82 Quotes About Generation-x

By some definitions I am a millennial. I was born in 1980 and entered adulthood in the early 2000s, and my transition from child to adult lasted over a decade. However, I don’t identify as a millennial. If I had been born five months earlier I would have been branded Generation X, a label I don’t feel a strong connection to either. And no brand savvy sociologist came up with a term catchy enough to enter the zeitgeist for the in-betweeners born on the cusp.

Once we got closer to the origins of these Eastern practices, we found that the monks and swamis were just as dogmatic and paternalistic, just as literal and conservative in their approach to spirituality as the Christian priests and ministers we were trying to get away from.

In my experience, Gen X women spend lotsof time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.

Of course, our roles within the family are radically different. Generational stereotypes of moms and dads have disintegrated A-bomb style. We are making it up as we go along, pioneering a new era of equality.

It cannot be denied that as institutions, churches do good work. They operate schools and hospitals. Their charity outreaches, which take care of the homeless, sick, and hungry, have real impacts on communities. And while there are certainly hellfire-and-brimstone preachers around, there is counterweight in Presbyterian and Methodist ministers, who are grounded in a modicum of rationality, using Biblical stories as fables to teach psychological and ethical principles.

This stance makes no distinction between (1) the pluralistic standpoint of making sure people have equal rights and (2) the act of co-dependently making sure not to hurt anyone’s feelings, however irrational they may be. We need to stop that nonsense. Getting your feelings hurt, quite frankly, is the price of living a in a free society.

... in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. “Truth” (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation.

Prior to postmodernism, it was all but impossible to claim that one was a cultural Christian, Jew, or Muslim. There was no such thing. Now, being culturally religious is a widely accepted stance.

By exclaiming that “there are no absolute truths” the postmodern stance is also claiming that the statement it just made is an absolute truth—trying to have it both ways, rejecting absolutism with absolutism.