r/GenX

I’m watching a movie right now that I really like and the actor is one of the best Gen X actors I know of and like a lot. Would like to see if he is mentioned. Go!

Edit: So I was watching True Romance and was thinking of Christian Slater, however based on many replies as well as my own thoughts, John Cusack and Winona Ryder as well as Robert Downey Jr probably had more movies and success. Slater was just cool as shit! Cusack a little goofy but also a really cool dude! I was always in love with Winona!

Thanks everyone for all your comments and you all have mentioned several other great Gen X actors! I miss being young! Long live Gen X!!

Pretty much just the question.

Mine was Desperado (1991)...why don't you come to your senses.

I am a late Gen Xer but was a young mother. I was divorced by 23 years old, ex-husband shortly after got ill and unable to provide, I put myself through college on my own dime all while raising a child. It was exhausting as even in college I was working and taking care of an infant and paying for childcare (though I did get help and lived with my mom for a few years). After I graduated, I ended up getting a good job but it was constant on the move, running from my job to help my child, getting dinner ready, etc (I moved out after I graduated because my parents needed space). My mom got ill in my late thirties and my early forties was even harder - a teenager/young adult at home but also staying nights and days between work to help with my mom.

After my daughter went off to college I had a boyfriend move in a year later. It was fine for a while but I often felt obligated to give him attention I didn't really have left at the end of the day. When my daughter came home from college, he ended up renting a room from a friend instead but he still stays here most nights. I think he was pretty much just annoyed with my child being home, but whatever, her house too.

The issue I'm having is, I am pooped at the end of the day. If I'm not paying attention, he feels insulted. He constantly wants to have dinners together, but I don't really like to do that. I like getting things like shrimp out of the freezer and making a quesadilla with it. Or, I'll order a door dash from a nice place and eat it three nights in a row. I want to come home and play a video game or something. He's very social and outgoing and can spend hours an evening socializing with friends and then come to my place and want to talk it up some more. Also, since it's my house there is a lot of overhead cleaning figuring out the mortgage, etc.

Does anybody have the type of relationship where they feel perfectly free to come home and make what they want for dinner without planning? Possibly play a game? Not feel obligated to spend the evening talking?

Did we really chant about an old man dying of an untreated head injury?

Seriously?!?

Time didn't exist when I was entranced by shelves and shelves of enticing titles and cover art.

Every weekend when I was small my parents loaded us in the car to visit the grandparents for Sunday dinner. The sucrets tin was waiting in the glove box with a joint. Other times we got in the car to visit their college friends, where the young ones were told to go away so the adults could play. I saw my parents fully out of it so much it alarmed me and I felt unsafe. Over and over for years. I can’t remember how many times I was hotboxed as a very young kid. I remember feeling the depersonalization though. It was the 80’s. There were uppers and downers and all manner of things everywhere. I was like 5-10 years old. I just didn’t understand.

Because of that early start, I avoided all drugs for decades, but am so familiar with the panic from the hotbox. The very smell put me into a panic attack for years after. I nearly threw up in my dad’s car from the smell freaking me out. I held it back bc I didn’t want to bother him with his car being dirtied.

As a young adult, I was diagnosed with depersonalization/ derealization disorder. I still have a hard time with it and I’m 50 now. It’s hard to drive or leave the house at all without a panic attack from feeling unreal. Certain angles of the sun, certain times of day…I’m fainting in panic attack.

My dad is gone and his ashes sit on my kitchen table for me to pass by and talk to several times a day. I like that for my own reasons. But it still catches me in the gut.

Am I alone with this? I now drink too much, and in the 5 months since my dad died I’ve been smoking his weed from his pipe every other night (his stash of weed and pipes were given to me by my stepmom when he died). It’s so weird. I suspect they wanted this for me so I’d hold space for them to continue their habit. I’m angry and sad but still responsible to do better and be better. I have one parent I love so much, but she still encourages me to numb out on alcohol and weed. This is NOT who I was for my first 30 years - I rejected all of it so much ppl might have thought I was a snob. I wasn’t, I was just so uncomfortable losing my senses to any substance. But it became my every day habit in midlife, and everywhere I look there are enablers. My kid hates me now. This is going to kill me. I’m only 50.

Does anyone else have boomer parents encouraging addiction they know will hurt or kill you, and take your kids out too?

I’ve been to rehab 4 times. They acted concerned for me, but if I’m being real they were more concerned for how it made them look to have their youngest kid struggle so much.

I’m making better choices now, in small increments, but I’m having the hardest time thinking I’ll ever recover enough to live to 51, let alone find my way to a better long term path. I feel like my days are numbered. My poor kid…

To be clear: I’m talking about being hotboxed with weed, not cigs. Cigs were there too, but that is not the issue im raising in this post.

I can’t watch anything set in the 80s with my happily oblivious millennial spouse because I won’t shut up about the hair.

Stylists seem to think that curls + a side part = 80s and I’m sorry but that just doesn’t cut it. 80s layers and/or feathering is needed and *bangs are an absolute non-negotiable must.*

I used to think it was never right because modern audiences just found true 80s hair to be too ugly. But nowadays a lot of 80s fashion, including some aspects of the hair, is coming back into style for better or for worse. So what’s their excuse now?

And the makers of period pieces love to tout how painstakingly researched and authentic everything is to their era. This stuff is in *living memory* people! Also hairpieces nowadays are really realistic, so it’s not like you need to convince the actors to commit to 80s hair.

ETA: I want to clarify that I’m not at all saying that everyone (or anyone) needs to have the giant teased crunchy hair à la late 80s high school. I also get that hair was different throughout the decade, regionally, and between age groups. What I’m saying is that even the variations aren’t accurately represented. Including (and even especially) the men’s hair.

