Hooray for Gen X: Raised on MTV, toughened by life
I bumped into an old colleague recently and she made me realize that reality does not only bite, it chews you up and spits you out. She said, “Wow, you look so good. How old are you now?” (it’s a Pinoy penchant for asking this uncomfortable question). I proudly answered, “I’m 60. I’m now a senior.” With disbelief in her tone, she replied, “You don’t look like it at all. It’s like you are only 50!” I think my smile dropped. In my mind, I was screaming, “What?! 50?!” Was it delusional of me to expect her to say I looked 20? At first, I was shocked, then annoyed. After a while, it slowly started to sink in. Yes, I am a Gen Xer.
Ah, Gen X, the childhood that would get modern parenting blogs canceled. Parents smacked us without remorse if we did something wrong. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” wasn’t a proverb, it was a daily operating system. You answered back and you got the tsinelas flying at your head with the accuracy of a heat-seeking missile. We didn’t have “gentle parenting.” And you know what? We learned. We learned fast.
We survived seatbelt-free rides in the car, wore no helmets when biking and skateboarding, made takas from school by jumping over the walls, met with friends at an agreed time and place (no cellphones), passed notes to one another in the classroom, and would go “where the wind will take us”—just as long we would be home before our curfew.
And who can forget the era of MTV? It was the coolest thing growing up. Music videos 24/7, and creative ones at that. And don’t get me started when Michael Jackson or Madonna would premiere a video. It was an event like no other. The world stopped for us.
We listened to music via a Walkman. I was so amazed by the sound quality when I first got mine. Parties growing up were either disco or punk, or new wave. I experienced all these genres and cringingly dressed accordingly. I liked to swing to disco tunes (though I wasn’t good), but also loved Blondie, Pat Benatar, and Tears for Fears.
When it came to young love, there were love letters, long phone calls with party lines interrupting. It was the good old days of forcefully banging the phone when fighting with someone at the other end of the line. So satisfying! And emotionally? We survived heartbreak without block buttons. Breakups were blunt, sometimes brutal, and always real. Breakups were face-to-face, but the cowardly ones were through fax. There was crying, of course. Yet we carried on even if we were scarred, stronger, still capable of laughing at ourselves.
As for technology, there were no cellphones yet. There were a few people who had the first generation of cellphones, but these were huge and heavy. It was like carrying a brick, so the phones were pretty much left in the car and used for emergencies. We had pagers, and people who wanted to reach you had to call an “operator” who would type a message for you. I cannot fathom now this roundabout way to reach someone, but for a while it worked.
Now we Gen Xers live in contradictions with ease. We are analog kids but also digital adults. We know TikTok but don’t mistake it for wisdom or real life. We roll our eyes at “adulting” posts because—hello!—we were paying bills and making life decisions before hashtags existed.
We don’t chase trends because we’ve seen them all recycled: bellbottoms, mullets, neon leg warmers, grunge, low-rise jeans. We’ve been there, done that, donated the shirt, and watched it come back as “vintage.”
I think our biggest gift is balance. We straddle worlds with ease. We can dance to Thriller like it’s 1983, then stream the latest K-pop hits without irony. We’re wise enough to value time, silly enough to waste it as well, strong enough to endure, soft enough to still need love.
So yes, hooray for Gen X. We are the ones who survived breakups by fax, slammed phones till they rattled, and dropped everything when MTV announced a world premiere.
I now fully embrace my Gen X self. I may be older (and look it), but I still belong to the generation that knows how to take a hit, laugh it off, and get back up—tsinelas mark and all.