And the Silent generation, being between the traumatised war/ greatest gen and baby boomers. My grandmother was in silent gen and some of her memoirs would make any genXer wide eyed. l'm a '75 gen Xer btw.
Yep. Latchkey at 7 at a home in the woods on 42 acres with no close neighbors. Went thru the fighting parents, divorce, the absent dad, the new step dad, two moves to two new cities/schools in two years. Then home became the place of the newlywed fighting parents (mom and stepdad) the next 6 years until college. At 11, I became the “family counselor” (as the youngest in the family), making sure everyone was “okay”. So yes, forced to grow up fast is a major understatement. I think we all were a little damaged. But we can come together and raise a glass for our mutual experiences.
Well... I grew up in a conservative neighborhood. Divorce was still looked down upon. But there was a lot of coldness. Not real love. Yes, I never had to go hungry. Yes, my parents were interested in my grades. Yes, my parents did not get divorced. But I was made responsible for my mom ?s decision to have us and not to have a career or to hire a babysitter. She drank, and smoked, and blamed it on us, especially on me as the second child. Having bad marks, when they were there, where not because we did not understand things properly, but because we wanted to make her look bad, my sister and me. And provided I had trouble with other kids , I never would ever have come to my parents to let them know. The main thing was "never ever be a nuisance and leave us alone". They never took a real interest in us, or what we wanted. We had to function. Get good grades, look beautiful, never talk back, be punctual, never ask questions, never ask for support, do not get yourself dirty, keep your clothes neat and tidy, you do not come from a scum family. And if we were ill, especially mom complained of having to take care of us extra because we were in the house too long. And of course, we as girls had to help in the house, the garden and to sew our own buttons. Strict parents in the 1970s were not that much fun, either. Well, at least they cared that I had good marks, had something to eat and drink and did not stay out too long...
I was a dental assistant at 13. I quit that job and got a job at Burger King when I turned 14 because it paid minimum wage when the dental gig paid $1.86 an hour.
It is true that many of us Gen X have some sort of trauma stemming from childhood. Then there are some that had it much much worse than anyone else. Everyone knew them yet NO ONE tried to help….a child, a friend. One might imagine what an adult version of said child might be like. Prison? Maybe. Successful? Possibly (define success). Distrusting,angry, and disgusted at society regardless of generations? Absolutely! Some people literally got left for dead or beaten mercilessly….a child, a friend. That NO ONE helped. I am not aware of anything darker than that.
"Let me get this right. You're saying you want to pay me extra money to jump out of an airplane, on top of already paying me to go live in the woods, play with automatic weapons, and blow shit up? You had me at living in the woods, Sucker."
No it wasn't. The freedom wasn't dark, it was liberating. The dark side was that psa, that asked, "it's 10 o'clock, do you know where your kids are"? That one caught me off guard every time.
My dad’s quite fond of the freedom he had as a kid. He’s still good friends with everyone he grew up with and they’re all quite successful and took big risks fearlessly. One perk about being a latchkey kid was having no aversion to risk.
@@taylorcrain1821 True, most of us are quite OK with crises, but for a lot of us life was a warzone. No one had your back. But that is why we were happy to travel around the world (literally in my case) at 14.
There wasn't emphasis back then about child and teen psychology. Kids are resilient, was the mantra. Kids were highly ignored, emotionally, socially, and physically. The high divorce rates and the impact on Kids was ignored. The largest amount of "missing" Kids were Gen Xers. In the 90s, things changed. Millenniall children became very protected. Suddenly, issues like pedophilia, abuse, missing kids, teen suicide, divorce impact FINALLY started to get central attention. But Gen Xers paid the price and it was too late for them. But what was gained was an unshakable resiliency. This is why we cringe when generations after us complain and need safe spaces. We had no platform to complain. And as for safe spaces, we had ourselves and relied on ourselves - not society to take of us. We gave society the middle finger, and in some ways today, we still do.
From my experience as a Millennial, Many of these things didnt change. I know many friends who were kids to Gen X and they had it hard. Being told they were mistakes, in the way or were very obviously used as a tool to harm dad in the divorce. We always had Stranger Danger held above us to drive home abject fear of random people, We were laregly sheltered because of that, and much much more. All while being told how great of a childhood Gen X had and how those days are long gone( but we had better stay close to home and not dip out of sight even with our neighbor friends). I learned the traumatizing and hard way that while Stranger Danger was meant to keep us safe from random people, I learned that its actually friends and family who are even more dangerous.... For every good Gen X parent that us Millennials got, there were even more that were absolutely awful. At least with us Millennials, if we had Boomer parents( that were together still). They tended to be near retirement or were and had fairly cushy lives. Thats where the spoiledness of my generation comes from, the sheltered ones or the ones that are thicker skinned tended to come from Gen X parents.
The impression I always got from my boomer 'old folks' is that even when you're a successful professional like my dad, life was always a bitch. Exhausting and miserable. Just to have a house to live in and some savings. So be it.
Yes, the kids have food, the lights are on, do you have the house key around your neck on the chain. Do you have feelings? Or you don’t know how to express your emotions? Course you don’t if no one understood. Some people blame the older generations than us for not engaging with us emotionally. Truthfully, I don’t think they knew how so I don’t blame them.
@@Alwayslearnimgyou’re so right. They grew up in sterile environments, poor, God fearing folks. When avenues went astray from what they knew I imagine it would be like asking a 90 year old to hook up a wifi router
@@skeezix8156 absolutely. That’s a good way to put it. That just was not part of their lives. And they could not understand. So I give them a lot of grace. I know they had it rough when they were younger. So I’ve tried really hard to understand this. Lack of trying to connect with us. It’s taking me a long time and I’m in my 50s now but I think I finally understand them a lot more. And I miss my parents every day.
I told a school counselor what a certain man was doing to me, a 11yr old girl. She ignored me for the rest of my time there. Nothing happened. Talk about the dark side.
I remember a girl up my street I’d known since before kindergarten. Sweet cute Caroline. Half Dutch half Irish. In 8th grade as I was hanging outside after school this nice September afternoon I saw Caroline on her knees in her cheerleading outfit giving a high school senior head. She didn’t even try to hide it or was unaware we saw her. My sister one year younger was appalled. They got up and went into her house. Both parents worked so they screwed for an hour or two then the dude left. I kept thinking to myself God Caroline not you too. Her life was a train wreak of many guys and being a single mom. Her pretty looks honestly by her early 20s. This was in 1978.
Recently I've begun remembering the teen runaway problem we had in the 70s and 80s when i read milennials and Z claim they have it most dangerous today. No such thing as "trafficking awareness" back then. If cops found a runaway, they were taken back to the abuse with the scolding "Your parents love you, you're making it hard on them with worry, shame shame".
How many parents just chucked their kids out the house? I knew someone in high school that died of AIDS at 18. Because his parents had thrown him out two years before and he'd had to hook to get money. My brother was friends with a girl who got pregnant at 16 and her parents immediately threw her out. So many kids got kicked out by their parents.
australia & america were different alright , the law courts in australia was ful of pedos who would chase after us , & force parental separation , they would become our job recruiter & pimp, we were 8 and we had to report to police as they were the pimp mafia , australias 1970 to 2000 darkside was that there was no safety ,,, high drug dependance to forget , but the flashbacks of abducted , trapped , no way out , statistically 75% of my generation were traffiked divorce kids , church was no safety either , it was only til now .. we survivors can tell our stories , even our own politicians had sex cults ,, we are demonised as woke , but each time an aussie pedo dies , we survivors have our own word for mourning .. a dark side full of light ,, in retirement .. well no one knows why australia was set up this way ,,@@julilla1
I was approached several times by dodgy fellas when I was a kid. However, it was drilled into me that I didn’t talk to or go with strangers - the consequences were never spelled out though as that wasn’t talked about. I don’t think it’s any worse today though but there’s greater awareness.
You mention the code of honor that Gen X had, which was, and still is, completely lost on Millennials. Snitching is one of the defining characteristics of Millennials that never gets talked about. Gen X has a silent comraderie that the millennials will never know.
@@barbaramatthews4735 we snitched once but the sixth grade teacher wore his GRAND DADDY’S ROBES to “social studies” and was being led out weeping and calling us liars, still berobèd, whilst being led off school grounds before the end of class session and nobody saw who did it. I stand by our honor with the severity of the exception as it’s very testament *bows*
And that’s how predators like Diddy keep getting away with fucking kids… and sex trafficking… 😒😒😒 you all literally knew, the rumors where out, celebs were literally like “stay away from Diddy”, there were lawsuits “buy outs”… and you know what? Gen X just lets evil happen And then shits on young people for trying to change thing when Gen X dosnt get mad or upset about the shit. The evil dark shit, no they get mad that young people are now saying “gen x, you can do something to stop this” and gen x is just like “that’s not my problem”… only it is Your in charge of the fucking system now you fucking adult children If you want to fight the light you need to let the light in, and if you’re not snitching on the evil You’re contributing to the evil
Gen X is the most abused, neglected, and mistreated generation in American history. I don't say that to brag or play the victim card. It's just reality. I'm in my 50's and I still suffer from the effects of my traumatic childhood. I've healed a lot and have made tremendous progress, but I still have my bad days.
Yeah I have them too sometimes, but just like then, we take a shot, and pull from a cigarette, (for those that smoke) and say .....oh well, and still carry on. If nothing else being Gen X, you ought to know, we don't linger in stuff too, we move on. I have PTSD from my childhood, but even with that I just use it to make me stronger. I know how to avoid b.s. because of it, and when I'm not around, I'm the first one they come looking for help from. But they call me crazy....🤣🤣🤣🤣. Gen X and I love it....
Grew up in a normal looking family where sexual abuse was part of growing up … at 48 I have regular memory reoccurrences of some horrible times, it never leaves you !
@@abc33944 Someone was fighting me repeatedly asserting the women in my family all met tragic ends entirely because they CHOSE BAD MEN like nobody ever married an abuser that knocked them up at 12 lolsob I'm happy that isn't the first thing they think of, but not when they are projecting AND shaming. And no, they weren't all awesome parents, and why would anyone expect that?
Home was where the fighting parents were. Eventually there was only one parent, and she was much too busy to look after me or my brother, so I became the pseudo-parent at 12. What a rotten awful time. You're right about one thing, and that's that to stop me you're going to have to take me out.
that's not even remotely a dark side to generation x upbringing. Instead of being pampered (as is the current parenting trend) you learned self-reliance. Today's generation, they're spoiled, generation x, they can fend for themselves.
"They learned self-reliance." Yeah, that's one way to respond to a traumatic situation that no child should have had to go through. That is very much a dark upbringing.
The best thing about being left on our own is I can figure out almost anything and fix almost anything or "rig" something that's broken to work! I hated it then ,but now my experience's come in handy.
Props for speaking out man… Guns and Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle isn’t just a pretty song, it was written during the 80’s for a reason. Started earning money picking strawberries when I was 8, so your story is very relatable. And yup, the golden rule was to never back down from a fight, even if you knew you would get your ass kicked. Thát way you knew you would earn the respect to not be bothered again, win or lose… otherwise you would be haunted by your bullies to the end of days. Good vid dude.
Amen to that. I fought my bullies, as I had no choice. My older siblings were out of school, and I couldn't run home, because then I'd get a whooping for running. To this day, I thank my bullies, because they made me the fighter that I am.
In my own experience it makes no difference if you fight back. Even putting the guy in the hospital for quite a while. People who stalk and harass you never, ever lay off until they're dead. People are fucked in the head
And many of us Millennials suffered as a result. I cant tell you the amount of times I heard friends or classmates tell eachother about how mom and dad ( usually mom) would berate them and call them mistakes or a useless mouth to feed. Or dad just wasnt interested in really being dad. Though many Millennials went through brutal divorces by gen X parents, and that fucked us up big time. Early Gen Z though..... God Speed to them and that generation. Then you have Stranger Danger, That was used as effectively a weapon of control against us. Even with our neighbor friends, we couldnt go very far out of sight. But we would get told how amazing of a childhood our Gen X parents had being free roam and adventurous. We were very sheltered, and to our detriment. So I think many Gen X parents realized this and over compensating by giving us participation trophys and being bulldozer parents as we got older and Gen X became more financially capable of doing it.
Gen x had dark side. Yeah that's a big understatement. We had to deal with our crap boomer parents not growing up. Hollywood stopped making children's movies and then made child villian movies. We saw the rapid escalation of urban crime and drug trade.
@singingwind977 A family of 10 kids. Parents were always out and the boomer older siblings just ignored you or beat you (one male sibling no one talks about cause they don't wanna admit what he did) I thank God I had a twin sister to talk with.
@singingwind977 I'm glad you are still standing and grinding through! I've got nothing to bother getting out for. As I said I've cut everyone out. I haven't left my house for (almost) 2 solid months right now. Zero reason to.
When fights or violence broke out nobody called the cops. You just had to deal with it, and there were no shoulders to cry on or services. Its the reason rock music from that era is so angry, and disgruntled. You can also see it in the TV shows. Im 36 so im kind of in-between.and can see the difference. But i do remember it vividly
More of us died per capita before the age of 35 than the greatest generation...and they fought WW2. So. Yah. And my friend...you went very, very easy on the dark side. Good on you.
Look at all the gen talk. Boomer, milinieal, z, y. Rip Greatest and before X always left out. Born 77..sweetest spot ever. So sweet we got our own micro Gen label. Maybe they all should get the hint and turn it over to us. Or we gonna get left out of getting a chance to run this shit.
There are still some out there but i have noticed over the last few decades it has dwindled and im a 90s baby. Just the overall quality of humans and livelihood has gone downhill
Never thought about it until this video but your are correct. Our generation never really talks about the negatives of our childhood, at least deeply. If we do, we are usually sarcastic about it or turning a negative into a little joke to get a quick laugh.
I believe that most of us learnt real quick to turn what they could into as positive of a spin as possible, no matter how bad it was for us. How would we be able to truly enjoy the good times if we didn't have those bad times to help us appreciate the good times better?
That's because we were designed not to give a fuct. We came at time when patriotism was at a low because we came after the end of the Vietnam war, and at that point society was at a, " can we all just get along", point. We are the kids that just took that depression and went outside and ran it off. Even today we talk about it, because in the end, we'll be ones that will have to patch 💩 up, after the gens before and after us, will come crying to show them how we done it. That's why I'm glad they forgot us.
@@deebraun7488 I suggest watching "Call Me Lucky" if you haven't and learn where our comedy culture of the 80s all really came from. Spoilers: it's trauma, and of a beautiful troubled human.
Dude is right, especially about toughness. ALL of us Gen X'ers have been in a physical fight, and probably many more. I'm a woman and pretty passive but growing up Gen X you had to fight and defend yourself. It's how we did it. Boomers might have grown up having to fight too, but I'm positive Millenials and Gen Z'ers never did.
Absolutely. I am a woman as well and yes, I believe the vast majority of us have been in fights. Not because we sought them out, but because we were generally forced into them. And there were not helicopter parents around to protect us. If you didn’t know how to fight, you might end up coming home having to make up a story about whatever bruises or whatever happened in that fight. But you learned how to defend yourself . Sink or swim.
