From Sports Cars to Suicide: A Generation Gap
Schem Rogerson Bader

Gen X has always been the ugly middle child, stuck between Baby Boomers and Millennials. Boomers, like my parents and my friends' parents, had careers, saved money, usually owned a home, took vacations and complained about taxes. In popular culture, Boomers were portrayed as choked to death by The Silent Generation. Suck it up. Don’t complain. Save your money. Boomers were a rebellious generation espousing free love and the rejection of 1950s domestici-ty. The plight of Boomers isn't the point of this writing. However, I do want to set up a kind of ar-gument about expectations, selfhood and mid-life. This is a piece of writing that is attempting to rectify or expose a generational problem that started at the inception of Gen X. The disappointed generation, the disappointing generation.

Born in the 60s, we were babies and didn't see the sexual revolution, we were feeding off our mother’s breast, or riding our bikes, or having time outs on the naughty step. By the 70s, there were gas storages, home-made yoghurt, and itchy fabrics with bold prints. The 1980s is where Gen X divided itself, no longer did our generation share ‘ideals.’ Some wore leather jackets, lis-tened to The Cure, and protested Christian Right values; Thatcher, Regan and Mulroney. Poll tax riots, AIDS and Apartheid were daily news items. Others wore leather jackets, who listened to Ted Nugent, or Nazi punk. They wanted a piece of the pie, the promise of a future, a golden fu-ture that affords financial security and social status. I saw them, I looked into their eyes. I, along with my group of friends, revolted against our generation.

"Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, mark my words, will save the U.S.A,” a quote from a hit movie that premiered in 1987. I never saw it, I never would. It was not entertainment that I wanted, and its perspective was in exact opposition to how I saw the world. This division would have much broader consequences to it than I real-ized. Let me explain. Many of us as a youth in the 1980s were invested in marginality. The main-stream was repugnant, its excesses were pure capital. Too much make-up, too much hair, too much neon clothing, too much cocaine. We wore black, patched the holes in our jeans and gath-ered our change to share a pitcher of beer in Kensington Market. Being outside the traditional market value was what was valued.

The excess of the 80s revealed a gross cultural mishandling of Nietzsche’s Will To Power. And power as a force for the Great Individual to rise, rose again. There was so much about my gen-eration that I hate. Conversely, some things make my generation unique, particularly to Millenni-als. I knew the city before every corner was taken over by corporations, I squatted and lived off very little, and had a sense of freedom. The division in Gen X speaks to fear and precarity. Fear of loss, of poverty, of connection, of purpose. Myself, like millions of other Gen Xer’s, lived meagrely rather than work in a soulless office. And then we aged, with each year, followed by decade, our bodies started to sag under the weight of inevitability. When I turned 40 years old, I remarked to a friend that I didn’t ever see myself being that old. Now at 52, I am even more sur-prised. That is a significant difference between Gen X and Baby Boomers.

Boomers have high expectations, they assume the world will hold them in its embrace. Since flower power, they have the things— a pension, a house that’s probably paid off, a saving ac-count, investments, marriages, children, a yard. This isn’t to say every Boomer is secure. Just as I am not saying every Gen X falls under these categories. However, this is to say that the gener-ation gap is filled with broken promises. As a Gen X, I was always sceptical of those hollow pledges. An existential awakening in midlife is precipitated with a reckoning of idealism, most notably the reflection of unconscious denial and manic defences, intended to help us face the inescapable. Destructive forces like nihilism, misery and tragedy were the playground of much of my youth. We enjoyed reading The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire in the park then later danc-ing to Killing Joke. We didn’t want to shop, we didn’t have money to shop, shopping wasn’t a past time, shopping was simply a necessity. Any pleasure of shopping came from thrift stores. Not wanted to look like others, gave us a kind of freedom.

For Boomers and perhaps for Millennials, shopping is a form of existence. A nod to Barbara Kruger here, “I Shop Therefore I Am.” Things for Boomers spelt success, and their soupy midlife crisis made up of denial and defences, intended to raise their consciousness to accept the una-voidable, resulted in a trope, a cliche. Affairs and sports cars, the negating of responsibility, the shirking of intimacy. We have seen this cliche so many times, we may think it a ‘normal’ process to midlife. Indeed, these tropes are gendered and have developed over time. That is because they are constructed, they have been socially and culturally constructed by forms of capital and consumerism. As Boomers hit their mid-life around 2000, the veneer of success split and the surface cracked, they were getting old, ageing loses social status, they appeared tone-deaf to the rest of the world. Lying to their wives, lying to their children, coming home late ‘from work,’ after having sex with a woman half their age. Still resistant to the inevitable truth, the shiny red sports car pulls into the driveway, and your wife knows, it’s over.

