1967, but most of the shows and music I was exposed to were American and the books I read were British.

Did I know that I was a rural kid? No. And I didn’t know about cities for years. I thought London, Ontario was a metropolis.

I did have some inkling of being from the wrong town in some way and, more to the point, that I was on the wrong side of that wrong town.

But that didn’t bother me too much. Not yet.

However, there was something about my identity that I knew for sure, even when I was a child. Like probably everybody else my age, I grew up having it made extremely clear to me that, for sure, I absolutely was not was a Boomer (in spite of having no idea about the term yet).

You may ask how I knew I wasn’t a Boomer. Well, I can tell you that I knew it in my bones because of how many Boomers over the years made it their business to let me know that I was not. And they made their point with great intensity for decades.

This wasn’t something that the average Boomer had to say out loud in those exact words because they did such a great job reminding all of us Gen-X kids how much we obviously weren’t as awesome as they were by sharing with us how much our music sucked, by shouting out loud how much our clothes sucked, by explaining how our shitty attitudes sucked, how our taste in movies sucked and how, basically, we just overall sucked. Period.

Along with that, what with all our general sucking and not living up to their impossibly high Boomer standards (which could be distilled into declaring that Pink Floyd was objectively better than U2 in every way, or something like that), was a strong belief that Gen-X kids could only be fixed by the aggressive administration of literal and figurative ass kickings of the sort Boomers would be doling out to us for much of the rest of our lives.

It wasn’t even called Bullying yet. It was just called Childhood.

We were developing a kind of collective Gen-X identity but even that was impinged by an intense Silent Generation/Boomer-built campaign of pop culture messaging that inculcated in us a self-correcting set of intra-generational cliques to which we either belonged or that we rejected.

And then there was dark, bitter irony, of course. Our forever friend…

Anyway, you don’t have to read about demographics to figure this out. You can watch John Hughes movies and it’ll be laid out before you. Were you going to be a Preppie? A New Waver? A Nerd? A Jock? A Punker? A Stoner? A Browner? Choir Kid? Drama Kid? Church Kid? Poor Kid? Farm Kid?

Imagine how fun this was for those who were different. Imagine being overweight, disabled, shy, closeted gay, out gay, ethnically diverse, ethnically uncertain, culturally, religiously or just visually out of the norm? Imagine how that rankled the meaty middle of this tight white western world of ours.

Looking back, it seems that there was baked into the generations born before Gen-X a deep and over-riding need to ferret out any and all differences any given individual might have from the pack, no matter how small. And once found, Normiess would punish the possessors of those differences by training our entire generation into using those often small differences like sharp sticks to poke our own eyes out over and over again.

If I was a conspiracy theory kid (which I was), I would be sure it was all part of a plan. I would realize the Boomers figured out that, if they were able to train my generation to defend all these restrictive, cliquish in-group identities we self-assigned, if they set us up to waste our time with factional in-fighting in the face of their demographic enormity, we wouldn’t notice how much we had in common. I think they thought that if they could make us care less about what we were as a whole, we’d never band together and reject their generational control. And it worked. Because we didn’t.

And they’re still out there doing the damn thing, still in control, still bending politics, the economy and culture to their ends as much as they are able.

Hmmm… do I sound bitter? Because I’m not. Not exactly.

The reason I’m not bitter is that, although the Boomers were — and still are — a fucking handful, I have to admit they helped my generation become what we are (especially if you read up on your Nietzsche) and because of that, I’m sort of grateful. Because they were so goddamn confident, so cocksure that they were born to rule, coming up under them allowed us Gen-X to set up at a distance and observe, gave us more incentive to consider, to check out everything around us and to realize that maybe we don’t want to be like them. Maybe we’re fine the way we are.

All that aside, it’s important to state that simply being born between 1965 and 1981 alone isn’t enough to make Gen-X what it is. It took everything.

We only got this way as a result of the cumulative effects of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular mix of people, all of us together riding out the first ripples of what would become the tidal wave of pop culture that’s still drowning the world, thanks to the Internet. It took years of economic, technological and social shifts across the decades. It took being the first – and maybe only – generation of latchkey kids working things out on our own while our moms went to work. It took being the kids in the middle of exploding divorce rates, stagflation, recession and contraction. It took being the first generation to experience the underemployment of bullshit McJobs, Western deindustrialization, the rise of the service-and-knowledge economy, grotesque hyper-commercialization, hyper-financialization, 24-hour cable news, MTV, the Fall of the Wall and the transition from analog everything to digital anything. And somehow, in the middle of an overwhelming assault, some of us figured out who we were, what we were and more importantly, what we weren’t. We didn’t even have to read Douglas Coupland to figure it out. But it was a good read anyway.

Now, as we slide through middle age at breakneck speed in a brand-built world where everything is captured, curated and quantified, we’re almost unbranded, riding the rails between meme-life and real life, ideas and action, slipping between cynicism and hope, giving up and never letting go, sharing our skeptical takes with anyone willing to listen (or not) until one day, not too long from now, we’ll fade away and finally exist in our purest, truest form: as a memory, a state of mind you find when you don’t want to be with everybody else, when you want to sit back and watch.