@@Alwayslearnimg LOL Yes, we were forced into them as in we werent the ones starting them. It was really common to witness fights too, at school and at play.
@@vaskylark I remember being in kindergarten or first grade, and this is the only time I think anything like this happened to me. But I’m literally challenged a little boy to a fight on the playground after school. 😂😂😂😂😂 Gen X girls. We totally rock.
@@Alwayslearnimg Gen X girls were far tougher than boys today.. I’m the baby of 4 and my sisters beat the dog snot out of me until lil brother became tougher than them. Lol.. One sister beat the dog snot out of 3 guys and 2 girls at a keg party.. All 5’3 110lbs of her broke 1 guys nose, slammed one guys arm in a door and broke it and cracked 2 of a girls ribs.. The other guy and girl just got bruised up faces.. That sister don’t cat fight. She punches, kicks, bites and if she grabs another girls hair it’s to shove her face into something like a wall or her knee..
@@lanejohnson7656 I agree. You are absolutely right. We had the best childhood ever, regardless of the fact that they were not perfect. We sure did learn a lot.
Similar here in Poland. Born in 67, both parents worked and struggled to bild a house by themselves. Socialism- empty shops, food limited as everything else. No one guided us, always out, always by ourselves. If clever you went to a library, but equally could join a gang. Powerty. One pair of jeans, two t-shirts, jacket and complains that I've outgrown it. I was trully sorry. You are right- we never complain and tried to provide our kids with so much more!
Sounds like capitalism 😂 That's why both of my parents worked - and I was a latchkey kid. With both working, him in law and her as a teacher, we lived in a small apartment until I was almost 8 when my brother came & had to move. (No space) It was because of social programs- that my Father had served in the military- that he qualified for a house loan. He was awful with money. He thought credit cards were 'free money' It was my Mom who knew knew how to make the ends stretch- or we'd have starved. We moved to a small house- he was promoted but then- poof- it was mid 80s then. The 'Greed is Good' era. 🙄 Gag me with a spoon. My father- the true boomer he is- feel into the trap that HE should look & act like 'every other dude in the office'. He couldn't keep it in his pants - or he couldn't keep it covered. Long story summary, he didn't even have the decency to look her in the eye to tell her he knocked up a coworker. He sent divorce papers in the mail and his sister mentioned something about a baby- thinking she already knew. She didn't. Smh. A real role model. Gah... Wonder why I have trust issues? Bahaha! But seriously 😒- Before that time, it had been my Mom's insurance which had covered our healthcare. But- thanks to his behavior- she couldn't maintain the house on her salary alone. Even if he paid child support. Which- he did do- eventually. And so our lives were uprooted as we moved to my grandfather's home in another city, several hours away, so she could have a support system and get a fresh start. It also meant we had no healthcare for a time. It took about a year to get another permanent teaching position. She tried her best and I don't blame her for anything- but I was 14 and I WAS angry- in general- so she caught lots of it because she was the one who there. I feel really bad about that... 🫤 Felt bad about it then even. She'd actually defend him- which would piss me off more honestly... The one thing I can say is that my Mom was wayyyy to good for him and he didn't deserve her. And tellingly, that second marriage ended in less than 3 years... and he pined for reconciliation but she had since met someone else. Her second marriage lasted 16 years. So... (shrugs) Capitalism... 😒
My cousin from NYC was 14 in 1978. I was two years younger. Beauty girl. She was dating a 20 year old rich kid from Manhattan. I remember his 78 black Z28. He was taking her to all the discos and doing cocaine. At 14 she had an overdose and an abort. My parents were absolutely horrified and wondered what the hell my aunt and uncle were doing behaving that way. My parents kept an eye on us like a hawk .
yes, 16 yrs old I had a 21 yr old boyfriend who fed & housed me, dropped me off at school, took me out to places on weekends. he was basically my proxy parent.
This is absolutely the very best commentary on our generation I have heard. Honest to God truth. Sometimes, we just need to be reminded of who we are and the stuff we are made of. Thank you.
Gen X had an unpsoken rule if you didn't stand up for yourself no one else would. I gave more respect to someone that stood up for themselves intstead of the kid that just went along like sheep when they knew it was wrong.
Real fights. Street fights. Never mattered if i even showed up at home at night. No supervision. No guidance. No help. My father worked so many hours we were basically a single parent home. Everything you said was correct.
I feel there is a big part of the Gen-X experience that is overlooked. The absolute struggle to be taken seriously by Boomers or at least not actively undermined by our parents peers. You can see it still happening in our government as the octogenarian politicians keep theirs claws on power and money by every means possible, even when doing so is hurting our country. Lodged between the two largest generational population groups, boomers and millennials, we are fighting with our parents and kids for jobs and other resources. Many of us still believe in the ethics and responsibilities our grandparents taught us while expecting others to do the same.
Despite my gripes about the sins of Gen X as adults/Parents. They at least have treated us Millennials as somewhat deserving of being viewed as adults as we've aged. Boomers still largely think we're snot sucking children that cant be given any credit. Though Many Gen X did fail us massively growing up too. It wasnt just the Boomers. Many millennials are not worth the space and air they take up. But we were set up to be this way largely, only some of us have rose above our generations stereotypes.
That also explains why alot of the early Gen X parents became the helocopter parents of the late 90s
9 місяців тому+29
Most people wouldn’t even believe me if I told them my story. But at my age now I’m tired of everyone’s victim status stories, so I just choose to keep my mouth shut.
@@333Mesmerized so say it with humor. you can't be anything but the story you tell about yourself, so tell it real, just tell it funny. at least this has worked for me.
I was about 13 when I lost a friend. to this day no one knows what happened to them. There were rumors of course... but never anything for sure for me. I did grow up with a single parent. No child support ect. I did the shopping, cooking, ect... I carried a defensive weapon on me, though not something that could be called a weapon legally back then.. I can't even imagine trying to explain these things to my kids. they think I exaggerate. Though they take my Husband's stories as more believable . It was tough growing up a female in that time. every one still comments I am not that girly. LOL Yes my high school had a day care.
Gen X was a tough time, especially for those that grew up with narcissistic parents. The kind that never wanted to see you and kicked you out, but if you stayed away for too long (even if they knew where you were), they would file a missing person's report. And you never knew how long it would be each time. My struggle wasn't in the streets, like it was with my brothers. Mine was at home, where I was expected to be, as a maid, but unable to cook for my family. For some reason, I was never allowed to learn those basic life skills and my brothers didn't need to listen to me, even though all the blame for their actions was hoisted on to my shoulders. It was weird. And then I was kicked out at 18 and literally had to figure out everything on my own bc I'd never been allowed to make my own decisions or my own mistakes, unlike my brothers. Thanks for putting up this video. It needs to be talked about.
While many of us lived in single parent homes, so many of my friends, had parents might as well have not been there, because they were drunk. The poor parents drank beer, where the well off parents drank liquor.
Thanks for this. I guess even if parents cared about us, like when we were home or how our grades were - they actually had difficulties in showing us love and respect. Especially with the girls.And the fathers. And that is why the girls often looked for love and respect elsewhere, in the arms of a random guy who seemed confident but was only bragging and the girls often mistook that confidence for competence. The girls were all craving to feel loved and special because all they heard was "Do not be in our way", "Be home when the lights are out or I will kill you when you COME home" , "Do not be trouble or I will cause you trouble", " Get your s..t together and buckle up, don`t you ever dare. to cry or I will give you something to cry about". The older guys had cars to drive you around somewhere, away from someone to whom you only seemed to have caused distress. The boys in the age group did not.And they gave daddy vibes to some girls. That was the huge problem of our generation.
As a gen xers friends ment everything. I remember having serious dark problems that I knew I would never go to my parents for because I knew there would be no help or concern. We all knew better then to inconvenience or parents with our problems. We went to our friends, we helped each other survive as children dealing with problems adults should have been dealing with. Many of us wouldn't have survived without our friends. I am forever grateful to my Gen X friends for making my childhood bearable and survivable.
Yeah, parents never cared.Teachers never cared. Friends, they cared. They at least listened. "Children should be seen and not heard".... Was I alone with this?
@@YvonneHoerde "Children should be seen and not heard". That came from the victorian period i had my gran say that to me ,70's children had said to them "stop your crying or i will give you something to cry about".
That's the way I remember it. I'm a baby boomer, but on the tail end of the baby boom, and my parents were separated before I was born. I had the only divorced and single mother in the neighborhood, and I became an outcast at the age of four, because people hated divorce in that era and they were afraid that I would be a bad influence on their children. Suddeenly, my friends and all the other kids in the neighborhood said they couldn't be my friend, and they weren't allowed to talk to me. Home life was like that. My mother was never around, because she worked and she went out dating after work. She was, 8nderstandably, obsessed with her own desperate situation, and the house fell into mess and disorder. By the time I was just barely turning five, I realized I was alone in the world. There was no help, no one to go to for advice, and I had to fight and fight in the streets and at school. When adults came after me, including a pedophile, I had to fight with them myself, and get away from them myself, with no one to report the incidents to. It always felt like I was on the edge of death and disaster. My mother would wake me at night and make me go to the hospital with her, because she had a heart problem and she worried that she was dying. I wondered if I would be orphaned at any moment. I did spend most of my time outside the house, day or night, when the streets were all empty. Most of the time, there wasn't food in the house, so I would collect soda bottles that were left all over town and take them in for enough money to get a meal at McDonald's. The younger girls of generation X were being molested by the older baby boomer boys in the neighborhood, and in high school, lots of the girls were dating college boys. A girl I had had a crush on was dating a high school senior, who had sideburns, and looked like a grown man, who had been set back a couple of times. I think it's funny when people talk about That Seventies Show and how the actress who played Jackie was only fifteen - what an outrage! Are they kidding? That was so common, it was ridiculous. Fourteen and fifteen year old girls were commonly dating college boys. People treated it as normal, and hardly worth commenting on. I knew guys in college in the eighties who would go to high schools to pick up girls. I thought it was ridiculous, so I didn't go along, but it was common. And the Baby Boomers treated Generation X like it was their special victim class, the younger kids that they could bully or exploit. They had their tricks, like one who offered to pay me and a friend to clean up his garage, a commercial garage and gas station, and when we were done, he tossed a joint on the floor and accused us of dropping it there. He said he was going to call the police on us, and we ran away without pay. It was a lesson learned, and I found that baby boomer managers and bosses were almost all treacherous liars. You would only hear later about little girls they had molested, and you would wonder why they didn't get in trouble. Their parents always covered for them.
The street fights were bad, and there were times when I was attacked with knives and baseball bats, but I could never go complaining to the police, because they hated me and they wouldn't believe me. I thought I might die any day, and I knew a lot of guys who did die young. I kind of miss them because they were the most high spirited, and among the few who knew how tough the lifestyle was. We all sort of hated and distrusted authorities and the government, because they were clearly against us.
As you say, I didn't talk about or cry about those things. For one thing, there was no one who would care. I tried to get my mother to take me out of school, but she wouldn't, and I played hooky as often as I could. They beat me by sending a squad car to pick me up and take me to school in the morning. My mother didn't even know about it, and I never told my mother about the fights, because I knew she would blame me. I was shocked when I got older to find that so many guys grew up without ever getting in a fight. How did they manage it? I had no choice, the other kids would gang up on me and attack - often there were ambushes, with several guys jumping me in an alley, or by the tracks. Generation X kids did start forming gangs for their own protection, but I was alone and a little ahead of the curve. The real hard thing about it was knowing that I was alone and friendless in the world - that there was no one to help or give me advice, and all hands were against me. Girls were afraid of me because of all the violence. It was a dark world that I often thought of as hell. But I was free, and I could pursue my own interests. go where I pleased and do what I pleased. When I had my bike, I ranged as far into other neighborhoods or into downtown Chicago as I could go in a day's ride. Other kids were forbidden to go to most of the places I went. I loved being free, so I still don't complain. I just say that's the way it was.
Yes , even in australia ,, when i was at university in 1990s i was frying to find the right code words , to idetify sex cult inside the authorities mob rule , molested by police as recruitment , australia still has generational trauma, so many teen pregnancies ,, by high school graduation~ 75 of my class were recruited in sex traffiking by age of 12, australian elites still run this pimp daddy nation,
Having a decent bicycle was such a game changer. There was never really anywhere that was too far to just ride there if it was a place we needed to get to. Mom and Dad driving you somewhere came with a whole different set of problems. That's if they had the time or desire to do it. So, you hopped on that BMX and rode out.
@@ozarkrefugee so similar , USA, australia , Canada, our university was free from 1966 babyboomer era to 1984 , when the same university studies examined ~ how we as , shunned & excluded , ended up were we are today ,, also employment agencies were run by the same church groups that shun us ,, the thing is , even me going to university &finding reports & studies in my local area , i can understand the similarity in generational change ,, in fact when i was reading about my local corruption , i never realised i was also excluded from the studies ,, lol.. how does it feel knowing australian genxers lived the same life,,..
We do collapse, though. We are a sad ass generation who feel like it's too late for sympathy and we just try to power through everything and it's sad as hell. We need to be here for each other..
Finally, someone talking about the realities instead of acting like it was all roses and fun times. I honestly don’t know a single girl I grew up with who wasn’t SA in some way before the age of 19. I was almost kidnapped walking the few hundred yards between my school and my grandparents’ house. We don’t talk to each other about any of it because we got used to no adults giving a toss about any of it. Even if we got hurt or sick we were told to walk it off and just deal with it. No one cared about our feelings. So we just shoved it all down and got on with it.
Interesting to know this. Every girl I got close enough to share personal stuff during my teens and twenties had some form of SA in her past. I just figured I was the kind of guy who attracted girls who needed to unload and felt safe to do so with me. No idea it was just so common instead.
My students were shocked that every milk cartoon had pictures of missing kids on them. Another dark side: You'll often hear our Generation say our dads were in Vietnam. But that war, eventhough it was before much of our times, seriously affected many Gen X and not in the best ways. My dad had really bad PTSD, but that went beyond jumping at fireworks and moments of panic and anxiety. It's depression, paranoia, and aggression that invades everything in their lives. It wasn't treated and for many men, it wasn't even recognized and diagnosed. For some, it contributed to alcoholism and broken families. I knew kids who felt like they had fought in that war because their dads brought the war home with them. We'd watch movies about the war, careful not to be caught by our dads. I think some of us children of Vietnam vets were searching for answers in those books and movies. Why our dad's did some of the things they did. Or, on a darker note, trying to make ourselves feel better by experiencing the piece of it captured in the movie. Like someone addicted to pain. I'm not saying we wanted to be in a war or thought our experience was anything like our dad's, but it still affected us greatly. Some more than others. But we didn't talk about it. We'd just say our dads were Vietnam Vets and we knew what that was. But it also made us stronger. We felt prepared to take on anything...even to fight off the Russians😂, and not just because of Red Dawn. That movie didn't have the same effect on other generations. I think our street experiences and the Vietnam experiences are what made Red Dawn hit us the way it did. We were all Wolverines in some way.