Affairs and sports car are being replaced by suicide for Gen Xer’s. Death a warmer cloak than sex or cars. Why? Why is the hopelessness of Gen X so different from Boomers? The genera-tion gap between Boomers and Gen X is part of it. Gen X preferred to reject a great deal of Boomers idealism, an idealism that seemed completely wrapped up in consuming, shopping, and getting. As mentioned earlier, there was an additional fissure as Gen X broke within itself. It was a political divide between those who wanted what others had, and those who wanted to reject the never-ending nagging of more.

That idealism of rejecting the status quo is one of the greatest achievements of Gen X. Charac-terized as slackers, being cynical and disaffected, gave me a sense of pride in my youth. By 1991, this way of seeing the world was fully entrenched, and Douglas Coupland book stated what I already knew, felt and was living. Paraphrasing here, but he said something like, Gen X wanted off the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing. Modern existence expects us to do these things, these are the expectations set by a Boomer generation; a generation that believed itself revolutionary and righteous. But the affairs and sports car cliche’s haunt my vision of Gen X and their/our midlife.

There have been several suicides in my cohort over the last few years. Some I knew, some I didn’t and others I loved deeply. There is a pattern forming of hopelessness in midlife for Gen Xer’s. Having sex won’t fix it, buying a car won’t fix it, a home with a yard won’t fix it. By pinning our existential needs to capital and consumption, the metaphoric sports car cannot bandage the gaping hole of our imperfections. The regrets we face at midlife are more an existential crisis than the truth about who we are or what we’ve become. Guilt, shame and self-loathing are part and parcel to the very act of ‘looking back,’ we could even say that such feelings demonstrate a critical and engaged interaction with ourselves: a sense of responsibility of who we may have hurt and why. To reconcile these seemingly insurmountable challenges needs another approach.

Truth needs to be parsed from that emotional process. Yes, parsed: truth is never whole, but rather bits and pieces. Truth is shattered over time. Reflecting on the details of our guilt or shame often results in setting a match to the tinder box that are the best parts of ourselves. This legacy of “the midlife crisis” must be reexamined. Depression, tragedy, resignation and most important-ly, precarity are the cornerstones to what I am seeing in my community, and what I too, am grappling with. Confronting our own chronology, midlife marks the end of growing up and the beginning of growing old, and we enter a paradox. The very idea of ‘growth’ is irrevocably al-tered. The ‘growth’ of youth; we were an expansive force. Richard said it best, “We were so young. Look at the faces, the unlined and unburdened faces.” We were also challenged, trun-cated or ruined by the existential crisis that we are never really free; nuclear war, AIDS, terror-ism, neo-Nazi’s, growing up. We face this similar crisis again, but this time with bunions, bifocals and sore backs.

The absurdity to life is knowing we will die is an Existentialist’s approach that may prove helpful. By knowing, we are alive. To prove our worth, value, or sheer existence is the stuff we gather over time; a brilliant CV, a loving partner or other life affirming things. What happens when these things fall apart; divorce, careers dissolve, arguments with friends and family? Those things we thought had our backs change, or suddenly disappear. And, we encounter a familiar pain. What’s the point? If we consider absurdity as a like of wild card; a location where we resign ourselves to the truth we’ve always known, we will die. I wonder how we can recreate the relationship be-tween absurdity and resignation. There is an interrelationship within the word construct: how do we construct healthier approaches to social and cultural constructs? I am reminded of the nihil-ism that fuelled me me in the 80s. The nihilism that spoke to me, and has guided me along my life’s path never suggested that life was meaningless. But rather, how we chose to live our lives that evokes futility, or how and under what conditions we surrender what we value for approval. The nihilism I speak of can really be summed by Crass’ Systematic Death. Repetitive, atonal, fast, and to the point.

System, system, system.
Send him to school.
System, system, system.
Force him to crawl.
System, system, system.
Teach him how to cheat.
System, system, system.
Kick him off his feet.

The systems and constructs that birthed and collapsed the Boomers, remains. It was there yesterday, here today, and guaranteed a future. Neither a sports car nor suicide will change that, and neither provides the desired outcome, happiness. Both wound others, and creates an addi-tional level of pain atop the grief we already live with. The grief of absurdity, which nothing but our own sense of selves can pull us out from. His suicide, their suicide’s are the metaphoric sports car pulling into the driveway, where we stand at the metaphoric kitchen window, knowing it's over. We live with these wounds, bundled and bound to old trauma, wiggling and squirming through our lives. At midlife, the expansive force of youth inverts, life gets smaller, we have physical, mental or energetic limitations. But what of that inversion? An inverted force? How do we harness it, and construct our marginal lives within it? Reconciliation begins with recalling, re-inventing, and not apologizing for being different.

Addendum

RM Vaughan gave me my name, a night over cocktails at my apartment in Parkdale. I told him, “Stephanie Rebecca Rogerson never made sense to me, it's frilly and goy.” Without a beat, he said, “Shem!,” and took to google to explain why it was perfect. Then quipped, “But, you’ll add a c to it, give it some panache.” I have been legally Schem Rogerson Bader for over a year, and my mother calls me “Schemanie.”

Thank you, Richard.