They told us we could be anything we wanted to be. Then told us it was our own fault we chose to be “losers” and “slackers”. They pushed us into the world with the cold indifference of a dive bar bouncer and expected us to get the good paying middle class jobs they refused to vacate or mandate and left us adrift in an economy, in a world even, that didn’t want us, didn’t care about us, and didn’t even want us to be there, and then judged us hard for not doing what they did – the difference being their parents worked hard and sacrificed for them and invested in them, and they were far too selfish and greedy to know or care, let alone do it for their own kids. We were the “are you still here?” generation and it shows. We were the latchkey kids, the first generation to grow up without a full time parent, the products of parents who wanted to “have it all”… leaving nothing behind for us.

Me, facebook, today

In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before something on my Gen X based Facebook group triggered me.

Turns out it was this :

Triggered by Fight Club – how cliché,

But yeah, My Gen X rage kicked in. We were (and are) victim of the vast soul sucking selfishness of the Boomers who raised us.

But we weren’t raised, we were “parented”. “Raising” children sounded like way too much work and (the most unspeakable thing) too much like they would have to make personal sacrifices in order to do it.

Well clearly that was absolutely unacceptable. Nothing could be more evil than having less for themselves.

So instead, they “parented”. That sounded a lot more like a hobby than a real commitment, and like any hobby, it could be done in whatever spare time you happened to have, assuming you had any.

Hence the invention of “quality time”. These two words were all they needed to justify spending almost no time with or on their kids because of course, what is important is not the quantity of time you spend raising your kids but the quality of said time!

And seeing as there is no way to quantify time quality, you are free to offhandedly imagine whatever tiny amount of time you spend with and on your kids is of such high quality that it’s still enough.

It wasn’t. Kids need parents, not parenting. Thinking your kids will be fine on whateer scraps of time you accidentally give them is like thinking you can live on 100 calories a day because that lettuce leaf you eat for breakfast is so darn nutritious.

SO our parents pursued their own self-interest with nary a thought for the kids they left to raise themselves.

Then they had the gall to claim they sacrificed so much for us when we complained.

Bullshit. You didn’t sacrifice a god damned thing. You would have had the exact same career in the exact same job making the exact same money if you had never had kids.

Sure, you spent money on your kids. And that’s not nothing.

It’s just not enough. It’s not nearly enough. In fact, you have to be pathologically selfish and self-absorbed to even think, for one second, that whatever the kids ended up with would just automatically turn out to be enough via the magic of “quality time”.

Kids need so much more than a roof over their heads and food on the table and jackets in the winter. Thy need love and caring and attention and guidance and assurance and discipline and all the other things our parents would have never dreamed of giving us because that would have meant less for them.

They could spend money. But they couldn’t share. They couldn’t accept having less so that their kids felt wanted and valued. They couldn’t conceive of it ever being acceptable for them to have less of what really mattered to them for any reason ever.

And so they raised us to say yes to everything. Yes, of course it’s okay that you skipped my recital to have lunch with your boss. Why would I object to barely seeing you at all and when I do see you, you’re too busy to even look at me? What possible problem could there be with me being raised by and bonding with a babysitter who will be far more of a parent to me than either of you and who will suddenly disappear from my life when I reach school age because to her, it was just a job?

Whatever meets your needs is A-OK with me, Mother and Dad.

After all, when you’re starving for attention, you’re sure as fuck not going to be picky about what tiny scraps of it you get.

You’re expected to be grateful that you get anything at all. Food, shelter, clothing, the occasional warm afterthought, birthday presents, the joy of :(silently) basking in their presence for minutes at a time – you should be grateful for all of it because you don’t deserve anything at all and your parents owe you absolutely nothing.

And if you dared to remind them you existed and assert your basic needs, what did they do? Send you off to boot camp.

Because to them, paying strangers to abduct your child in the middle of the night and take them God knows where to do God knows what to them for three weeks was, to their selfish souls, better than having to spend precious “me!” time talking with their children and possibly facing the truth about their own selfish “parenting”.

No,no, whatever we give them, no matter how little, is “enough” and if the kid wants more, it means they are broken (must be all that rap music) and you get to ship them off for three whole weeks (three weeks childless – what bliss) and feel virtuous for doing so.

We are Generation Nobody. We don’t exist. We don’t even get negative attention – all the memes are about Millennials versus Boomers.

The Boomers didn’t raise the Millennials – we did, got damn it.

But as usual, people – especially Boomers – forget we exist.

No wonder we’re a bitter and resentful bunch.

You would be too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.