My father came back from Nam and killed himself on new years eve. It messed my mother up so much that she gave me and my sister to the state so she could start a new life. The state gave us up for adoption to a family who used and abused us in EVERY way, including sexual. War hurts. Aask a survivor.
I realized, while listening to this video, that we are emulating the Silent Generation. They were the last time the kids flooded the workforce, like we did. And then they saw some shit (WW1, the Great Depression and then WW2) and they didn't really talk about it either. That would be a fascinating comparison. We were the Mall Rats, the Street Rats, we were feral. :P
@@alexanderbielski9327 I'm sorry, what now? Are you honesty comparing the generation who literally made safe spaces a thing to the generation that won two world wars?? Are you alright? Do you need a safe space to process??
We are the revolution against the woke BS you people literally and not used in your dumb Gen x way but literally literally invented woke political correct bullshit. You were feral because baby boomers didn't care about their children and wanted to do better than their children and raised even bigger prices of shit somehow some way.
Because I'm early generation x born 1967 my experience would be different from someone born later like say in 1977- 1980. A decade makes a major difference.
I agree my brother was born in 76 and I was born in 67 and he has no clue what I had to go through because I had to deal with the teenagers from the early 60s and they were very bad.
I was 68. I never fully identified with the younger X. I know I'm far from being a Boomer. Those of us X born in the 60s had a little bit different experience. I was a teen in the 80s.
My girl did that in 1983. Runaways. Years later after I (17yrs old and she 15 in 1983) when we were arrested out of state. I was extradited for: contributing to the delinquency of minor/taking a minor across state lines/and statutory R! All charges dropped except for the contributing to the delinquency of a minor... 6 months in prison served on a 2 to 5yr sentence turning 18 in prison. She was taken to a shelter/escaped it/hooked up with a truck driver to take her home and end up forced into prostitution/finally escaping via other prostitutes help her escape... 10yrs later 1993 approximately. A friend who knew our story sees a girl with an ugly tattoo with my name at a burger King drive through and puts us back in touch. When I finally get to talk to her and want to reconnect she refused because she didn't want me to see what she looks like then. Turns out she had been shot in the face at that drive though window. Dark side gen X.
Wow, that hit hard. Yeah, my dad worked constantly as a machinist in the 70s-- when he wasn't being laid off. My mother was a valium-addicted narcissist with MS. Since I was 6 years old, I stayed out of the house as much as I could. Yeah, I had a paper route at 12 because my folks couldn't be bothered to provide for me. Stole packs of smokes from Ma all the time. Thankfully never got pregnant, but a lot of my friends did. And yeah, we didn't date high school guys, we dated guys in their 20s and sometimes 30s-- in my state at the time, age of consent was 17. Yeah, we at least had 3rd spaces, and the drinking age at the time was 18. We'd pay our 18 yo friends to buy us booze at 13, 14. We were out cruising in cars at 15. Hell, the local "candy shop" near the high school would have a special blue light on outside to tell us they had marijuana for sale. We were 30 at age 10 and we're 30 in our 50s. Gen Z look at us like we're feral a$$holes, but that's how it was. Oh, and child sexual abuse?? Puhleeze, who could we tell? Who would believe us? And if we did tell, we got blamed. We were the last generation to leave the house at 18 because we couldn't wait to get TF out. Yup, the dark side of Gen X. If you weren't there, you won't get it.
My dark side was different. Having deaf parents made it very different. My parents divorced and mom remarried, but all three parents lived under same roof. They were party people. So I recall several swinger parties that were interesting for a 5yr old. I got stories that would blow your mind! Kids today would break walking a mile in my childhood
Yeah those parents sure seemed to have a great time. Why were we even at those parties. My friends and I talk about how alarmingly finely attuned we are to anyone being on coke.
I guess compared to this, I lived like a noble girl. My parents stuck together, they even had a house on their own, but were always complaining about the costs, yet, they had enough money to go on holiday. Compared to their childhood, in many aspects, ours must have seemed quite good, I mean, in Germany, right after the war, everything was out of order. I always had enough to eat and drink and enough things to wear. But since they never learnt to be loved, they could not love us really. We did not really trust our parents. We did never talk about anything real. When we cried, we cried in our rooms. When we were happy, we were happy with our friends. "Children should be seen and not heard". " You have eaten? Is your homework ready? So, out with you and do you not dare to be back before the lights come up but do not dare to be back after, either!"
1976 in small town midwest, my girlfriend and I finished our crossing guard duty. We were in 5th grade, and were headed back to the elementary school for Girl Scouts, about 14 blocks. Three guys in Chevelle, high gloss black with lime pin stripes- slowed down pacing us, cat calling and trying to make time with us. We were tall probably 5' 4" and well developed. But still had our safety belts on. After about 4 blocks, we had enough to l d then to F off and stuck out our tongues. That made it worse, they opened their dors and we ran. They got back in the car and started to try to cut us off, we ran thru some yards to a parallel street. They pulled around to get at us. We crossed the street cut thru a grass lot and finally arrived the school. They drove off- peeling out. We told the Scout Leader, because we were late out of breath and crying. She called the cops. He told us it was our faults because We Stuck Out Our Tongues. We learned our lesson- never tell, never trust an authority figure. This wouldn't happen today. Kids don't walk to school, and would any school have 10 year old crossing guards? Later on as a 21 year old, I was graped- I didn't tell a soul. I blamed myself.
Yes I was 8 in 76, It was like you described. A feeling of being on our own and having to fend for ourselves. I was molested by a teen boy in 75 and tried to talk to my parents about it but got shut down. It made me feel powerless and shameful.
6:23 I remember that "just say no to drugs" They sold pencils that said "don't do drugs" you sharpened it enough it read "do drugs" and then just "drugs" until it was just a pencil. When the school board found out about these other stages they quit selling those pencils.
Having parents from the silent generation Definitely created a dark side in my life Because they were of the opinion that I was to be seen and not heard Didn't work out well
x Back in the day...there was only moving forward...you had to keep going like the Energizer Bunny in order for things to get better. x When I was a kid I realized, without a shadow of a doubt, that listening to the "elders" would only get anyone to a place called NOWHERE.
Even those of us who had a parent who gave a crap about you, we also had to be tough because the less friendly street kids were happy to be a problem. I know I've gotten the crap beat out of me quite a few times for giving insult apologies and also did my share of beating other kids. Even the kids with good homes had to be hard.
Just like Boomers were the first generation to have starter homes, they also had starter children: Gen X. Their “real” kids were the millennials. We were nothing more than try before you buy. When they found their second and third spouses is when they had their golden children, the millennials.
My generation is stoic. We are strong we don’t need to air our grievances and have anyone validate us. We have depended on ourselves since childhood. These younger coddled generations can’t fight or think their way out of a wet paper bag on some issues. They are very book smart but not logical. Also they live in the virtual while we created damn thing
I was born '73 in the UK, so my experience is a bit different to my American peers. My parents were Silent Gen, and helicopted me well into my late teens. I didnt have my own key til 20's but there was an outside key on a hook under the hedgerow in front because Mom kept getting locked out. I got kicked to my room a lot of the time, so I wouldnt get underfoot or bother my parents with my stupid kid shit and so I had no one to talk to about the bullying in school. All I got was my Dad telling me, if they hit you, hit back harder, if you get chased, get them lost, if you need to hide, make sure you cant be found. I remember being told, be back for the streetlamps but I wasnt allowed to sleep around anyone's house because my parents were obsessed with this idea of me mixing with the *wrong sort of people* and they isolated me like you would not believe. Didnt stop me, sneaking out to hang out with friends or one friend who had to climb out of the bathroom window, and climb down the drainpipe so my Dad didnt know I had a friend visiting. He didnt want me to do anything except get married and have kids. I am child free and never married. I stood by my guns. I wanted a job, Dad sabotaged me, I wanted to have hobbies, Dad blocked it. Every time I tried to deviate from his life path, he made sure I failed. He wanted me so desperate and unable to do anything for myself, so I would have no choice but to marry and have kids. I stayed home until my parents died and inherited everything. My parents gave me mental illness which makes growing up in the 70s up harder but I'm still here. I haven't self deleted like others younger than me going through bullying at school. My Mom didnt care that my ex was SA'ing me, she thought it would make me strong if I had to fight for my survival. My Dad never even found out what had happened til decades later. So, I wasnt technically a Latch Key kid but being isolated and constantly fighting to keep your personality intact when you are battling psychological neglect and abuse from your parents, its a different battle, to the ones that got beaten up in the street. We all had different battles to fight. We didnt have therapy, we had ourselves. I've been in therapy, it doesnt work. It actually had zero effect on me except to learn that the Mental Health professionals dont WANT to help people with BPD, they'd rather we were locked up and drugged into insensibility so they dont have to deal with the girl that wont tolerate other people's abuse without fighting back.
Gen X here, born 1967. We talk way too much about our childhood and I think the reason why is because we're still wounded by being "alone" in our childhood. We were the first generation without 2 parents at home. No nannies, no babysitters, just "you're on your own kid". We didn't have year round sports programs to go to, after school activities etc. All of what you said was my childhood. There is a movie with Matt Dillon called Over The Edge. This movie was made in 1979 and for me, this is THE GEN X movie that shows our childhood more than any other. Asking about dating, girls in my school didn't date college guys, they dated their peers, I never knew a girl that dated a college guy. I had a lot of fights like you, but I was always the winner because I was "crazy" and bigger than most of my peers back then. I was 6 ft. tall by 5th grade. I never grew an inch after 5th grade, lol!
Us Millennials have similar talks amongst ourselves too. We may have been pampered due to the 90s and tech boom of the 2000s, but we had similar experiences. The lack of supervision on the computer is whats alarming with us, but outside we were watched like prey by parents.
51 year old Aussie bloke here. Pretty much the same story on the other side of the planet. My millenial kids think we're full of it, whereas my 18 year old sees it and gets it. Gen Z feel like we do, they're our inheritors.
These stories resonate, even from the other side of the world. You’re right, it felt the same here in Australia. Life was tough. We were forced into adulthood in our early teens. I distinctively remember street fights being crazy. I still wonder how we weren’t killed or how we didn’t kill anyone. Rough times.
I often say Gen Z are the new and improved Gen X. Most of the Gen Z I know, I was a teacher, seemed to learn a lot of the same lessons from us without the hardships we had. That, and they are go getters and spit fires once they find a direction. They have better tools too. They are making a bigger difference in their world. One of my students heard about families in South America with very little electric lights. So he found a way to create solar powered lamps that lasted for hours and were dirt cheap. He fundraised the money needed to make them, ship them, and even deliver some himself. All so students could study and read in the evening. He was in high school when he did this (16-17). This was 10 years ago or so.
Some of us Millennials understand your generation despite us being your victims. However, in the US. Gen Z is not really your inheritors. Most Gen Z I have met tend to be the most weak and helpless generation around. Even putting a large chunk of worthless millennials in good light I do not share your, nor many others sentiment on Gen Z. Some are capable, but most that I have met are the furthest thing from resilient.
Everything you said is spot on. My real father was out of the picture. My step father worked long hours, sometimes was gone for days or weeks on end. And my mother was absent and a drunk so I raised myself. I was only home to sleep and occasionally grab a meal. I had side hustles both legal and illegal. Lost a friend at 16 who we believed was murdered by a biker. I raised myself, but I'm glad I went through it because it taught me that I could handle anything.
I cant relate at all to this. I was born 1999, not sure what generation i am. my generation is mostly fucked in the head. Most people I know cant get a date or a job. Even popular people have trouble finding a girlfriend. Most people are more interested in one night stands. One of my friends has a college degree in cyber security. yet he cant find a job anywhere, he files so many applications and cant get one. It was interesting hearing about gen-x, people in my generation are caudled, so tons of us are unable to do adult things and figure out the details of life. I know about 6 or so people who killed themselves tho, i don't know if that's high or low tho.
1982er here. Also knew a bunch of folks who checked out early. They feel like combat deaths, like they didn't actually self-delete, but that essentially society took them out. I wish you good fortune in whatever endeavor you choose, and I hope that you find peace and happiness amidst this madness.
The thing is y'all think too much, and as far as getting a girl, don't rush to get one, take your time, and get them all. Life comes with rejection, so get used to it. Gen X here, 69 and we just kept pushing. Even at my age, women of all ages find me intriguing because move in silence, and exert outwardly I still can choose. I've been that way since a pre teen. Being Gen X means we don't worry about things, we can't do nothing about, but what we can do, we do, and will do. We don't believe in boundaries, but we respect them. Go live your life, find some outgoing friends and have a life. Put down that cell phone, and just go.
Alcoholic codependent father, delusional adult child of an alcoholic mother. Wanna talk about being on your own? We had the appearance of a family who had it all together. But at home, it was a different story. I told my mom that im not upset at anyone. However, it makes all the sense in the world that im divorced and loving living single. I figured out how to live like a king on very little.
Tbh we didn't talk about it, because we had to carry the innocence after kids after the Vietnam war, when the country was going through a culture change. We know what we heard, and saw but just being kids and having that freedom to just be left alone to be kids is what kept us from looking too deeply into adult matters. We were glad we were latch key kids because it meant we had the house to ourselves, without a lot of other people and their b.s., which also explains why our counselors was our friends, that if our parents were fighting I could just go to their house and my parents still knew where I was, after they stopped fighting to realize I was gone. There were dark times, but it made us self reliant and resilient. We are the last of the strong self sufficient generation.
It was pretty wild. Literally. I got hooked on dope and alcohol as a teenager. Found out i had some good hands on me too. I got to be a scary guy. Sobered up at 22 in 92. Lost so many friends. We really live by the Gasden. Dont Tread On Me. I wouldnt trade it for anything. God bless all my GenX Brothers and Sisters.
That's the sentiment of Gen X, all our brothers and sisters no matter the skin color. We realized racism was pushed on us, by stupid parents and wanted to get away from that. Our problems wasn't in the streets, it was at home, and all Gen Xers can get with that no matter the skin color. We are the first generation not to give into that racist mindset, so we all had mostly the same experience no matter your background. Gen Xers are the realist of any generation. We are all one....Gen X.... Stay strong my brothers and sisters, anyone getting clean, and staying sober big ups, to ones that still struggle we are here for you.... We know your pain....,💪💪💪💪
Tough, resilient,.. persistent… patient.. observant… The list goes on brothers and sisters. Generation X has it in spades and plays it close to the chest.WE KNOW. If there was ever a generation that came close to Jedi status….GX. To this day, heads down to hell with the pain, to hell with the cost bean counter ,we will suffer later …MOVE FORWARD. AND LOVING EVERY SECOND. LOVING IT.
I said the same thing. We just keep moving forward, don't have time to look back. Too afraid if I turn around, I'll have to whoop someone's ass....🤣🤣🤣🤣
My teenage years started in 1985. I turned 12 in the fall of '86. Our generation saw the Challenger go boom and were told to watch tv by our teachers and to shut up. I didn't dare talk back to my old man, I did, but I found out fast that was a bad idea.
