Notes from the Couch: The Gen X/Y/Millennial Debacle And Our Own Private Lord Of The Flies Or Who Cares Anymore Anyway? We're All Old Now.

  I get it. Really, I do—And I’ve been that girl. When people first started talking about Generation Y, I must have sifted through every article in every magazine I could find trying to locate something that labelled me as Gen Y instead of Gen X. Maybe a lot of it was just to feel younger or be seen as younger, or maybe at least to be associated with younger people. We all know youth is brief and old age is out there knocking at the door telling us we are no longer relevant. Is it any wonder that we do what we can to avoid seeing it—to avoid the need to face that someday that is where we will be. That just like the Evil Queen looking in the mirror every day, eventually the mirror will tell us there are younger, more beautiful, more relevant people out there. And we can’t go around feeding all of them poisoned apples…

        I will confess that when the lame name Gen Y was changed to the very cool sounding name Millennial, I wanted to be seen as one of those cool guys even more. Even when the name was lame, it still meant younger—which instantly had a cool feel to it. But this was bonus point time—on top of being a Millennial meaning I’d be part of the younger generation, I’d also have a cooler name. Gen X always seems to miss out on the cool stuff. Being part of the generation that had been going on for over a decade when I was born felt almost like being part of some archaic aging group of the past.  Sadly, we never really seemed to be cool—Even the name, Gen X—X marked the unknown—we didn’t have to fight any wars and we had no idea who we were according to the older generations. For us, there was an unwillingness to be defined, and, well, with the Cold War, a belief that maybe there was no future anyway, so why plan for one. And of course there is what Kurt Cobain would write about in his journal (and was very much a feeling of the 90s)—that everything had already been done. The Boomers said all we were doing was redoing their shit, that we had nothing new. If we are honest with ourselves, our fatalistic view could be seen as just a darker continuation of the Boomer theme from the Viet Nam era. And so we said screw it.  Which now, looking at that makes me love my Gen X-ness more than ever, but still, especially back then—Millennial sounded so much cooler.  There was something purposeful about it.  Something futuristic—you know, like you thought you had one. The Silents and Boomers tended to say those were things we lacked.  We had no purpose. We didn’t CARE about anything. “Well, whatever.  Nevermind.” “The Powers that Be” even created these mishmash generational soup groups that displayed qualities of both the earlier and later generation, because generational changes don’t actually happen overnight.  But sadly, even with those groupings—“Xennial”or “Oregon Trail”, My birth year STILL didn’t fit into it.  I was too old to be considered part of the cool kids, get back into that Gen X hated generation, you.  Assed out yet again—kinda  like when we got our doors taped shut at night on the Washington trip in eighth grade, or how my varsity soccer team didn’t get team jackets. 

Now that the oldest Millennials are turning 40, and the Gen Z’ers are the youngest to do the adulting thing, now that we’re BOTH old, I feel I can finally speak out about these things. Maybe just clear my way through the muck a bit.

Over a quarter of a century ago, I wrote a paper for English Comp on the nature vs. nurture concept as it is seen in Lord of the Flies. Of any book I have read, I think this is the one I have read the most times.  Dependent on my age at the time of the read, my reaction to the novel has varied. The first time I read it, I hated it.  I borrowed it from one of the classrooms and read it in sixth or seventh grade. Group 2 (or was it the “green group” experiment the middle school tried where they attempted to not label the classes by “smarts” but still really did…) read it in maybe seventh grade, but since I was in Group 1 (yellow, I think?  Or I might be remembering them backwards), I didn’t have to read it for class yet.  Really though, I preferred reading books on my own—not hindered by the constructs of a teacher telling me when I should read it or what I should get out of it. Reading it on my own suited me better.  And I hated the book.  I should capitalize that.  I HATED it.  The characters, the fact that there were no girls, the weak explanation that the author gave that he didn’t add girls in and made the boys young enough that sexual jealousy could be left out.  I thought this was a stupid explanation. I was about 12 at the time and we already had crushes and “boyfriends” and to say that didn’t come into play yet was rubbish.  When you get older you conveniently forget some aspects of being a kid. Especially the aspects of being a kid that don’t fit the narrative you want to remember about your childhood.

It’s more than likely that I read the book on my own at this time because of the impending movie that we heard so much about. I do that often, though—where if I have not read something and the movie is coming out, I will get the book to read. I found out about the movie when my favorite magazine at the time, Sassy, put out a big spread introducing us to the two prep school boys who got the roles of Jack and Ralph. Sassy also posited that if girls had plane crashed on the island that everything would have been waaaay different. That girls wouldn’t have been hunting boars, but getting fruit to eat and all in all the island would have been better off.

I didn’t believe that for one hot minute. I thought there would have been more fatalities on the island. Being the smart, nerdy kid in middle school gave me a big dose of just how scary kids can be. Eventually I would see that for all my wanting to be in the popular crowd, it really wasn’t any easier being on the inside. I think that we all want so desperately to fit in somewhere. We don’t want to conform to society, but then again, we do. We create other groups that still wind up requiring conformity. Even being in the “nerd” groups are like that. Not knowing ENOUGH about a book, game, or show. I wrote reviews for fan sites for Supernatural for a few years, I believe seasons 4-7.  The comments could be brutal. Seriously, some of the biggest nerds can become the worst bullies.  It is all a vicious cycle…and one that I would rather hit on with the series Cobra Kai…

But now back to Lord of the Flies and that second read—which was for my AP English class Senior year of high school. I think—I’m pretty sure because William Golding was British and Junior year English was American Lit. I did like it that time. Interesting to note I had to read it for a class, and I still liked it. I don’t remember having a lot of insights into it at that time, I just remember my overall reaction to it being very different than it had been the first reading.

