This is true for me. I have a sense that I came of age very late. I have a sense that I did not come of age at all, that I was always of age. My generation, according to this book, is extremely dependent on self and does not look to the outside. In general for my generation there have been no grand messages or themes. The unity comes in its unraveling and dysphoria. Like a natural autumn, we are the drying-up, the dying part of the cycle.
According to the book, we will experience a monumental crisis around the year 2025, when the nation will experience death and rebirth, as it did with World War II/Great Depression, Civil War and Revolutionary War. This crisis will force a change of life and completely separate the lifestyle from what it was before. However I am not really interested in all those theories.
Anyway, at the tailing edge of my generation I have begun to feel very interested in the leading edge. The first things that come to my mind are The Breakfast Club and Edward Scissorhands. Gothic culture came about in this time, but there is a general attitude of darkness in the youth culture whether or not members would identify with the gothic culture. One thing that separates the tailing end of Generation X from the leading end of the Millenial Generation is the birth of the Internet. This has had such a profound impact on youth culture and identity, and I wish the book could have covered it, but it was published in 1996, and that was when the Internet first became available in a widespread sense.
I was very much a part of the early Internet. I made my website immediately, became engrossed in the gothic and fantasy cultures online, which revolved around movies like Labyrinth and Legend. I think it is really interesting that I immediately found so much common to myself on the Internet. I feel like it was because my gravitation to the Internet corresponded to others who wanted to express the same thing I did.
So the early Internet was dominated almost exclusively by Generation X. The Millenial generation will have no recollection of it. Their present domination of the Internet has changed its timbre completely. Now the Internet is a social place. It is not the place you go when you are a nerd, it is just the place you go.
I find myself going between two different cultures, one older than myself and one younger than myself. I question my need, but I do not feel like I can express and create artistically until I know about whom and what I am speaking. It may be that I would be much more effective all around if this need had never occurred to me, but there it is, and I must continue to examine it.