Gen X Is Not Okay.

You really ought to check on your Gen X friends.

It is difficult to articulate what this middle is like right now for us. We are caring for the parents above us, watching this pandemic ravage their mental health as they stay isolated inside, but simultaneously worried that if we try to hug them or comfort them or encourage them to leave they will catch a deadly disease. At the same time we are trying to shepherd our kids through this thing too, somehow ensuring that they don’t grow up to be permanently scarred and weird because all they know are screens and adult conversations and that is not a childhood. We are doing all of this while we hold the line on businesses and jobs and careers. We are twenty years in. We are the ones with enough institutional knowledge to keep the office or that business afloat right now. We are 15 years into a marriage and at best, two away from needing a new roof. We are holding ALL of it up.

But watching everything unfold yesterday just about nearly broke us. Throughout all of our adult lives we have been handed so much horse crap, like the Bush v. Gore decision, or even the Iraq war, and each time we were told to trust the system, to respect the rules. Pay your student loans. Show up for work on time. So to watch a bunch of boomers and millennials in cosplay light that on fire from our remote desks while we homeschool our kids, make dinner, and do a socially distant welfare check on mom and dad, was just maybe too much to bear. There is a great line in the movie Singles: “Somewhere around 25, bizarre becomes immature.”…