Dwain Northey (Gen X)

We are Generation X—the forgotten middle children of history. No draft notices ever landed in our mailboxes, no national crusades demanded our sacrifice. Instead, we were handed a latchkey, a Pop-Tart, and a half-functioning TV remote, told to raise ourselves while our parents figured out their “second marriages.” We grew up feral, with sarcasm as our native tongue, MTV as our babysitter, and cynicism as our religion.

And let’s face it—we swore we’d never grow up. Never. We were the slackers in thrift-store flannel, the mixtape philosophers, the mall rats, the garage-band prophets of whatever, man. We promised ourselves we’d never sell out, never become our parents, never sit around lecturing kids about “the good old days.” Guess what? We lied.

Now we’re the ones telling endless stories that start with “When I was a kid…”—and we have a thousand of them. We drank straight from the garden hose, we rode in the back of pickup trucks without seat belts, and we played outside until the streetlights came on while no adult cared if we were alive or not. We tell these stories like holy scripture, conveniently forgetting our parents didn’t bother us with half as many “back in my day” lectures. Nope—we invented the nostalgia monologue and perfected it into an Olympic sport.

But here’s the kicker: we never actually stopped being kids. We just got mortgages, creaky knees, and bifocals while still secretly blasting the same songs we thought would “change the world.” We sneer at TikTok while doomscrolling under the covers at 2 a.m., telling our kids to log off while we fall down YouTube rabbit holes about 80s commercials. We’re running PTA meetings with the same half-hearted effort we once applied to passing high school algebra.

And let’s be honest—we feel like impostors. Every time we’re told we’re the adults now, we laugh nervously and wonder who let us be in charge. We’ve been pretending since 1991, and the world still hasn’t caught on. The truth is, the kids’ table never really ended—it just got rebranded as the HOA meeting, complete with worse snacks.

So here we are: the generation that never grew up, trying to play grown-up, clinging to our sarcasm like it’s life support. And the most poetic twist of all? Our kids roll their eyes at our stories exactly the way we once rolled ours. Congratulations, Gen X—we became the thing we mocked. And of course, we’re going to complain about it.