Someone once said, ~Within any generation, there’s always two distinct classes: a handful who accept and embody the assigned caricature, and many more others who are caricatured against their will, simply because they happened to be born in a particular year. It was no different for Generation X. The only dissimilarity is that it bothered them less.~ Without a doubt, Generation X, most definitely grew up differently as we were shaped mentally, physically, and emotionally by the lessons taught to us by our parents. Of course, there were three main lessons out of countless ones that we constantly heard that made us into the individuals who we are today. The following three lessons are: figure it out, walk it off, and suck it up.
As I said before, Generation X most definitely grew up differently as we were shaped mentally, physically, and emotionally by the lessons taught to us by our parents. Thinking about it further, it was an interesting and not to mention wild time indeed as we practically raised ourselves and quickly learned from a very young age to simply figure it out. Essentially, it’s one of the many reasons Generation X is so highly adept mentally when it involves our problem solving skills to the point where the words “McGuyver It” has been innately embedded/ingrained into the lexicon of our vocabulary. In other words, when we were left to our own devices we knew how to get around the problem even if it meant using some unorthodox means to do it.
If you think about it, the physical toughness of Generation X will never be discounted or unmatched for that matter because the injuries we sustained growing up were deemed badges of honor. For it’s those badges of honor in which we got back up and quite literally walked off the pain to do it all over again. Why? It was fun and combined with our own imagination there was no telling what incredibly idiotic stunt we’d come up with because of how fearlessly stupid we all were, especially when we rode our bikes. I think I can speak for Generation X when I say that we’re all absolutely amazed we’ve managed to walk away from near death experiences knowing full well the physical damage we not only inflicted on ourselves, but on each other as well.
Let me ask this question to my fellow Gen X-ers, when life didn’t go our way growing up how did your parents react? More importantly, how did your dad react? Oftentimes, a father’s advice is vastly different from one’s mother as their pearls of wisdom were more nurturing. For the most part, a father’s advice was based on giving you the reality of life lessons. Although the particular life lesson each of us went through sucked at the time, being advised to simply suck it up and move on was painfully unconventional, but at the same time it potentially helped prepare us for the next one. In hindsight, it was dad’s way of showing us that life will suck and it’s how you respond to it knowing there are much more difficult life lessons to face ahead of us
In retrospect, the three life lessons that were previously mentioned can be either taken literally or figuratively. Oftentimes, life itself can be absolutely brutal as it can hit us hard, so to speak, when it comes to friendships, matters of the heart, or the career path we’ve chosen. Ultimately, Generation X grew up at a time when it was basically a childhood in progress filled with failures, success, and getting knocked out into next week by our parents when we got in trouble. Hey, as “The Lost/Feral Generation” we learned to figure out life on our own, walked it off when it got painful, and eventually sucked it up to keep moving forward. In the end, Generation is an entirely different breed altogether because instead of crying/complaining we made things happen and sometimes by accident.
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