The third time I read it was for English Comp, writing that paper I mentioned earlier on it.  This time the book really opened up for me—the pun is weak, I know…but the paper was not. And now, I finally get to my point. The nature vs. nurture concept. In my paper, I explored that we see the nature portion in Roger and Simon. Roger being the representation of the Devil to Simon’s Jesus. Roger was just an evil boy. It wasn’t because of how he was raised, or because of society, he just was. Simon was good, and again, it wasn’t about how he was raised, it just was. And even though both characters are important to the story, they are not the main characters. The main story, and our story, revolves around the nurture component—what made Jack and Ralph different. Jack was the oldest boy on the island, he was head boy of the choir and as such, he felt he deserved to be the leader and he was usurped by Ralph, the younger boy.  

What made Ralph a natural leader was how he was raised. He is the only boy on the island that we know about his upbringing. He is the boy that wanted to play with the rest—is in fact the reason why we don’t even know Piggy’s real name, but just what other boys call him—call him because Ralph told them that is what Piggy was called. But Ralph does not play around even though he wants to.  He knows, because his father, a military man who instilled real survival skills in Ralph, that to survive they need to be rescued and as soon as possible. That to get rescued, they need to make themselves seen. 

And how much of that happens to us? Each generation is deeply impacted by the world as it has been created by the previous generations. We see the flaws, get into adulting planning on changing the way the previous generations have done things—seeing the error of their ways…and then we realize that we are essentially like John Hammond in The Lost World:  Jurassic Park when he said “Don’t worry, we won’t make the same mistakes again”. “No. You’re making all new ones.” All new issues for the younger generations to complain about and scorn. And we come full circle…

I mentioned that when I was in middle school a new movie version of this book came out. There are interesting parallels here to the Harry Potter movie versions of the books for Millennials.  

The reason Sassy was probably so interested in the Lord of the Flies 1990 adaptation was because the casting for the show was done from boys prep schools around the US. (Side note:  here is where my intrigue with Mr. Paul Balthazar Getty started. He also played Tom O’Folliard in Young Guns 2, and he has an album coming out this coming week) When the casting was done for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, I was reminded of the casting for Lord of the Flies. And looking at the two movies, see the different attitudes towards kids, and the younger generation in general.  In Lord of the Flies, there is that idea that children will fall back into base human nature, reverting to their animalistic tendencies. They are only able to survive by adult society coming in and rescuing them. In Harry Potter, the kids rise to the challenge, helping to repair a world corrupted by the greed of earlier generations. This is kind of telling isn’t it? In one, kids are told that the only way to survive is to become what is expected of you, and the other says, nah, just find your own way to change the world. Harry Potter isn’t an isolated example either, look at The Hunger Games and Divergent, too.

Now Lord of the Flies was written in 1954, which means my parents were toddlers but many stories that we grew up reading focused on becoming adults—which generally included confronting to society standards. But moving away from Lord of the Flies, we can look at the original Star Wars trilogy, which most of us Gen Xers grew up on, and would be a better pop culture parallel to Harry Potter.  And here we can see the change happening regarding youths and their ability to change the status quo—so maybe those generational changes aren’t as abrupt as most generations like to think they are. 

Quite frankly, this kind of explains why Gen X gets ignored, or forgotten as much as we do—When you compare Baby Boomers and Millennials there are far more differences, add Gen X into the equation and you see a slow progression of thought over time.

The Star Wars movies, especially if you consider the original trilogy a next generation storyline, has a group of “misfits”—a woman, a meddling “whiny” teen (although the fact that the woman is supposed to be mature and older, holds office and is going to be executed for treason, but the guy is still able to be seen as a whiny boy even though they are actually TWINS is another story ENTIRELY and says a lot about gender treatment of Gen X as well, but I’m writing full length plays and novels about that shit), people of color, criminals, and “aliens” storming the gates of the old white dude empire. I read a harsh critique on the prequels that said that Lucas ruined Star Wars by adding political subtext to the storyline. Wait, what? Clearly that person had not watched the original trilogy since he was five…

But all of these disenfranchised groups learned that to defeat the evil Empire they were going to have to work together, even if they didn’t generally tend to work together—or even marginally get along, for that matter. The movies showed them working together to fight the system, and winning! Which is a valuable lesson to us, even if the bulk of what we were to learn was ripped from canon when Disney bought Star Wars and threw out decades of books outlining the problems afterward.  Because everyone wants to be there to tear down the wall, but how many stay to rebuild and create something better after? That is the less sexy story. And so, as Orson Welles said “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” You want the prince and the princess to live “happily ever after” you’re going to have to end the story when they decide they are in love. Start talking about bills, junior’s propensity for bullying and his most recent suspension, the dalliances with the chamber maid, your happy ending is ruined. 

The ending of Lord of the Flies, however, is bitter sweet, the boys are chasing Ralph around the island burning it down as they go, when they are rescued.  But now they have seen their own darkness, and have to go back to the world with that knowledge.  As we all do when we realize that we can’t change the world on our own.  So what do we do with that knowledge?  What next?

I originally wrote this over the summer but never posted it. I added some stuff, took some out, and I feel there is a lot more to write about it, especially about groups and the conforming nonconformist, which I will definitely take up at another time.  After writing this, I reread Lord of the Flies AGAIN.  And this time I found the book very meh.  Maybe I didn’t feel it lived up to the last time I read it when I loved it.  Maybe I am becoming jaded by its message, like much of Gen X now that we are all tired of fighting the system for as long as we have been.  We have a lot more to do.  We will be those old people holding placards saying “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit”. Or at least some of us will be. And that’s awesome. Because life is about the journey, and we’ve got this.