Being born in 74 and the middle kid (oh...the irony) my childhood was pretty dark. But there were a LOT of good times too mostly centered around music. Lost a lot of friends to drugs, gangs and suicide. I tell these younger people 'You think you're gonna stop me from doing what I do? Think you're gonna bring me down? BITCH. PLEASE. I used to give Pop and another friend's Dad shit about the old man in the room. Now, that I'M the old man in the room? I realize how much of an honor it was to be so because I lot of us Gen X'ers didn't make it (including my older brother who passed away at 50 but it took cancer 4 times to finally take him). I used to say this about my family but I've come to realize that the ones that survived? We are NOTORIOUSLY hard to kill.
Was 15 when I got with my wife. She was 14. She was just coming out of 8th grade and I was heading into my sophomore year. Been together ever since minus the million break-ups lol!
9:46 - accurate. I dated a guy who was in the military when I was 15/16. He was 21. (We lived in a military town, and my father was in the military.) My parents even met him and approved. He'd come over for dinner, BBQ's, to go swimming, watch movies, and we would also go out and do things together. My parents would eventually separate that same year, but before they did, it was non-stop fighting between them, unless he was there, and then they would get along for the sake of appearances. The guy I was dating knew things weren't rosey at home, though. When it got bad, he'd come and pick me up, to get me away from the house, so I didn't have to listen to their fights. So yeah, where I lived it was quite common for teenaged girls to date older guys. It wasn't as "taboo" as it is today. I have to agree with this entire video. We (GenX) didn't have it the best, but we made the best with what we had. I still think we grew up in the greatest era of time, though and I wouldn't change that for anything. We still had a lot of great times, and I have many good memories from my younger days. I cling to the good memories, because my youth wasn't completely awful. You take the good with the bad.
Me too! He was Air Force, I was 15 he was 23! Funny thing was, he couldn’t go to my senior prom because he was too old! So he drove me to get my pictures taken then we went to a bar! 😂 I can’t imagine my daughter dating someone that old! My parents did give a crap! Nobody thought it was weird. I ended up marrying someone 18 years older than me 😂 so I guess I have a type. I loved how if you were happy, nobody judged your situations then.
i was hustling money at 9. mowed lawn's, a paper route, and collected glass bottles. fought all the time, lost more than won, but had to fight. would travel up to 20miles a day on the weekends if i wasn't hustling. go into the woods, travel across the interstate because it was a short cut to places you wanted to get to, hit the beach alone.
Excellent talk. It encourages me to play now. I avoid good times cus feelings of work even if i dont have to ect. While it hurts, yes those druggies and boozers were weaker then us. They clicked up via self harm and if you didn’t partake… it was like you were a child to them. I lost 2 to booze now 1 guy, 1 gal friend. Lost another to not elevating his game, stabbed 6 weeks ago, acting like it’s cool to be up late on SF streets acting like a teen around methheads. I got hooked on fitness and martial arts, some motor sports. Almost always alone. Sometimes I’m aloof inappropriately, other times my peers are aloof in the same way. Sad stuff, no doubt. We should embrace our generations strengths because they are truly special. After tomorrows lift and post work out shake, I’m hitting old school pizza place and some GOT pinball machine on my motorcycle. Kinda nostalgic. The pent up anger. The aloneness. Working some video game or pinball skills… hoping no one f’s with you… and what you’ll have to do ect… then the teenage commute home m, messed up feelings but trying to be cool and happy like nothing matters. Felt like shit but when looking in the mirror, we were young and felt that youthful truth. While we may have said we didn’t look like some actor / a tired ect or a super kool kid at school, and we may have self clowned, we still liked ourselves and had hella pride for being survivors of the day. Thanks again for the talk. I got some play experiences to make up for. I’m sure many of us do. Especially us sober ones. So when some hater caps on my incoming c-8 vet, I’ll just say I got this car cus I was stone cold sober all high school long while you drank and got smoked up… We need to accept and embrace self love in ways we never got nor were accustomed to. Any dream or nice thing you have must be fortified with 3-5 reasons you have it. When other cap, you hit a reason, when they cap again, you hit another reason… and so forth… all chill like. Get your blessings, what ever they are. Clean laundry done on the regular is my go to every other day blessing. Embrace small, medium and large blessings. Keep your haters at bay 🖖🏼live long and prosper mother fu**ers. Take care-
I was in my mid 40s and a dead girl was identified on the news after 30 years missing. She was last seen at the mall in the mid 1970s. That left me shaken to the core. She would have been my age. We also had the "killer clown" with 25 bodies under his house. Clowns used to be fun. A lot changed in the 1970s.
I think people talk about the generations are missing the point. The collapse of civilization is slowly set up over a long period of time spanning over several generations. Each seemingly small piece of decay is taken in the collective stride of those who live through it. People get into the mentality that something must not be so bad because the warnings from those that see the danger doesn’t immediately happen. The delayed consequences give a false sense of security until the sudden collapse.
All we hear about today are Boomers,Zs and Millennials. X has been ignored because we quietly go out our business like Sigmas. We used to do all kinds of crazy stuff. Today’s kids have helicopter parents or they sit at home on their phones or games.
When I get together with my two older sisters and we are all genx, that's what we talk about, how we survived our childhoods. Things like how my middle sister had to walk a few miles back and forth to school and on two occasions was chased by men in a car trying to abduct her. I was involved in criminal behaviors as a teen and was lucky to survive, have PTSD from it. Seen people nearly get killed, carried a gun in high school , high speed car chases, trauma units 3 or 4 times before I was 19, drug rehab, on and on. Chicago was a rough place to grow up. Here's the thing, growing up so poor living above bars with rats and roaches and absent parents, we turned out very smart and resilient, two sisters both scientists, one PHD, and I work for one of the biggest tech companies as a facilities engineer. I feel the struggle and freedom to make our own mistakes made us who we are.
That's because after all of that, and you lived, at some point you had to succeed. That's why we as Gen Xers dgaf. We made through some tough ish, and are still here to tell the tale.
I can see the end of us,.. it's when our next generations grow up with AI doing everything for them. Answering any questions that they need just by speaking aloud. Showing them how to get to anywhere and reading directiins aloud or just driving them there. Doing everything for us, we will become weak, atrophy, individually stupid, unable to make our own decisions, and frozen in indecision without our AI assistant. Deathly afraid of risk, personal injury, risk averse to the point of being frozen in fear, and at that point, we will be dead. Once we are weekend to this point, anyone can swoop in and mow us down like grass.
I know how to save us. We will need to program a "prime directive" in AI to not give us the snawers. AI will have to be a mentor, tutor, an assistant but not simply do it for us. This must be it's prime directive, to be all knowing but to always show us the path not take us down it.
This i why I have to laugh at today's kids who think they're all that and a bag of chips. Not only was there a dark side, but some of us lived in it willingly. We got to a point where we said to ourselves, "Enough of this bullshit." And we took steps. Myself, I got into a fight in school stemming from a false accusation. All it took was the first fight. The usual crowd gathered, "someone's gonna beat up that scrawny nerd, let's watch!" That was when I learned I didn't have that proverbial glass jaw. He got in one good hit. I stumbled, and glared. Then I took him by the throat and proceeded to hamburger his face. Dented the locker through his head, broke a knuckle on his face. Poor Dave Minardi, never saw him again. Even tried to look him up a few times in recent years, no clue whatever happened to him. But that one fight in high school, 9th grade, seemed to change my life for the better in many respects. Never got bullied since, except one unfortunate new kid didn't know about it. Laid him out with one hit. I was never popular, never into sports, I was - and still am - a nerd. Soon to be 54 now. We are the last of the feral children. For the most part, we are not weak. We don't take any shit from anyone. We know bullshit when we see it. We are intelligent. We have common sense, and we have oodles of wisdom learned the hard way. We are dangerous, we do not fight fair, and we will fuck you up if you screw with us. We have surpassed the Boomers in many ways, but generations following us have SUCH a long way to go to even come close to us. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my SMB game....
Everyone also forgets that child abductions by strangers was rampant during Gen x childhood and teen years because our parents never knew where we were or cared to know. Child abductions by predators and serial killers was highest during the 70's and 80's.
Sitting here with a missing tooth from a random encounter on the streets of Spokane WA. Buddy and I minding our own business esp. cause at the time I was in a knee brace , two guys come up to us and ask "what's up?" and before we could even answer my tank of a best friend got knocked out and I took a ring to the mouth as the guys who hit us for no reason ran off. Just how it was.
I was there. I absolutely hate that we don't talk about it. The last stronghold I had was the kids that grew up with me only to go through all of that, grow up and we all are just gonna act like the one that speaks up is the weird kid still
I hated my childhood. Hated school. Hated the powerlessness of being a kid. Couldn't wait to grow up and fly away. I left school and started a job at 15. I suffered from cyclical depression for about 13 years. Every winter I'd be suicidally depressed for a month or two. I thought it was normal. Later, I thought it was SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder.) But, aside from this I was optimistic. Glad to be free. For years I woke up every morning delighted that I didn't have to go to school. I revelled in my freedom. I was a punk. Got into fights. Arrested a few times. Many different jobs. Lived in squats. Chased women. Had intense friendships with guys. Drugs, raves, music festivals, gigs, motorbikes, lots of dramas. Didn't know how psychologically damaged I was until around 2012 when I came across podcasts discussing traumatic childhoods on UA-cam. You don't accept you're damaged until it is pointed out to you. Mind you, I scorned younger people for being weaker and softer than me. My horrible childhood had made me resilient and turbo-charged my brain. I was in the last generation to create original culture...punk, hip-hop, grunge etc.. The last generation to be critical thinkers and despise authority. We need adversity to spark our intelligence and make us creative. To make the canary sing you have to puncture its eyes.
There were a lot of kids including myself that were violated, it became such an epidemic that Rick Schroeder had a commercial about it (don't be afraid to tell someone) .
I know lots of us xers think we had the best childhoods but not true, we had the hardest. It took tolls on us that we would not know until adulthood. Because of shitting parenting most of us have cPTSD and autoimmune issues or addictions. Our lives were hard and it shows.
My best early hustle (I was 10) was an early tone dialer. I made a small electronic box that would play the tone that was made when a quarter was placed in a pay phone. Any kid that bought it could make a call anywhere on earth for free from any phonebooth in the United States.
Cool... The military used to have an 800 number for their guys to make free long distance calls. I slept with a few to get that number and when it changed.
We had a number and a code and then could call around the world. We would just random dial different countries and talk to people. Surprisingly, most spoke English. It was wild!
Correct me if Im wrong, but our generation was the first of women (our mamas) leaving the home to work full time jobs. i hated that. I wanted my mom home.
You're right about many things and you remember them as if is it was yesterday like some of us who survived that psyckopathic era all alone where nothing was as it seemed and no one taught many of us from Generation exit anything useful
They did teach you something useful. How to live without negative people. I could write a book on how to avoid b.s. just by growing up GenX. If it should have taught you anything is how to make lemonade, and build a stand. It's only how you choose to look at it. Gen X is resilient because we had to be that way, and besides your still here right. So you learned something...
Not really I belong to generation Exit, born between 1975 to 1985 saying:" The worst they could do is the most you got" Basically this means we never lived or learned anything most of us died on the inside by drugs or gang violence but you sound as a GenX that made it through almost intact that's wonderful I pad you on your back. @@AlldatJazz-rw9wy
Latchkey Gen-X'r here. The only one's tougher than us are the Greatest Generation.
I said we were raised on “Watership Down” even our cartoons bled.
Proud Xer here. Agree with both ya.
And the Silent generation, being between the traumatised war/ greatest gen and baby boomers.
My grandmother was in silent gen and some of her memoirs would make any genXer wide eyed.
l'm a '75 gen Xer btw.
Funny enough, those guys had a much more coddled childhood than you 13ers.
Lmao, that's SO true!!! That's why SO MANY of them are STILL creating our laws. Regardless of how different the world is now.
Mental toughness, our "safe space" was within us.
I still strongly support this mentality ‘98 born myself. I think having parents from a 3rd world country really helped
We still have this mentality.
It still is.
We Gen Xers had to create our own safe spaces , as stated for me it was my imagination.
It still is
"It is 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?"
Nailed it my brother… it’s a miracle I made it adulthood.
Yep. Latchkey at 7 at a home in the woods on 42 acres with no close neighbors. Went thru the fighting parents, divorce, the absent dad, the new step dad, two moves to two new cities/schools in two years. Then home became the place of the newlywed fighting parents (mom and stepdad) the next 6 years until college. At 11, I became the “family counselor” (as the youngest in the family), making sure everyone was “okay”. So yes, forced to grow up fast is a major understatement. I think we all were a little damaged. But we can come together and raise a glass for our mutual experiences.
SALUTE!!!
Well... I grew up in a conservative neighborhood. Divorce was still looked down upon. But there was a lot of coldness. Not real love. Yes, I never had to go hungry. Yes, my parents were interested in my grades. Yes, my parents did not get divorced. But I was made responsible for my mom ?s decision to have us and not to have a career or to hire a babysitter. She drank, and smoked, and blamed it on us, especially on me as the second child. Having bad marks, when they were there, where not because we did not understand things properly, but because we wanted to make her look bad, my sister and me. And provided I had trouble with other kids , I never would ever have come to my parents to let them know. The main thing was "never ever be a nuisance and leave us alone". They never took a real interest in us, or what we wanted. We had to function. Get good grades, look beautiful, never talk back, be punctual, never ask questions, never ask for support, do not get yourself dirty, keep your clothes neat and tidy, you do not come from a scum family. And if we were ill, especially mom complained of having to take care of us extra because we were in the house too long. And of course, we as girls had to help in the house, the garden and to sew our own buttons. Strict parents in the 1970s were not that much fun, either. Well, at least they cared that I had good marks, had something to eat and drink and did not stay out too long...
I was a dental assistant at 13. I quit that job and got a job at Burger King when I turned 14 because it paid minimum wage when the dental gig paid $1.86 an hour.
It is true that many of us Gen X have some sort of trauma stemming from childhood. Then there are some that had it much much worse than anyone else. Everyone knew them yet NO ONE tried to help….a child, a friend. One might imagine what an adult version of said child might be like. Prison? Maybe. Successful? Possibly (define success). Distrusting,angry, and disgusted at society regardless of generations? Absolutely! Some people literally got left for dead or beaten mercilessly….a child, a friend. That NO ONE helped. I am not aware of anything darker than that.
pain is weakness leaving the bodies. kids have no drive these days
I enjoyed growing up feral. It prepared me for a career in the Infantry. Looking at other generations, I feel fortunate to be a Gen X kid. No regrets.
They sure worked hard keeping women and others who wanted to serve out, then let them in as tokes for a r*pe gauntlet. Lucky you.
I agree.
✔️
HELL YEAH We made Great Infantry
"Let me get this right. You're saying you want to pay me extra money to jump out of an airplane, on top of already paying me to go live in the woods, play with automatic weapons, and blow shit up?
You had me at living in the woods, Sucker."
Wtf you mean it had a Darkside? The whole of GenX was existence on the darkside
No it wasn't. The freedom wasn't dark, it was liberating. The dark side was that psa, that asked, "it's 10 o'clock, do you know where your kids are"? That one caught me off guard every time.
@@AlldatJazz-rw9wy apparently not for everyone. But guys with your attitude were what was dangerous for me. You ARE potentially my dark side.