So I'm having a birthday around the end of this month. (Gemini turf, for those who are into that sort of thing.) I had planned a few years back to do something big for my 50th, but that never quite materialized, due to car issues and other stuff. Haven't really done much of anything the last couple of years after that, either. The last sort of "official" celebration was a couple of years before I hit fifty, in a small party at a pinball/arcade place to which only a few friends came.

I have no wife or girlfriend (Haven't honestly tried dating in I don't know how many years. The dating pool these days feels full of toxic waste and whackjobs.). No kids of my own. Both of those are by choice. My birthday falls on a weekend, so I'd like to do something. But what? Most of my close family lives over a thousand miles away... and my parents are really too old to do anything I might want to do. My sister, who's a few years old, is getting over a foot injury, and would probably have other plans with her kid or her husband - who I don't think cares very much for me anymore. Most of my own close friends either have gigs that have them working on the weekends, or family obligations. Some of them feel like they can't be bothered with me anymore.

So, for a fifty-something musician who doesn't really play anymore, mediocre gamer and pinball player, doesn't drink alcoholic beverages anymore, never liked to get stoned or high, and in a place where it's probably going to be too ridiculously hot to do anything... I can't help but wonder. What should I do to make it be something more than just any other day? What would you do, Gen-X'rs?

"Other people have birthdays. Why are we treating yours like a funeral???" - DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," 1982.

I've worked since I was 10 years old, for real. I just turned 49 last week. I drive a trash truck with two guys working as loaders. I don't get out of the truck unless it's a recycle day and I'll get out to throw carts and rack the truck while the loaders load the hopper. Today I drove for 6 hours and was done. I had climbed out and stretched a few times and was feeling just fine. Arrived at the shop and the water and sewer supervisor was at the shop and just happened to look over as my left ankle and right knee decided to mutiny as I was climbing down the truck steps and I ate shit hard. I played it off and did a quick truck chore, climbed back up and headed to the landfill. An hour and half later I was back at the shop and he asked if I'm good. I said it hurt but I'm fine. He shook his head and said if that happened to one of his guys they'd gone home. I'm fit. I've backpacked all over the US and walk to work. Im a bit heavy but I'm fit more or less. I've broke my ankle, lower back and shoulder in the past and my knees feel years of labor work and hard playing. I just can't believe they both gave out at the same time after such an easy day.

https://preview.redd.it/lv929a3ka62h1.png?width=1072&format=png&auto=webp&s=836db0ea5b5d47a3fcc0b4e651316673dcec4a70

Long into the night did we practice our multiplication tables and, for some reason, create diagrams of sentences, lest we not be permitted to talk on a phone attached to the wall or watch television shows that were only on at one specific time of day and maybe never again.

When I was a kid, I had a lemonade stand with some neighborhood friends. I still think about the guy that that gave us a $20 and said keep the change. Friends and I took our profits and went to Pizza Hut feeling adultish at our first sit down meal with no adults. Dad asked how things went so I told him all the details. Same day, I also learned about tipping. Dad went to Pizza Hut, found the server, and made it right. I learned a LOT of lessons that day ❤️ Important ones. I still pay it forward at lemonade stands today.

I’ll be 56 this summer and have been in my career for 35 years. I work for a fortune 100 and make great money but I’m just not sure how much longer I can do the corporate world. I don’t have enough to retire yet so need to at least get 5 more years out of this and that’s assuming the market doesn’t tank. After 60 I planned to get a much easier job that at least has benefits and do that until 67 but at this point I’m just about out of steam. The corporate world is a complete drain and I’m very unhappy. I just don’t know how long I can do it. Would love to hear from you all to see how you’re coping and what the heck you do at this stage?

I've generally had an 8-5 career since graduating college in '94. Yet, here I sit in the parking lot at 6:45 am. No one else will get here till 7:30. I used to barely get to work on time when I was raising my kids but now I have so much extra time that I just come to the office. I don't know what else to do with my mornings.

I can't help but get up early and lately, it's been 445 and I'm wide awake. I try to lay in bed till 530 but still, I'm ready to go by 630. This has all kind of crept up on me over the past 5 years and it's getting earlier and earlier. I go to bed by 9ish if that helps any.

How early is everyone else getting to the office?

Edit to clarify: I'm not sitting in my car car for 45 minutes. I was just posting this morning as I was sitting there annoyed at how early it was.

Someone commented that she was with her grandma and heard a story from another woman her grandmas age who had numerous abortions then went back to her job at a factory. The comment was like ‘and this was 30 years ago, it was even common way back then’ like that was shocking. Seriously I was thinking 30 years ago was 1996 not 1946. The way she said it was like it was soooo lonnggg ago she couldn’t believe it. Like this woman worked in a coal mine and barely had electricity. The timeline isn’t that different, you all wear the same stuff we did and young people were listening to music about sex and drugs like they do now and getting into trouble exactly the same.

I couldn’t figure out how to stop a Keynote app presentation and I lost my shit and started screaming at my iPhone. Finally figured out I had to pinch the screen to exit.

Are you better off financially, even emotionally? Are you happier than they seemed when they were the age you are now?

Buncha kids stuck on a school bus on a dirt road- theres a shot of the bus from the outside, bees are gonna kill them....etc.

Was this a made for tv movie? Was this a fever dream i had?

I cant find it, does anyone know what im talking about? I feel like it was early to mid 80s and i saw it in the middle of the afternoon on summer break....but i coild just be making this all up.