By Wolfie (aka: Lone Wolf)

Well…we’re still around…and slowly drifting out of the minds of most people, to make more room for Generation Y, which are the young twenty-somethings of this current era.

What are we, exactly? Generation X-er’s are a generation of people born within the years of 1961 and 1980 from another generation known as the “Baby Boomers.” We have even been given an alternate name dubbed as “Baby Busters” This name was derived from the diminutive number of births following the ‘baby boom.’

• We were around for many of the events that changed and shaped the lives of the world that we see today
• We existed during the height of mothers in the workplace.
• We played around with the first kinds of portable entertainment such as Sony’s Walkman
• We lived through and witnessed the conclusion of the Cold War.
• We observed the start and end of another incident known as the Gulf war.
• We experienced the short end of the stick when educational loans started to dwindle.
• We were around during the debut of the Internet.
• We were excited over the DOTcom boom and felt discouraged during the fallout of the DOTcom bust.
• We took advantage of the availability of birth control pills and increased the newer “Sexual Revolution” as well as the AIDS epidemic.

Much like the Baby-boomers, Generation X will soon be long forgotten too, though perhaps our legacy will still remain in some of the discount section DVD titles such as “Reality Bites” and “Singles”. And to think that it was a few movies from that particular genre that influenced the world and media’s perceptions of what WE, Generation X-er’s stood for.

What exactly did we stand for? This question was often asked when I was in my twenties and at the prime of my life. For most people perceived us in a negative light. WE were the ones that most people pegged as “directionless.” WE were the one’s that grew up quite cynical and a tad apathetic. Well, some of us. Many of the Baby Boomers who gave birth to us had such high hopes for us in the beginning. So much that they pushed us to our limits and beyond. And some of us took it in stride because we wanted so much to appease our parents. We wanted their acceptance immensely but we would soon find out after secondary school how much faith they lacked in us…Generation X.

While a few of us succumbed to conventionalism and did what our parents expected of us, there were some of us who wanted to break that conventionalism. Some of us were non-conformists and proved just that by trying to carve a life out on own. We wanted our own identity. We wanted to be independent and escape the indentured life that our parents would inflict upon us. And for those who don’t quite understand the meaning of this indentured life, it simply means that once college is out of the way, we WILL owe our parents for the rest of our lives.

I, like many others, were given the options of a free ride. We either major in something respectable like medicine, or engineering to gain that free ride or be left alone to pay for our own schooling should we decide to choose to follow our own paths. It’s quite evident what path I chose as it took me quite some time to pay off my college tuition. Sure, I could have taken the easy route by yielding to my parents wishes and have my entire tuition paid for. Easy and effortless. But would I have been satisfied in the end? Would I have felt as fulfilled as I do at the very moment? Simply….”no.”

I could imagine my life being full of regrets and “What if..?” scenarios would be flooding my mind until it finally drove me to the edge insanity. Insanity….heh, I’m an artist, therefore I’m already insane but at least I’m quite happy at the moment. Like many others of my generation, we followed our own path, moved out of our parents houses at an early age and made our own destinies but not without struggles. Though broken and battered by many circumstances, we persevered through our continued education, we picked up many jobs along the way, and we stayed up in the wee hours of the night practicing our “crafts.” We persevered through the continued criticism from our parents as well as our fellow peers. For those who did not display an ounce of faith in us, it only drove us to do greater things. We followed through our education and earned ourselves some college degrees through blood, sweat and tears plus plenty of networking. We finally managed to land the careers that most people could only dream of.

We know the quote, “If you dream it, it’s yours!” This saying rings true but dreams are not handed to us on a silver platter. One must work hard to achieve that dream and not sit idly by wishing and sulking.

If we do nothing, then we will gain nothing.

We, Generation X-ers have seen and experienced so much in life. Despite what the media’s discernment has generated, we have proven most of them wrong. While our parents still question our choices in life, we realized that all they wanted was for us to have a better life than what they had experienced…a much easier, sheltered life. But we also learned that the kind of life our parents sought for us was not “living” at all. To really live, is to learn from our own mistakes. To really live is to make our own choices in life. To really live is to persist regardless of what the world throws at us.

Because of this, we are “movers and shakers.”

…oh yeah…by the way….that newly released video game that your holding? That was made by us….Generation X.

–Wolfie