@@JenSell1626 who asked you? Idc about how you feel. Keep it to yourself, or go find therapy.
My dad’s quite fond of the freedom he had as a kid. He’s still good friends with everyone he grew up with and they’re all quite successful and took big risks fearlessly. One perk about being a latchkey kid was having no aversion to risk.
@@taylorcrain1821 True, most of us are quite OK with crises, but for a lot of us life was a warzone. No one had your back. But that is why we were happy to travel around the world (literally in my case) at 14.
We came to terms with "that which does not kill you makes us stronger "Friedrich Nietzsche's
Actually I think the line goes: That which does not kill you, gives you some weird coping mechanisms :)
AMEN!
What doesn't kill you isn't working
Don't be a millennial you boomer
There wasn't emphasis back then about child and teen psychology. Kids are resilient, was the mantra. Kids were highly ignored, emotionally, socially, and physically. The high divorce rates and the impact on Kids was ignored. The largest amount of "missing" Kids were Gen Xers. In the 90s, things changed. Millenniall children became very protected. Suddenly, issues like pedophilia, abuse, missing kids, teen suicide, divorce impact FINALLY started to get central attention. But Gen Xers paid the price and it was too late for them. But what was gained was an unshakable resiliency. This is why we cringe when generations after us complain and need safe spaces. We had no platform to complain. And as for safe spaces, we had ourselves and relied on ourselves - not society to take of us. We gave society the middle finger, and in some ways today, we still do.
From my experience as a Millennial, Many of these things didnt change. I know many friends who were kids to Gen X and they had it hard. Being told they were mistakes, in the way or were very obviously used as a tool to harm dad in the divorce. We always had Stranger Danger held above us to drive home abject fear of random people, We were laregly sheltered because of that, and much much more. All while being told how great of a childhood Gen X had and how those days are long gone( but we had better stay close to home and not dip out of sight even with our neighbor friends). I learned the traumatizing and hard way that while Stranger Danger was meant to keep us safe from random people, I learned that its actually friends and family who are even more dangerous....
For every good Gen X parent that us Millennials got, there were even more that were absolutely awful. At least with us Millennials, if we had Boomer parents( that were together still). They tended to be near retirement or were and had fairly cushy lives. Thats where the spoiledness of my generation comes from, the sheltered ones or the ones that are thicker skinned tended to come from Gen X parents.
I approve this message and a stiff middle finger to those that don't lol❤
Our parents were occupied with their own lives and success. As long as we weren't starving, all was good.
It was like they just dropped off the food and said, "go for self, I'll be back". Love ya....🤣🤣🤣🤣
The impression I always got from my boomer 'old folks' is that even when you're a successful professional like my dad, life was always a bitch. Exhausting and miserable. Just to have a house to live in and some savings.
So be it.
Yes, the kids have food, the lights are on, do you have the house key around your neck on the chain. Do you have feelings? Or you don’t know how to express your emotions? Course you don’t if no one understood. Some people blame the older generations than us for not engaging with us emotionally. Truthfully, I don’t think they knew how so I don’t blame them.
@@Alwayslearnimgyou’re so right. They grew up in sterile environments, poor, God fearing folks. When avenues went astray from what they knew I imagine it would be like asking a 90 year old to hook up a wifi router
@@skeezix8156 absolutely. That’s a good way to put it. That just was not part of their lives. And they could not understand. So I give them a lot of grace. I know they had it rough when they were younger. So I’ve tried really hard to understand this. Lack of trying to connect with us. It’s taking me a long time and I’m in my 50s now but I think I finally understand them a lot more. And I miss my parents every day.
I told a school counselor what a certain man was doing to me, a 11yr old girl. She ignored me for the rest of my time there. Nothing happened. Talk about the dark side.
I hear you.
Too much paperwork..
I was 4, in pre k and "assaulted " by a classmate. Never told anyone...
I remember a girl up my street I’d known since before kindergarten. Sweet cute Caroline. Half Dutch half Irish. In 8th grade as I was hanging outside after school this nice September afternoon I saw Caroline on her knees in her cheerleading outfit giving a high school senior head. She didn’t even try to hide it or was unaware we saw her. My sister one year younger was appalled. They got up and went into her house. Both parents worked so they screwed for an hour or two then the dude left. I kept thinking to myself God Caroline not you too. Her life was a train wreak of many guys and being a single mom. Her pretty looks honestly by her early 20s. This was in 1978.
@@chiarac3833 I understand. To distrust authority figures is very sad at such an early stage in life
Recently I've begun remembering the teen runaway problem we had in the 70s and 80s when i read milennials and Z claim they have it most dangerous today. No such thing as "trafficking awareness" back then. If cops found a runaway, they were taken back to the abuse with the scolding "Your parents love you, you're making it hard on them with worry, shame shame".
How many parents just chucked their kids out the house? I knew someone in high school that died of AIDS at 18. Because his parents had thrown him out two years before and he'd had to hook to get money. My brother was friends with a girl who got pregnant at 16 and her parents immediately threw her out. So many kids got kicked out by their parents.
@@julilla1 Yep. Met a 59yr old this week whose mom threw him out at 14.
@@C.Church oh I'm sure. The other thing that kids in America dealt with were dads with "flashbacks", now know as PTSD, from Vietnam.
australia & america were different alright , the law courts in australia was ful of pedos who would chase after us , & force parental separation , they would become our job recruiter & pimp, we were 8 and we had to report to police as they were the pimp mafia ,
australias 1970 to 2000 darkside was that there was no safety ,,,
high drug dependance to forget , but the flashbacks of abducted , trapped , no way out , statistically 75% of my generation were traffiked divorce kids , church was no safety either , it was only til now .. we survivors can tell our stories , even our own politicians had sex cults ,, we are demonised as woke , but each time an aussie pedo dies , we survivors have our own word for mourning ..
a dark side full of light ,, in retirement .. well no one knows why australia was set up this way ,,@@julilla1
Called many times lying of my whereabouts. Long as I called even after 2 days I’d call
Gen-X’er here. One thing that was absolutely true about our generation is that the likelihood that we would run into perverts was really high.
I was approached several times by dodgy fellas when I was a kid. However, it was drilled into me that I didn’t talk to or go with strangers - the consequences were never spelled out though as that wasn’t talked about. I don’t think it’s any worse today though but there’s greater awareness.
perverts are being normalized, WTF is with “minor attracted person”? we called them pedos.
Finally somebody talking about the real sh*t when it comes to my generation. Thank you.
None of us got "over it" but we got BEYOND it. Whatever our "it" was or is.
Truth
You're right it's sad but I felt like a gladiator for most of my childhood .
You mention the code of honor that Gen X had, which was, and still is, completely lost on Millennials. Snitching is one of the defining characteristics of Millennials that never gets talked about. Gen X has a silent comraderie that the millennials will never know.
Snitches get stitches. We would get whooping for being a tattle tale. Unless someone was about to burn down the house, you didn't snitch.
We fought together. We also banded together. and we dealt witrh our issues liike men. Not like these snivelling cowards
@@barbaramatthews4735 we snitched once but the sixth grade teacher wore his GRAND DADDY’S ROBES to “social studies” and was being led out weeping and calling us liars, still berobèd, whilst being led off school grounds before the end of class session
and nobody saw who did it.
I stand by our honor with the severity of the exception as it’s very testament
*bows*
I can’t stand snitches they are the lowest form of coward.
Especially someone who snitched on ‘friends’.
And that’s how predators like Diddy keep getting away with fucking kids… and sex trafficking… 😒😒😒 you all literally knew, the rumors where out, celebs were literally like “stay away from Diddy”, there were lawsuits “buy outs”… and you know what?
Gen X just lets evil happen
And then shits on young people for trying to change thing when Gen X dosnt get mad or upset about the shit. The evil dark shit, no they get mad that young people are now saying “gen x, you can do something to stop this” and gen x is just like “that’s not my problem”… only it is
Your in charge of the fucking system now you fucking adult children
If you want to fight the light you need to let the light in, and if you’re not snitching on the evil
You’re contributing to the evil
Gen X is the most abused, neglected, and mistreated generation in American history. I don't say that to brag or play the victim card. It's just reality. I'm in my 50's and I still suffer from the effects of my traumatic childhood. I've healed a lot and have made tremendous progress, but I still have my bad days.
Yeah I have them too sometimes, but just like then, we take a shot, and pull from a cigarette, (for those that smoke) and say .....oh well, and still carry on. If nothing else being Gen X, you ought to know, we don't linger in stuff too, we move on. I have PTSD from my childhood, but even with that I just use it to make me stronger. I know how to avoid b.s. because of it, and when I'm not around, I'm the first one they come looking for help from. But they call me crazy....🤣🤣🤣🤣. Gen X and I love it....
@@AlldatJazz-rw9wy We are definitely tough and resilient. I'm proud to be in Gen X. We are the greatest or a close second.
Grew up in a normal looking family where sexual abuse was part of growing up … at 48 I have regular memory reoccurrences of some horrible times, it never leaves you !
@@abc33944 I think it's important to remember that abuse and neglect wasn't our fault. I hope you find peace and healing.
@@abc33944 Someone was fighting me repeatedly asserting the women in my family all met tragic ends entirely because they CHOSE BAD MEN like nobody ever married an abuser that knocked them up at 12 lolsob I'm happy that isn't the first thing they think of, but not when they are projecting AND shaming. And no, they weren't all awesome parents, and why would anyone expect that?
Home was where the fighting parents were. Eventually there was only one parent, and she was much too busy to look after me or my brother, so I became the pseudo-parent at 12. What a rotten awful time. You're right about one thing, and that's that to stop me you're going to have to take me out.
Hugs.
that's not even remotely a dark side to generation x upbringing. Instead of being pampered (as is the current parenting trend) you learned self-reliance. Today's generation, they're spoiled, generation x, they can fend for themselves.
@boogiemcsplogie... Absolutely! But on a light note... Take you out like on a date or a sniper? 😂😂😂😂 Sorry, not sorry. Gotta love GenX humor 😂😂😂
"They learned self-reliance." Yeah, that's one way to respond to a traumatic situation that no child should have had to go through. That is very much a dark upbringing.
@@belias360 sensitive, reactionary little snowflake says what?
The best thing about being left on our own is I can figure out almost anything and fix almost anything or "rig" something that's broken to work! I hated it then ,but now my experience's come in handy.
AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH!!!!
Very true. However, it also means that I have a hard time asking for help when I actually need it.
Props for speaking out man… Guns and Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle isn’t just a pretty song, it was written during the 80’s for a reason. Started earning money picking strawberries when I was 8, so your story is very relatable.
And yup, the golden rule was to never back down from a fight, even if you knew you would get your ass kicked. Thát way you knew you would earn the respect to not be bothered again, win or lose… otherwise you would be haunted by your bullies to the end of days.
Good vid dude.
"You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby. You're gonna die."
Amen to that. I fought my bullies, as I had no choice. My older siblings were out of school, and I couldn't run home, because then I'd get a whooping for running. To this day, I thank my bullies, because they made me the fighter that I am.
In my own experience it makes no difference if you fight back. Even putting the guy in the hospital for quite a while. People who stalk and harass you never, ever lay off until they're dead. People are fucked in the head
@@devilsoffspring5519 That's indeed fucked up, and different people experience different lives. Sorry it didn't work for you mate.
my theme song.
We went through so much good and bad stuff as kids we ended up indifferent as adults.
And many of us Millennials suffered as a result. I cant tell you the amount of times I heard friends or classmates tell eachother about how mom and dad ( usually mom) would berate them and call them mistakes or a useless mouth to feed. Or dad just wasnt interested in really being dad. Though many Millennials went through brutal divorces by gen X parents, and that fucked us up big time. Early Gen Z though..... God Speed to them and that generation.
Then you have Stranger Danger, That was used as effectively a weapon of control against us. Even with our neighbor friends, we couldnt go very far out of sight. But we would get told how amazing of a childhood our Gen X parents had being free roam and adventurous. We were very sheltered, and to our detriment. So I think many Gen X parents realized this and over compensating by giving us participation trophys and being bulldozer parents as we got older and Gen X became more financially capable of doing it.
@@joshuakhaos4451 so it's all my fault then? Even Thou I've never met you...
Feel Better now you've got that off your chest?
Gen x had dark side. Yeah that's a big understatement. We had to deal with our crap boomer parents not growing up. Hollywood stopped making children's movies and then made child villian movies. We saw the rapid escalation of urban crime and drug trade.
@singingwind977 A family of 10 kids. Parents were always out and the boomer older siblings just ignored you or beat you (one male sibling no one talks about cause they don't wanna admit what he did) I thank God I had a twin sister to talk with.
@singingwind977 I'm glad you are still standing and grinding through!
I've got nothing to bother getting out for. As I said I've cut everyone out. I haven't left my house for (almost) 2 solid months right now. Zero reason to.
When fights or violence broke out nobody called the cops. You just had to deal with it, and there were no shoulders to cry on or services. Its the reason rock music from that era is so angry, and disgruntled. You can also see it in the TV shows.
Im 36 so im kind of in-between.and can see the difference. But i do remember it vividly
More of us died per capita before the age of 35 than the greatest generation...and they fought WW2. So. Yah. And my friend...you went very, very easy on the dark side. Good on you.
LOLs us Gen Xers are as hard as a coffin nail! true story.
Look at all the gen talk. Boomer, milinieal, z, y. Rip Greatest and before
X always left out.
Born 77..sweetest spot ever. So sweet we got our own micro Gen label.
Maybe they all should get the hint and turn it over to us. Or we gonna get left out of getting a chance to run this shit.
Word!
I’m a warrior physically but growing up Gen x ruined me mentally.
We were the last generation of critical thinking, common sense.
Truth
Indeed.
And the last gen to grew up with a good economy and low housing market. Yet most of you'll can't retire 😅
@@scaldon2 yeah GenX were the last generation of "give me my keys back, I'm ok to drive"......
There are still some out there but i have noticed over the last few decades it has dwindled and im a 90s baby. Just the overall quality of humans and livelihood has gone downhill
Never thought about it until this video but your are correct. Our generation never really talks about the negatives of our childhood, at least deeply. If we do, we are usually sarcastic about it or turning a negative into a little joke to get a quick laugh.
We learned to channel our pain into comedy. That's how most of us processed the Challenger explosion.
I believe that most of us learnt real quick to turn what they could into as positive of a spin as possible, no matter how bad it was for us.
How would we be able to truly enjoy the good times if we didn't have those bad times to help us appreciate the good times better?
Today’s kids are constantly talking about their anxiety.
That's because we were designed not to give a fuct. We came at time when patriotism was at a low because we came after the end of the Vietnam war, and at that point society was at a, " can we all just get along", point. We are the kids that just took that depression and went outside and ran it off. Even today we talk about it, because in the end, we'll be ones that will have to patch 💩 up, after the gens before and after us, will come crying to show them how we done it. That's why I'm glad they forgot us.
@@deebraun7488 I suggest watching "Call Me Lucky" if you haven't and learn where our comedy culture of the 80s all really came from. Spoilers: it's trauma, and of a beautiful troubled human.
