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My Gen X Soul Cringes at Side Hustles, or Whatever Else the Internet Writing “Experts” Tell Me to Be Besides a Writer
Like, whatever man
Hi, I’m from the Generation known as “X”. We spent much of our youth plotting how to be slackers as long as humanly possible. Triers were majorly uncool.
We wanted to be Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice (then Heathers then Reality Bites and pretty much everything she did except maybe the one thing but also we secretly didn’t really care about her crimes against retail, the backlash to that was very right-wingy am I right), Jon Cusack in Say Anything, Christian Slater in everything. We wanted to use our liberal arts degrees for a (vague) sense of good not evil. Some of us anyway.
No one I knew growing up (or was friends with anyway) cared about becoming rich assholes. We grew up with yuppies on our screens as examples of adulthood in shows like Thirtysomething, or Michael Douglas in Wall Street— yawn.
We preferred funner types, anarchists, punks, alternative music, and a general championing of antiheroes, not actors in plastic capes with psychotically honed builds. Can anyone imagine Jon Cusack doing a Marvel movie in his heyday?
