Folks of my particular vintage, I believe, have a certain set of advantages.
Growing up in the 1980s and into the 1990s, we occupied a really interesting space in terms of technology. We came up with the personal computer, but we can remember a time before it was ubiquitous and powerful. We remember when tech didn’t hold your hand and required arcane knowledge to maintain and use. We’re young enough that computers are still a natural part of our skillset, but we’re old enough not to take the technology for granted. We still know how to rip things down and troubleshoot them and remember the ancient ways of the techpriest.
Likewise for the Internet. We remember a time when if you wanted to know something, you had to read a book. I had a set of encyclopedias, and I made regular trips to the library to look things up that I wanted to learn about. We remember what it was like not having an algorithm deciding what you wanted to watch and learn and spoon-feeding you a carefully curated drip-feed of information designed to skew your perspectives. We had attention spans.
We also were the last generation that was left to our own devices. Helicopter parents weren’t a thing. “It’s 9 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” was an honest-to-god real question. We didn’t have cellphones, so we could actually drop off the radar if we wanted to. Similarly, every dumb fuckin’ thing we ever did wasn’t instantly saved to the Internet for posterity.
(Although I’ll cop to a downside there; there are a few people who have left this world that I dearly wish I had more pictures and recordings of, and I’d commit a large variety of crimes to get them.)
We got to grow up under the doom of the tail end of the Cold War, and then lived through that brief seven-or-eight month period in the 1990s where it seemed like everything might actually turn out okay for our species. (Whoops. Almost as embarrassing an assumption as believing the Internet, giving people access to the sum total of human knowledge, would be a net positive for our civilization. Our bad.) We know in our hearts it’s Not Going To Be Okay and we’re not going to freak out when it turns out we’re right.
We got to watch when the music industry attempted to profiteer off us and a bunch of nerds kicked them in the balls so hard people think paying for music is wrong to this day. We got to see the government try to crack down on artists and watched long-haired weirdos absolutely clown on senators about free expression on live television. Our generation got handed ticking environmental and technological timebombs, and people actually fixed them instead of just making everything worse.
We still had heroes. And I mean real ones, not babyfaces packaged in densely-packed kayfabe to fool the masses.
Christopher Titus has a great bit where he talks about when the shit finally hits the fan, all the normal people are going to lose it and panic and cry. And all the people with fucked-up upbringings are going to be thinking, “Hey, nobody’s guarding the Lexus dealership.”
It’s kind of cool being part of the most dysfunctional generation.