Dude is right, especially about toughness. ALL of us Gen X'ers have been in a physical fight, and probably many more. I'm a woman and pretty passive but growing up Gen X you had to fight and defend yourself. It's how we did it. Boomers might have grown up having to fight too, but I'm positive Millenials and Gen Z'ers never did.
Absolutely. I am a woman as well and yes, I believe the vast majority of us have been in fights. Not because we sought them out, but because we were generally forced into them. And there were not helicopter parents around to protect us. If you didn’t know how to fight, you might end up coming home having to make up a story about whatever bruises or whatever happened in that fight. But you learned how to defend yourself . Sink or swim.
@@Alwayslearnimg LOL Yes, we were forced into them as in we werent the ones starting them. It was really common to witness fights too, at school and at play.
@@vaskylark I remember being in kindergarten or first grade, and this is the only time I think anything like this happened to me. But I’m literally challenged a little boy to a fight on the playground after school. 😂😂😂😂😂 Gen X girls. We totally rock.
@@Alwayslearnimg Gen X girls were far tougher than boys today.. I’m the baby of 4 and my sisters beat the dog snot out of me until lil brother became tougher than them. Lol.. One sister beat the dog snot out of 3 guys and 2 girls at a keg party.. All 5’3 110lbs of her broke 1 guys nose, slammed one guys arm in a door and broke it and cracked 2 of a girls ribs.. The other guy and girl just got bruised up faces.. That sister don’t cat fight. She punches, kicks, bites and if she grabs another girls hair it’s to shove her face into something like a wall or her knee..
@@lanejohnson7656 I agree. You are absolutely right. We had the best childhood ever, regardless of the fact that they were not perfect. We sure did learn a lot.
Similar here in Poland. Born in 67, both parents worked and struggled to bild a house by themselves. Socialism- empty shops, food limited as everything else. No one guided us, always out, always by ourselves. If clever you went to a library, but equally could join a gang. Powerty. One pair of jeans, two t-shirts, jacket and complains that I've outgrown it. I was trully sorry. You are right- we never complain and tried to provide our kids with so much more!
Sounds like capitalism 😂 That's why both of my parents worked - and I was a latchkey kid.
With both working, him in law and her as a teacher, we lived in a small apartment until I was almost 8 when my brother came & had to move. (No space)
It was because of social programs- that my Father had served in the military- that he qualified for a house loan. He was awful with money. He thought credit cards were 'free money' It was my Mom who knew knew how to make the ends stretch- or we'd have starved.
We moved to a small house- he was promoted but then- poof- it was mid 80s then. The 'Greed is Good' era. 🙄 Gag me with a spoon. My father- the true boomer he is- feel into the trap that HE should look & act like 'every other dude in the office'.
He couldn't keep it in his pants - or he couldn't keep it covered. Long story summary, he didn't even have the decency to look her in the eye to tell her he knocked up a coworker. He sent divorce papers in the mail and his sister mentioned something about a baby- thinking she already knew. She didn't.
Smh. A real role model.
Gah... Wonder why I have trust issues? Bahaha!
But seriously 😒-
Before that time, it had been my Mom's insurance which had covered our healthcare. But- thanks to his behavior- she couldn't maintain the house on her salary alone. Even if he paid child support.
Which- he did do- eventually.
And so our lives were uprooted as we moved to my grandfather's home in another city, several hours away, so she could have a support system and get a fresh start.
It also meant we had no healthcare for a time.
It took about a year to get another permanent teaching position. She tried her best and I don't blame her for anything- but I was 14 and I WAS angry- in general- so she caught lots of it because she was the one who there.
I feel really bad about that... 🫤
Felt bad about it then even.
She'd actually defend him- which would piss me off more honestly...
The one thing I can say is that my Mom was wayyyy to good for him and he didn't deserve her.
And tellingly, that second marriage ended in less than 3 years... and he pined for reconciliation but she had since met someone else.
Her second marriage lasted 16 years. So... (shrugs)
Capitalism...
😒
@@INFP_me 🤣trying to blame capitalism for poor personal choices🤣
They dated older guys because it was harder for them to get a home away from home alone, so they looked for older men that could give them a home.
You're not exactly wrong.
My cousin from NYC was 14 in 1978. I was two years younger. Beauty girl. She was dating a 20 year old rich kid from Manhattan. I remember his 78 black Z28. He was taking her to all the discos and doing cocaine. At 14 she had an overdose and an abort. My parents were absolutely horrified and wondered what the hell my aunt and uncle were doing behaving that way. My parents kept an eye on us like a hawk .
yes, 16 yrs old I had a 21 yr old boyfriend who fed & housed me, dropped me off at school, took me out to places on weekends. he was basically my proxy parent.
Not really?
I dated guys that was older but not
Adult guys that had their own home. That would be boomers
We dated Gen X our own generation.
@@sarah.j.777 Did he sleep with you?
This is absolutely the very best commentary on our generation I have heard. Honest to God truth. Sometimes, we just need to be reminded of who we are and the stuff we are made of. Thank you.
We were the last generation that got our asses beat when we were kids
I should have been…instead I was ignored and let loose.
That’s abuse too
1987 Millennial here. I stayed getting my ass whooped as a kid. I even had to pick a switch off the tree 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣💯
Gen X had an unpsoken rule if you didn't stand up for yourself no one else would. I gave more respect to someone that stood up for themselves intstead of the kid that just went along like sheep when they knew it was wrong.
@@jenniferw6192 I'm referring to my parents and family.... None of my peers could/would ever... Just Saying...#GenY(Millennials)Last of a dying Breed
Real fights. Street fights. Never mattered if i even showed up at home at night. No supervision. No guidance. No help. My father worked so many hours we were basically a single parent home. Everything you said was correct.
I feel there is a big part of the Gen-X experience that is overlooked. The absolute struggle to be taken seriously by Boomers or at least not actively undermined by our parents peers. You can see it still happening in our government as the octogenarian politicians keep theirs claws on power and money by every means possible, even when doing so is hurting our country. Lodged between the two largest generational population groups, boomers and millennials, we are fighting with our parents and kids for jobs and other resources. Many of us still believe in the ethics and responsibilities our grandparents taught us while expecting others to do the same.
hear hear! well said..
Despite my gripes about the sins of Gen X as adults/Parents. They at least have treated us Millennials as somewhat deserving of being viewed as adults as we've aged. Boomers still largely think we're snot sucking children that cant be given any credit.
Though Many Gen X did fail us massively growing up too. It wasnt just the Boomers. Many millennials are not worth the space and air they take up. But we were set up to be this way largely, only some of us have rose above our generations stereotypes.
That also explains why alot of the early Gen X parents became the helocopter parents of the late 90s
Most people wouldn’t even believe me if I told them my story. But at my age now I’m tired of everyone’s victim status stories, so I just choose to keep my mouth shut.
You hit the nail on the head.I so wanna tell my story but I can't because if I did it would just sound like I was a crying victim.
@@333Mesmerized so say it with humor. you can't be anything but the story you tell about yourself, so tell it real, just tell it funny. at least this has worked for me.
@@333Mesmerized Nah we know it's not I don't view my life as an I'm a victim story I view it as a war story.
I was about 13 when I lost a friend. to this day no one knows what happened to them. There were rumors of course... but never anything for sure for me. I did grow up with a single parent. No child support ect. I did the shopping, cooking, ect... I carried a defensive weapon on me, though not something that could be called a weapon legally back then.. I can't even imagine trying to explain these things to my kids. they think I exaggerate. Though they take my Husband's stories as more believable . It was tough growing up a female in that time. every one still comments I am not that girly. LOL Yes my high school had a day care.
Gen X was a tough time, especially for those that grew up with narcissistic parents.
The kind that never wanted to see you and kicked you out, but if you stayed away for too long (even if they knew where you were), they would file a missing person's report. And you never knew how long it would be each time.
My struggle wasn't in the streets, like it was with my brothers. Mine was at home, where I was expected to be, as a maid, but unable to cook for my family.
For some reason, I was never allowed to learn those basic life skills and my brothers didn't need to listen to me, even though all the blame for their actions was hoisted on to my shoulders. It was weird.
And then I was kicked out at 18 and literally had to figure out everything on my own bc I'd never been allowed to make my own decisions or my own mistakes, unlike my brothers.
Thanks for putting up this video. It needs to be talked about.
While many of us lived in single parent homes, so many of my friends, had parents might as well have not been there, because they were drunk. The poor parents drank beer, where the well off parents drank liquor.
Thanks for this. I guess even if parents cared about us, like when we were home or how our grades were - they actually had difficulties in showing us love and respect. Especially with the girls.And the fathers. And that is why the girls often looked for love and respect elsewhere, in the arms of a random guy who seemed confident but was only bragging and the girls often mistook that confidence for competence. The girls were all craving to feel loved and special because all they heard was "Do not be in our way", "Be home when the lights are out or I will kill you when you COME home" , "Do not be trouble or I will cause you trouble", " Get your s..t together and buckle up, don`t you ever dare. to cry or I will give you something to cry about". The older guys had cars to drive you around somewhere, away from someone to whom you only seemed to have caused distress. The boys in the age group did not.And they gave daddy vibes to some girls. That was the huge problem of our generation.
Absolutely, no one talks about this. Truth💯
You. Nailed. It. 😍
As a gen xers friends ment everything. I remember having serious dark problems that I knew I would never go to my parents for because I knew there would be no help or concern. We all knew better then to inconvenience or parents with our problems. We went to our friends, we helped each other survive as children dealing with problems adults should have been dealing with. Many of us wouldn't have survived without our friends. I am forever grateful to my Gen X friends for making my childhood bearable and survivable.
Yeah, parents never cared.Teachers never cared. Friends, they cared. They at least listened. "Children should be seen and not heard".... Was I alone with this?
@@YvonneHoerde "Children should be seen and not heard". That came from the victorian period i had my gran say that to me ,70's children had said to them "stop your crying or i will give you something to cry about".
That's the way I remember it.
I'm a baby boomer, but on the tail end of the baby boom, and my parents were separated before I was born.
I had the only divorced and single mother in the neighborhood, and I became an outcast at the age of four, because people hated divorce in that era and they were afraid that I would be a bad influence on their children. Suddeenly, my friends and all the other kids in the neighborhood said they couldn't be my friend, and they weren't allowed to talk to me.
Home life was like that. My mother was never around, because she worked and she went out dating after work. She was, 8nderstandably, obsessed with her own desperate situation, and the house fell into mess and disorder.
By the time I was just barely turning five, I realized I was alone in the world. There was no help, no one to go to for advice, and I had to fight and fight in the streets and at school. When adults came after me, including a pedophile, I had to fight with them myself, and get away from them myself, with no one to report the incidents to.
It always felt like I was on the edge of death and disaster. My mother would wake me at night and make me go to the hospital with her, because she had a heart problem and she worried that she was dying. I wondered if I would be orphaned at any moment.
I did spend most of my time outside the house, day or night, when the streets were all empty.
Most of the time, there wasn't food in the house, so I would collect soda bottles that were left all over town and take them in for enough money to get a meal at McDonald's.
The younger girls of generation X were being molested by the older baby boomer boys in the neighborhood, and in high school, lots of the girls were dating college boys. A girl I had had a crush on was dating a high school senior, who had sideburns, and looked like a grown man, who had been set back a couple of times.
I think it's funny when people talk about That Seventies Show and how the actress who played Jackie was only fifteen - what an outrage! Are they kidding? That was so common, it was ridiculous. Fourteen and fifteen year old girls were commonly dating college boys. People treated it as normal, and hardly worth commenting on.
I knew guys in college in the eighties who would go to high schools to pick up girls.
I thought it was ridiculous, so I didn't go along, but it was common.
And the Baby Boomers treated Generation X like it was their special victim class, the younger kids that they could bully or exploit.
They had their tricks, like one who offered to pay me and a friend to clean up his garage, a commercial garage and gas station, and when we were done, he tossed a joint on the floor and accused us of dropping it there. He said he was going to call the police on us, and we ran away without pay.
It was a lesson learned, and I found that baby boomer managers and bosses were almost all treacherous liars.
You would only hear later about little girls they had molested, and you would wonder why they didn't get in trouble.
Their parents always covered for them.
The street fights were bad, and there were times when I was attacked with knives and baseball bats, but I could never go complaining to the police, because they hated me and they wouldn't believe me.
I thought I might die any day, and I knew a lot of guys who did die young.
I kind of miss them because they were the most high spirited, and among the few who knew how tough the lifestyle was.
We all sort of hated and distrusted authorities and the government, because they were clearly against us.
As you say, I didn't talk about or cry about those things.
For one thing, there was no one who would care.
I tried to get my mother to take me out of school, but she wouldn't, and I played hooky as often as I could.
They beat me by sending a squad car to pick me up and take me to school in the morning.
My mother didn't even know about it, and I never told my mother about the fights, because I knew she would blame me.
I was shocked when I got older to find that so many guys grew up without ever getting in a fight.
How did they manage it?
I had no choice, the other kids would gang up on me and attack - often there were ambushes, with several guys jumping me in an alley, or by the tracks.
Generation X kids did start forming gangs for their own protection, but I was alone and a little ahead of the curve.
The real hard thing about it was knowing that I was alone and friendless in the world - that there was no one to help or give me advice, and all hands were against me. Girls were afraid of me because of all the violence.
It was a dark world that I often thought of as hell.
But I was free, and I could pursue my own interests. go where I pleased and do what I pleased.
When I had my bike, I ranged as far into other neighborhoods or into downtown Chicago as I could go in a day's ride.
Other kids were forbidden to go to most of the places I went.
I loved being free, so I still don't complain.
I just say that's the way it was.
Yes , even in australia ,, when i was at university in 1990s i was frying to find the right code words , to idetify sex cult inside the authorities mob rule , molested by police as recruitment , australia still has generational trauma, so many teen pregnancies ,, by high school graduation~ 75 of my class were recruited in sex traffiking by age of 12,
australian elites still run this pimp daddy nation,
Having a decent bicycle was such a game changer. There was never really anywhere that was too far to just ride there if it was a place we needed to get to. Mom and Dad driving you somewhere came with a whole different set of problems. That's if they had the time or desire to do it. So, you hopped on that BMX and rode out.
@@ozarkrefugee so similar , USA, australia , Canada, our university was free from 1966 babyboomer era to 1984 , when the same university studies examined ~ how we as , shunned & excluded , ended up were we are today ,, also employment agencies were run by the same church groups that shun us ,, the thing is , even me going to university &finding reports & studies in my local area , i can understand the similarity in generational change ,, in fact when i was reading about my local corruption , i never realised i was also excluded from the studies ,, lol.. how does it feel knowing australian genxers lived the same life,,..
We do collapse, though. We are a sad ass generation who feel like it's too late for sympathy and we just try to power through everything and it's sad as hell. We need to be here for each other..
I only can relate ate other gen x’ers
You probably think bananas are too spicy.
Finally, someone talking about the realities instead of acting like it was all roses and fun times. I honestly don’t know a single girl I grew up with who wasn’t SA in some way before the age of 19. I was almost kidnapped walking the few hundred yards between my school and my grandparents’ house. We don’t talk to each other about any of it because we got used to no adults giving a toss about any of it. Even if we got hurt or sick we were told to walk it off and just deal with it. No one cared about our feelings. So we just shoved it all down and got on with it.
Interesting to know this. Every girl I got close enough to share personal stuff during my teens and twenties had some form of SA in her past. I just figured I was the kind of guy who attracted girls who needed to unload and felt safe to do so with me. No idea it was just so common instead.
My students were shocked that every milk cartoon had pictures of missing kids on them.
Another dark side:
You'll often hear our Generation say our dads were in Vietnam. But that war, eventhough it was before much of our times, seriously affected many Gen X and not in the best ways. My dad had really bad PTSD, but that went beyond jumping at fireworks and moments of panic and anxiety. It's depression, paranoia, and aggression that invades everything in their lives. It wasn't treated and for many men, it wasn't even recognized and diagnosed. For some, it contributed to alcoholism and broken families. I knew kids who felt like they had fought in that war because their dads brought the war home with them. We'd watch movies about the war, careful not to be caught by our dads. I think some of us children of Vietnam vets were searching for answers in those books and movies. Why our dad's did some of the things they did. Or, on a darker note, trying to make ourselves feel better by experiencing the piece of it captured in the movie. Like someone addicted to pain. I'm not saying we wanted to be in a war or thought our experience was anything like our dad's, but it still affected us greatly. Some more than others.
But we didn't talk about it. We'd just say our dads were Vietnam Vets and we knew what that was. But it also made us stronger. We felt prepared to take on anything...even to fight off the Russians😂, and not just because of Red Dawn. That movie didn't have the same effect on other generations. I think our street experiences and the Vietnam experiences are what made Red Dawn hit us the way it did. We were all Wolverines in some way.
My father came back from Nam and killed himself on new years eve. It messed my mother up so much that she gave me and my sister to the state so she could start a new life. The state gave us up for adoption to a family who used and abused us in EVERY way, including sexual. War hurts. Aask a survivor.
I realized, while listening to this video, that we are emulating the Silent Generation. They were the last time the kids flooded the workforce, like we did. And then they saw some shit (WW1, the Great Depression and then WW2) and they didn't really talk about it either. That would be a fascinating comparison. We were the Mall Rats, the Street Rats, we were feral. :P
Millennials are the new silent generation. We’re going to have to contend with all the baby boomers and gen x mistakes.
@@alexanderbielski9327 I'm sorry, what now? Are you honesty comparing the generation who literally made safe spaces a thing to the generation that won two world wars?? Are you alright? Do you need a safe space to process??
We are the revolution against the woke BS you people literally and not used in your dumb Gen x way but literally literally invented woke political correct bullshit. You were feral because baby boomers didn't care about their children and wanted to do better than their children and raised even bigger prices of shit somehow some way.
@alexanderbielski9327
@@alexanderbielski9327 tell me you haven't read Strauss Howe "generational theory" 😂
Because I'm early generation x born 1967 my experience would be different from someone born later like say in 1977- 1980. A decade makes a major difference.
I agree my brother was born in 76 and I was born in 67 and he has no clue what I had to go through because I had to deal with the teenagers from the early 60s and they were very bad.
Truth! I was born in 66. I don't have much in common with someone born in 1979-1980
I was 68. I never fully identified with the younger X. I know I'm far from being a Boomer. Those of us X born in the 60s had a little bit different experience.
I was a teen in the 80s.
Me too born in 66
66 here but sometimes feel related to boomers.
I had a friend who carved a boys name into her arm with a razor blade. I bandaged it up in the bathroom. No one told social worker or teacher.
So many similar times. We just took care of each other best we could and it never occurred to us to go to an adult for help.
My girl did that in 1983. Runaways. Years later after I (17yrs old and she 15 in 1983) when we were arrested out of state. I was extradited for: contributing to the delinquency of minor/taking a minor across state lines/and statutory R! All charges dropped except for the contributing to the delinquency of a minor... 6 months in prison served on a 2 to 5yr sentence turning 18 in prison. She was taken to a shelter/escaped it/hooked up with a truck driver to take her home and end up forced into prostitution/finally escaping via other prostitutes help her escape... 10yrs later 1993 approximately. A friend who knew our story sees a girl with an ugly tattoo with my name at a burger King drive through and puts us back in touch. When I finally get to talk to her and want to reconnect she refused because she didn't want me to see what she looks like then. Turns out she had been shot in the face at that drive though window. Dark side gen X.
Wow, that hit hard. Yeah, my dad worked constantly as a machinist in the 70s-- when he wasn't being laid off. My mother was a valium-addicted narcissist with MS. Since I was 6 years old, I stayed out of the house as much as I could. Yeah, I had a paper route at 12 because my folks couldn't be bothered to provide for me. Stole packs of smokes from Ma all the time. Thankfully never got pregnant, but a lot of my friends did. And yeah, we didn't date high school guys, we dated guys in their 20s and sometimes 30s-- in my state at the time, age of consent was 17. Yeah, we at least had 3rd spaces, and the drinking age at the time was 18. We'd pay our 18 yo friends to buy us booze at 13, 14. We were out cruising in cars at 15. Hell, the local "candy shop" near the high school would have a special blue light on outside to tell us they had marijuana for sale.
We were 30 at age 10 and we're 30 in our 50s. Gen Z look at us like we're feral
a$$holes, but that's how it was. Oh, and child sexual abuse?? Puhleeze, who could we tell? Who would believe us? And if we did tell, we got blamed.
We were the last generation to leave the house at 18 because we couldn't wait to get TF out. Yup, the dark side of Gen X. If you weren't there, you won't get it.
Even now everything in me says not to comment on this subject.
Truth.
Same😢
My dark side was different. Having deaf parents made it very different. My parents divorced and mom remarried, but all three parents lived under same roof. They were party people. So I recall several swinger parties that were interesting for a 5yr old. I got stories that would blow your mind! Kids today would break walking a mile in my childhood
Kids today would break just by walking an actual mile.
Yeah those parents sure seemed to have a great time. Why were we even at those parties. My friends and I talk about how alarmingly finely attuned we are to anyone being on coke.
I guess compared to this, I lived like a noble girl. My parents stuck together, they even had a house on their own, but were always complaining about the costs, yet, they had enough money to go on holiday. Compared to their childhood, in many aspects, ours must have seemed quite good, I mean, in Germany, right after the war, everything was out of order. I always had enough to eat and drink and enough things to wear. But since they never learnt to be loved, they could not love us really. We did not really trust our parents. We did never talk about anything real. When we cried, we cried in our rooms. When we were happy, we were happy with our friends. "Children should be seen and not heard". " You have eaten? Is your homework ready? So, out with you and do you not dare to be back before the lights come up but do not dare to be back after, either!"
1976 in small town midwest, my girlfriend and I finished our crossing guard duty. We were in 5th grade, and were headed back to the elementary school for Girl Scouts, about 14 blocks.
Three guys in Chevelle, high gloss black with lime pin stripes- slowed down pacing us, cat calling and trying to make time with us. We were tall probably 5' 4" and well developed. But still had our safety belts on. After about 4 blocks, we had enough to l d then to F off and stuck out our tongues. That made it worse, they opened their dors and we ran. They got back in the car and started to try to cut us off, we ran thru some yards to a parallel street. They pulled around to get at us. We crossed the street cut thru a grass lot and finally arrived the school. They drove off- peeling out.
We told the Scout Leader, because we were late out of breath and crying. She called the cops.
He told us it was our faults because We Stuck Out Our Tongues.
We learned our lesson- never tell, never trust an authority figure.
This wouldn't happen today. Kids don't walk to school, and would any school have 10 year old crossing guards?
Later on as a 21 year old, I was graped- I didn't tell a soul. I blamed myself.
Yes I was 8 in 76, It was like you described. A feeling of being on our own and having to fend for ourselves. I was molested by a teen boy in 75 and tried to talk to my parents about it but got shut down. It made me feel powerless and shameful.
@yurix_xroblox yet we carried on, created coping skills and survived.
6:23 I remember that "just say no to drugs" They sold pencils that said "don't do drugs" you sharpened it enough it read "do drugs" and then just "drugs" until it was just a pencil. When the school board found out about these other stages they quit selling those pencils.
Having parents from the silent generation Definitely created a dark side in my life Because they were of the opinion that I was to be seen and not heard Didn't work out well
x Back in the day...there was only moving forward...you had to keep going like the Energizer Bunny in order for things to get better.
x When I was a kid I realized, without a shadow of a doubt, that listening to the "elders" would only get anyone to a place called NOWHERE.
Even those of us who had a parent who gave a crap about you, we also had to be tough because the less friendly street kids were happy to be a problem. I know I've gotten the crap beat out of me quite a few times for giving insult apologies and also did my share of beating other kids. Even the kids with good homes had to be hard.
"Wake up every morning, assess the damage, and do what you can do." ~BBRS
From third grade on, we were taught to always travel in packs so you wouldn't wind up on the back of a milk carton.
If GenX talks about their childhood it's usually considered "trauma dumping."
Just like Boomers were the first generation to have starter homes, they also had starter children: Gen X. Their “real” kids were the millennials. We were nothing more than try before you buy. When they found their second and third spouses is when they had their golden children, the millennials.
My generation is stoic. We are strong we don’t need to air our grievances and have anyone validate us. We have depended on ourselves since childhood. These younger coddled generations can’t fight or think their way out of a wet paper bag on some issues. They are very book smart but not logical. Also they live in the virtual while we created damn thing
We have a lot in common.
I was born '73 in the UK, so my experience is a bit different to my American peers. My parents were Silent Gen, and helicopted me well into my late teens. I didnt have my own key til 20's but there was an outside key on a hook under the hedgerow in front because Mom kept getting locked out. I got kicked to my room a lot of the time, so I wouldnt get underfoot or bother my parents with my stupid kid shit and so I had no one to talk to about the bullying in school. All I got was my Dad telling me, if they hit you, hit back harder, if you get chased, get them lost, if you need to hide, make sure you cant be found. I remember being told, be back for the streetlamps but I wasnt allowed to sleep around anyone's house because my parents were obsessed with this idea of me mixing with the *wrong sort of people* and they isolated me like you would not believe. Didnt stop me, sneaking out to hang out with friends or one friend who had to climb out of the bathroom window, and climb down the drainpipe so my Dad didnt know I had a friend visiting. He didnt want me to do anything except get married and have kids. I am child free and never married. I stood by my guns. I wanted a job, Dad sabotaged me, I wanted to have hobbies, Dad blocked it. Every time I tried to deviate from his life path, he made sure I failed. He wanted me so desperate and unable to do anything for myself, so I would have no choice but to marry and have kids. I stayed home until my parents died and inherited everything. My parents gave me mental illness which makes growing up in the 70s up harder but I'm still here. I haven't self deleted like others younger than me going through bullying at school. My Mom didnt care that my ex was SA'ing me, she thought it would make me strong if I had to fight for my survival. My Dad never even found out what had happened til decades later. So, I wasnt technically a Latch Key kid but being isolated and constantly fighting to keep your personality intact when you are battling psychological neglect and abuse from your parents, its a different battle, to the ones that got beaten up in the street. We all had different battles to fight. We didnt have therapy, we had ourselves. I've been in therapy, it doesnt work. It actually had zero effect on me except to learn that the Mental Health professionals dont WANT to help people with BPD, they'd rather we were locked up and drugged into insensibility so they dont have to deal with the girl that wont tolerate other people's abuse without fighting back.
Don't forget how many siblings we lost once abortion became totally legalized socially accepted. I lost all of them. Lonely- to be sure.
Gen X here, born 1967. We talk way too much about our childhood and I think the reason why is because we're still wounded by being "alone" in our childhood. We were the first generation without 2 parents at home. No nannies, no babysitters, just "you're on your own kid". We didn't have year round sports programs to go to, after school activities etc. All of what you said was my childhood.
There is a movie with Matt Dillon called Over The Edge. This movie was made in 1979 and for me, this is THE GEN X movie that shows our childhood more than any other.
Asking about dating, girls in my school didn't date college guys, they dated their peers, I never knew a girl that dated a college guy.
I had a lot of fights like you, but I was always the winner because I was "crazy" and bigger than most of my peers back then. I was 6 ft. tall by 5th grade. I never grew an inch after 5th grade, lol!
Us Millennials have similar talks amongst ourselves too. We may have been pampered due to the 90s and tech boom of the 2000s, but we had similar experiences. The lack of supervision on the computer is whats alarming with us, but outside we were watched like prey by parents.
Tough is the wrong word, GenX is resilient.
51 year old Aussie bloke here. Pretty much the same story on the other side of the planet. My millenial kids think we're full of it, whereas my 18 year old sees it and gets it. Gen Z feel like we do, they're our inheritors.
These stories resonate, even from the other side of the world. You’re right, it felt the same here in Australia. Life was tough. We were forced into adulthood in our early teens. I distinctively remember street fights being crazy. I still wonder how we weren’t killed or how we didn’t kill anyone. Rough times.
I often say Gen Z are the new and improved Gen X. Most of the Gen Z I know, I was a teacher, seemed to learn a lot of the same lessons from us without the hardships we had. That, and they are go getters and spit fires once they find a direction. They have better tools too. They are making a bigger difference in their world. One of my students heard about families in South America with very little electric lights. So he found a way to create solar powered lamps that lasted for hours and were dirt cheap. He fundraised the money needed to make them, ship them, and even deliver some himself. All so students could study and read in the evening. He was in high school when he did this (16-17). This was 10 years ago or so.
Some of us Millennials understand your generation despite us being your victims. However, in the US. Gen Z is not really your inheritors. Most Gen Z I have met tend to be the most weak and helpless generation around. Even putting a large chunk of worthless millennials in good light
I do not share your, nor many others sentiment on Gen Z. Some are capable, but most that I have met are the furthest thing from resilient.
Everything you said is spot on. My real father was out of the picture. My step father worked long hours, sometimes was gone for days or weeks on end. And my mother was absent and a drunk so I raised myself. I was only home to sleep and occasionally grab a meal. I had side hustles both legal and illegal. Lost a friend at 16 who we believed was murdered by a biker.
I raised myself, but I'm glad I went through it because it taught me that I could handle anything.
I cant relate at all to this. I was born 1999, not sure what generation i am. my generation is mostly fucked in the head. Most people I know cant get a date or a job. Even popular people have trouble finding a girlfriend. Most people are more interested in one night stands. One of my friends has a college degree in cyber security. yet he cant find a job anywhere, he files so many applications and cant get one.
It was interesting hearing about gen-x, people in my generation are caudled, so tons of us are unable to do adult things and figure out the details of life. I know about 6 or so people who killed themselves tho, i don't know if that's high or low tho.
1982er here. Also knew a bunch of folks who checked out early. They feel like combat deaths, like they didn't actually self-delete, but that essentially society took them out.
I wish you good fortune in whatever endeavor you choose, and I hope that you find peace and happiness amidst this madness.
Born in 1999 makes you an older Gen Z (born after 1997 is Gen Z).
i left school in the uk in 91. we coulndt get jobs we lived in the country. we had to work it out, youll get there. just keep going.
High.
The thing is y'all think too much, and as far as getting a girl, don't rush to get one, take your time, and get them all. Life comes with rejection, so get used to it. Gen X here, 69 and we just kept pushing. Even at my age, women of all ages find me intriguing because move in silence, and exert outwardly I still can choose. I've been that way since a pre teen. Being Gen X means we don't worry about things, we can't do nothing about, but what we can do, we do, and will do. We don't believe in boundaries, but we respect them. Go live your life, find some outgoing friends and have a life. Put down that cell phone, and just go.
Alcoholic codependent father, delusional adult child of an alcoholic mother. Wanna talk about being on your own? We had the appearance of a family who had it all together. But at home, it was a different story.
I told my mom that im not upset at anyone. However, it makes all the sense in the world that im divorced and loving living single. I figured out how to live like a king on very little.
Tbh we didn't talk about it, because we had to carry the innocence after kids after the Vietnam war, when the country was going through a culture change. We know what we heard, and saw but just being kids and having that freedom to just be left alone to be kids is what kept us from looking too deeply into adult matters. We were glad we were latch key kids because it meant we had the house to ourselves, without a lot of other people and their b.s., which also explains why our counselors was our friends, that if our parents were fighting I could just go to their house and my parents still knew where I was, after they stopped fighting to realize I was gone. There were dark times, but it made us self reliant and resilient. We are the last of the strong self sufficient generation.
It was pretty wild. Literally.
I got hooked on dope and alcohol as a teenager.
Found out i had some good hands on me too.
I got to be a scary guy.
Sobered up at 22 in 92.
Lost so many friends.
We really live by the Gasden.
Dont Tread On Me.
I wouldnt trade it for anything.
God bless all my GenX Brothers and Sisters.
God bless you and i am proud of you for getting sober-
internet stranger
Glad you're clean now. A lot of us drank, smoked, did drugs because we were self medicating.
@@julilla1
We sure did. I was in that group .
That's the sentiment of Gen X, all our brothers and sisters no matter the skin color. We realized racism was pushed on us, by stupid parents and wanted to get away from that. Our problems wasn't in the streets, it was at home, and all Gen Xers can get with that no matter the skin color. We are the first generation not to give into that racist mindset, so we all had mostly the same experience no matter your background. Gen Xers are the realist of any generation. We are all one....Gen X.... Stay strong my brothers and sisters, anyone getting clean, and staying sober big ups, to ones that still struggle we are here for you.... We know your pain....,💪💪💪💪
@@AlldatJazz-rw9wy
Very well said.
If you're cool. You're cool.
If you're not.
You're not.
I'm proud of us. Thank you very much!!
Tough, resilient,.. persistent… patient.. observant… The list goes on brothers and sisters.
Generation X has it in spades and plays it close to the chest.WE KNOW.
If there was ever a generation that came close to Jedi status….GX.
To this day, heads down to hell with the pain, to hell with the cost bean counter ,we will suffer later …MOVE FORWARD.
AND LOVING EVERY SECOND.
LOVING IT.
I said the same thing. We just keep moving forward, don't have time to look back. Too afraid if I turn around, I'll have to whoop someone's ass....🤣🤣🤣🤣
My teenage years started in 1985. I turned 12 in the fall of '86. Our generation saw the Challenger go boom and were told to watch tv by our teachers and to shut up. I didn't dare talk back to my old man, I did, but I found out fast that was a bad idea.
Being born in 74 and the middle kid (oh...the irony) my childhood was pretty dark. But there were a LOT of good times too mostly centered around music. Lost a lot of friends to drugs, gangs and suicide. I tell these younger people 'You think you're gonna stop me from doing what I do? Think you're gonna bring me down? BITCH. PLEASE. I used to give Pop and another friend's Dad shit about the old man in the room. Now, that I'M the old man in the room? I realize how much of an honor it was to be so because I lot of us Gen X'ers didn't make it (including my older brother who passed away at 50 but it took cancer 4 times to finally take him). I used to say this about my family but I've come to realize that the ones that survived? We are NOTORIOUSLY hard to kill.
Was 15 when I got with my wife. She was 14. She was just coming out of 8th grade and I was heading into my sophomore year. Been together ever since minus the million break-ups lol!
9:46 - accurate. I dated a guy who was in the military when I was 15/16. He was 21. (We lived in a military town, and my father was in the military.) My parents even met him and approved. He'd come over for dinner, BBQ's, to go swimming, watch movies, and we would also go out and do things together. My parents would eventually separate that same year, but before they did, it was non-stop fighting between them, unless he was there, and then they would get along for the sake of appearances. The guy I was dating knew things weren't rosey at home, though. When it got bad, he'd come and pick me up, to get me away from the house, so I didn't have to listen to their fights.
So yeah, where I lived it was quite common for teenaged girls to date older guys. It wasn't as "taboo" as it is today.
I have to agree with this entire video. We (GenX) didn't have it the best, but we made the best with what we had. I still think we grew up in the greatest era of time, though and I wouldn't change that for anything. We still had a lot of great times, and I have many good memories from my younger days. I cling to the good memories, because my youth wasn't completely awful. You take the good with the bad.
Me too! He was Air Force, I was 15 he was 23! Funny thing was, he couldn’t go to my senior prom because he was too old! So he drove me to get my pictures taken then we went to a bar! 😂 I can’t imagine my daughter dating someone that old! My parents did give a crap! Nobody thought it was weird. I ended up marrying someone 18 years older than me 😂 so I guess I have a type. I loved how if you were happy, nobody judged your situations then.
i was hustling money at 9. mowed lawn's, a paper route, and collected glass bottles. fought all the time, lost more than won, but had to fight. would travel up to 20miles a day on the weekends if i wasn't hustling. go into the woods, travel across the interstate because it was a short cut to places you wanted to get to, hit the beach alone.
Excellent talk. It encourages me to play now.
I avoid good times cus feelings of work even if i dont have to ect.
While it hurts, yes those druggies and boozers were weaker then us.
They clicked up via self harm and if you didn’t partake… it was like you were a child to them.
I lost 2 to booze now 1 guy, 1 gal friend.
Lost another to not elevating his game, stabbed 6 weeks ago, acting like it’s cool to be up late on SF streets acting like a teen around methheads.
I got hooked on fitness and martial arts, some motor sports.
Almost always alone. Sometimes I’m aloof inappropriately, other times my peers are aloof in the same way.
Sad stuff, no doubt.
We should embrace our generations strengths because they are truly special.
After tomorrows lift and post work out shake, I’m hitting old school pizza place and some GOT pinball machine on my motorcycle.
Kinda nostalgic. The pent up anger. The aloneness. Working some video game or pinball skills… hoping no one f’s with you… and what you’ll have to do ect… then the teenage commute home m, messed up feelings but trying to be cool and happy like nothing matters.
Felt like shit but when looking in the mirror, we were young and felt that youthful truth.
While we may have said we didn’t look like some actor / a tired ect or a super kool kid at school, and we may have self clowned, we still liked ourselves and had hella pride for being survivors of the day.
Thanks again for the talk.
I got some play experiences to make up for. I’m sure many of us do. Especially us sober ones.
So when some hater caps on my incoming c-8 vet, I’ll just say I got this car cus I was stone cold sober all high school long while you drank and got smoked up…
We need to accept and embrace self love in ways we never got nor were accustomed to.
Any dream or nice thing you have must be fortified with 3-5 reasons you have it.
When other cap, you hit a reason, when they cap again, you hit another reason… and so forth… all chill like.
Get your blessings, what ever they are. Clean laundry done on the regular is my go to every other day blessing.
Embrace small, medium and large blessings. Keep your haters at bay
🖖🏼live long and prosper mother fu**ers.
Take care-
I was in my mid 40s and a dead girl was identified on the news after 30 years missing. She was last seen at the mall in the mid 1970s. That left me shaken to the core. She would have been my age. We also had the "killer clown" with 25 bodies under his house. Clowns used to be fun. A lot changed in the 1970s.
I think people talk about the generations are missing the point. The collapse of civilization is slowly set up over a long period of time spanning over several generations. Each seemingly small piece of decay is taken in the collective stride of those who live through it. People get into the mentality that something must not be so bad because the warnings from those that see the danger doesn’t immediately happen. The delayed consequences give a false sense of security until the sudden collapse.
Well said, One could not disagree with this statement.
All we hear about today are Boomers,Zs and Millennials. X has been ignored because we quietly go out our business like Sigmas. We used to do all kinds of crazy stuff. Today’s kids have helicopter parents or they sit at home on their phones or games.
When I get together with my two older sisters and we are all genx, that's what we talk about, how we survived our childhoods. Things like how my middle sister had to walk a few miles back and forth to school and on two occasions was chased by men in a car trying to abduct her. I was involved in criminal behaviors as a teen and was lucky to survive, have PTSD from it. Seen people nearly get killed, carried a gun in high school , high speed car chases, trauma units 3 or 4 times before I was 19, drug rehab, on and on. Chicago was a rough place to grow up. Here's the thing, growing up so poor living above bars with rats and roaches and absent parents, we turned out very smart and resilient, two sisters both scientists, one PHD, and I work for one of the biggest tech companies as a facilities engineer. I feel the struggle and freedom to make our own mistakes made us who we are.
That's because after all of that, and you lived, at some point you had to succeed. That's why we as Gen Xers dgaf. We made through some tough ish, and are still here to tell the tale.
I can see the end of us,.. it's when our next generations grow up with AI doing everything for them. Answering any questions that they need just by speaking aloud. Showing them how to get to anywhere and reading directiins aloud or just driving them there. Doing everything for us, we will become weak, atrophy, individually stupid, unable to make our own decisions, and frozen in indecision without our AI assistant. Deathly afraid of risk, personal injury, risk averse to the point of being frozen in fear, and at that point, we will be dead. Once we are weekend to this point, anyone can swoop in and mow us down like grass.
I know how to save us. We will need to program a "prime directive" in AI to not give us the snawers. AI will have to be a mentor, tutor, an assistant but not simply do it for us. This must be it's prime directive, to be all knowing but to always show us the path not take us down it.
@@johnnyb8629 too late, that's already happening.🤣🤣🤣🤣
As a Gen-X'er I can totally relate. This is the best explanation of Gen-X I've seen. Keep up the good work. Thank you.
This i why I have to laugh at today's kids who think they're all that and a bag of chips.
Not only was there a dark side, but some of us lived in it willingly. We got to a point where we said to ourselves, "Enough of this bullshit." And we took steps. Myself, I got into a fight in school stemming from a false accusation. All it took was the first fight. The usual crowd gathered, "someone's gonna beat up that scrawny nerd, let's watch!" That was when I learned I didn't have that proverbial glass jaw. He got in one good hit. I stumbled, and glared. Then I took him by the throat and proceeded to hamburger his face. Dented the locker through his head, broke a knuckle on his face. Poor Dave Minardi, never saw him again. Even tried to look him up a few times in recent years, no clue whatever happened to him. But that one fight in high school, 9th grade, seemed to change my life for the better in many respects. Never got bullied since, except one unfortunate new kid didn't know about it. Laid him out with one hit. I was never popular, never into sports, I was - and still am - a nerd. Soon to be 54 now.
We are the last of the feral children. For the most part, we are not weak. We don't take any shit from anyone. We know bullshit when we see it. We are intelligent. We have common sense, and we have oodles of wisdom learned the hard way. We are dangerous, we do not fight fair, and we will fuck you up if you screw with us. We have surpassed the Boomers in many ways, but generations following us have SUCH a long way to go to even come close to us.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my SMB game....
I got a dishwasher job at age 14 in early 80s. I loved it .
Everyone also forgets that child abductions by strangers was rampant during Gen x childhood and teen years because our parents never knew where we were or cared to know. Child abductions by predators and serial killers was highest during the 70's and 80's.
Sitting here with a missing tooth from a random encounter on the streets of Spokane WA. Buddy and I minding our own business esp. cause at the time I was in a knee brace , two guys come up to us and ask "what's up?" and before we could even answer my tank of a best friend got knocked out and I took a ring to the mouth as the guys who hit us for no reason ran off. Just how it was.
Just how it was.
I was there. I absolutely hate that we don't talk about it. The last stronghold I had was the kids that grew up with me only to go through all of that, grow up and we all are just gonna act like the one that speaks up is the weird kid still
I hated my childhood. Hated school. Hated the powerlessness of being a kid. Couldn't wait to grow up and fly away. I left school and started a job at 15. I suffered from cyclical depression for about 13 years. Every winter I'd be suicidally depressed for a month or two. I thought it was normal. Later, I thought it was SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder.) But, aside from this I was optimistic. Glad to be free. For years I woke up every morning delighted that I didn't have to go to school. I revelled in my freedom. I was a punk. Got into fights. Arrested a few times. Many different jobs. Lived in squats. Chased women. Had intense friendships with guys. Drugs, raves, music festivals, gigs, motorbikes, lots of dramas. Didn't know how psychologically damaged I was until around 2012 when I came across podcasts discussing traumatic childhoods on UA-cam. You don't accept you're damaged until it is pointed out to you. Mind you, I scorned younger people for being weaker and softer than me. My horrible childhood had made me resilient and turbo-charged my brain. I was in the last generation to create original culture...punk, hip-hop, grunge etc.. The last generation to be critical thinkers and despise authority. We need adversity to spark our intelligence and make us creative. To make the canary sing you have to puncture its eyes.
I'd love to see my kids walk in these shoes for a day 😂 then report back .
There were a lot of kids including myself that were violated, it became such an epidemic that Rick Schroeder had a commercial about it (don't be afraid to tell someone) .
A difference between gen x and Early millennials is people started listening to millennials .
I know lots of us xers think we had the best childhoods but not true, we had the hardest. It took tolls on us that we would not know until adulthood. Because of shitting parenting most of us have cPTSD and autoimmune issues or addictions. Our lives were hard and it shows.
My best early hustle (I was 10) was an early tone dialer. I made a small electronic box that would play the tone that was made when a quarter was placed in a pay phone.
Any kid that bought it could make a call anywhere on earth for free from any phonebooth in the United States.
Cool... The military used to have an 800 number for their guys to make free long distance calls. I slept with a few to get that number and when it changed.
We had a number and a code and then could call around the world. We would just random dial different countries and talk to people. Surprisingly, most spoke English. It was wild!
Radio Shack
Correct me if Im wrong, but our generation was the first of women (our mamas) leaving the home to work full time jobs. i hated that. I wanted my mom home.
You're right about many things and you remember them as if is it was yesterday like some of us who survived that psyckopathic era all alone where nothing was as it seemed and no one taught many of us from Generation exit anything useful
They did teach you something useful. How to live without negative people. I could write a book on how to avoid b.s. just by growing up GenX. If it should have taught you anything is how to make lemonade, and build a stand. It's only how you choose to look at it. Gen X is resilient because we had to be that way, and besides your still here right. So you learned something...
Not really I belong to generation Exit, born between 1975 to 1985 saying:" The worst they could do is the most you got" Basically this means we never lived or learned anything most of us died on the inside by drugs or gang violence but you sound as a GenX that made it through almost intact that's wonderful I pad you on your back. @@AlldatJazz-rw9wy