Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials

By Matthew Hennessey

In Zero Hour for Gen X, Matthew Hennessey calls on his generation, Generation X, to take a stand against tech-obsessed millennials, apathetic baby boomers, utopian Silicon Valley “visionaries,” and the menace to top them all: the soft totalitarian conspiracy known as the Internet of Things. Soon Gen Xers will be the only cohort of Americans who remember life as it was lived before the arrival of the Internet. They are, as Hennessey dubs them, “the last adult generation,” the sole remaining link to a time when childhood was still a bit dangerous but produced adults who were naturally resilient.

More than a decade into the social media revolution, the American public is waking up to the idea that the tech sector’s intentions might not be as pure as advertised. The mountains of money being made off our browsing habits and purchase histories are used to fund ever-more extravagant and utopian projects that, by their very natures, will corrode the foundations of free society, leaving us all helpless and digitally enslaved to an elite crew of ultra-sophisticated tech geniuses. But it’s not too late to turn the tide. There’s still time for Gen X to write its own future.

A spirited defense of free speech, eye contact, and the virtues of patience, Zero Hour for Gen X is a cultural history of the last 35 years, an analysis of the current social and historical moment, and a generational call to arms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641770651

Matthew Hennessey

Matthew Hennessey is the Wall Street Journal's deputy op-ed editor.

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

I take no great pleasure in having been right.

The long lead times of book publishing being what they are, I couldn’t possibly have foreseen the specifics. I turned in the manuscript of Zero Hour for Gen X shortly before Christmas 2017. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was then still slinging drinks in New York City; Pete Buttigieg was little known outside the political circles of South Bend, Indiana. The full scope of the cascading data privacy scandals that have bedeviled Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook over the past few years had yet to come fully into the light, if, indeed, they have come fully into the light.

If the events of 2018–19 proved anything, it’s that the central thesis of my book was (and is) correct: millennials aren’t interested in waiting their turn.

They are now charging headlong into politics the way they charged into the colleges and universities, browbeating every erstwhile adult into accepting their evolving and increasingly outlandish demands. You saw what happened on campus during the past two decades, with the explosion of trigger warnings, unsafe spaces, and the emotional snowflake culture. You’ve seen how Silicon Valley and big business kowtowed to millennial desires to suppress speech, stigmatize dissent, and politicize absolutely everything. Now you see that wave is washing into Congress. Perhaps it will wash into the White House soon.

The millennial moment is coming faster and harder than anyone expected, and poor Generation X is getting ignored—again.

The past few years of thinking and talking on the subject have brought into focus a few things I didn’t fully appreciate while writing Zero Hour. For one thing, it has become obvious that millennials see themselves not as young people usually do—overbrimming with potential and heading toward a future of unlimited possibility. Rather, they see themselves as tragic victims of invisible, nefarious forces. Those forces are largely economic and, in the millennials’ telling, singularly focused on punishing anyone born during the 1980s and ’90s.

Millennials believe they walked into an adverse set of economic circumstances unlike any in American history. This belief colors everything, from their attitude toward work to their decision—taken seemingly en masse—to forgo having children. They point to the housing collapse and subsequent financial crisis and say, Nobody knows what it’s like to be us.

There’s no denying the Great Recession was bad. If you graduated from college in 2008 or 2009 you definitely took a short straw. You had a hard time finding a job (especially if you majored in oppression studies), and the salary you were offered when you eventually found one probably wasn’t what you were hoping for. That frustration is understandable. I wouldn’t have wanted to be 22 in 2008.

But that’s about as far as my sympathy goes. The unemployment rate peaked in October 2009 and has been falling more or less steadily since. It started dropping like a rock in late 2011, and the following years have seen delicious levels of growth. Wages are up. Productivity is up. Jobs are plentiful. The economy has done a fairly good job of putting itself back together in the decade since the collapse. If you were 22 in 2008, you are almost 33 now and things have been pretty good for a while. You’re fine. You have your whole working life still ahead of you. Stop complaining about the past and get going on the future.

The pain of the Great Recession was real, but millennials didn’t experience it alone. I was there, too. As hard as it may be for self-obsessed millennials to swallow, Gen Xers also took the hit. No, we weren’t making our first tentative steps into the labor market at the moment when everything went pear-shaped. But we were working like hell to keep the mortgages on our houses from going under. We were getting laid off or watching our friends get laid off. We were thinking of going back to school, weighing whether the time was right to make a change. We endured salary freezes and furloughs and deductibles that went through the roof practically overnight. For the most part we didn’t have our parents’ spare bedrooms and health insurance as fallback options.

The Great Recession affected everyone, not just millennials. And we rode it out, like we rode out every other crazy thing that’s come along and tried to throw our lives off track. Most of it was beyond our control. Some of it was really bad. But we rode it out because that’s what adults do.

Let’s not forget the baby boomers, who don’t get much love here in Zero Hour. They experienced the pain of the financial collapse, too. Many delayed or came out of retirement after looking at what had happened to their 401(k)s. I wouldn’t expect most millennials to understand the acute and specific panic of being at the end of your economically productive years and watching the modest retirement money you’d set aside over a lifetime shrink by half or more overnight, or of not being able to sell your house, or your small business. There’s no starting over for people like that. There’s no time left to earn it back.

If you must get hit by a once-in-a-century economic Armageddon, better for it to happen when you’re young.

But Social Security won’t be there for us! they cry. Maybe not. But it might not be there for me, either. Or for my kids. It never occurs to millennials that they aren’t the last generation that will ever walk the earth and that the prime mover behind every invisible economic force isn’t society’s secret desire to screw them over.

Aggrieved millennials should take heart. Previous American generations lived through calamities far worse than the Great Recession. Our grandparents and great-grandparents made it through the Great Depression, and they did it without Instagram. Then they made it through World War II and Korea. The baby boomers had Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation. They made it through. At every step there were economic dips and dives that seemed at the time like insurmountable setbacks. But we survived. We all survived.

The promise of America is that each generation can do better than the last. That promise got pretty banged up in 2008, but it’s still redeemable.

The big difference between millennials and the rest of us—and I include the even younger generation here, Gen Z—is that many millennials don’t believe the promise of America. They have imbibed an extraordinary amount of cynicism about the United States in their young lives. Time and experience will sort a lot of them out. They will hopefully begin to see more clearly that they won the lottery of human freedom and flourishing by the accident of having been born in the United States of America at the end of the 20th century. But until that happens, there’s important work to be done by those of us who know the score.

It’s still Zero Hour.

Matthew Hennessey

Yonkers, NY

May 2019

INTRODUCTION

People generally remember the strapping actor Christopher Reeve for two things: his 1978 role as Superman and the unfortunate horsebackriding accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down in 1995. I remember him for something else.

Shortly before his accident, the Juilliard-trained Reeve gave a supple supporting performance in The Remains of the Day as an American congressman visiting the United Kingdom shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson took the starring roles, but Reeve’s fine work in the melancholy Merchant Ivory drama was noticed and talked about. In a 1996 interview with Larry King, the wheelchair-bound Reeve said that he felt his accident had come just as he was poised to shake free of the action-hero persona that had clung to him since Superman. His career, he felt, was about to take a turn away from roles that required little more than that he look good. He was hoping to transition into substantive parts in better films.

I was just getting the hang of it, he said with obvious regret.

After his accident, the once physically vital Reeve appeared in a handful of movies and did a bit of directing for television from his wheelchair, but physical paralysis robbed him of the opportunity to do what he’d worked so hard to prepare himself for. He died a few years later. The King interview added a layer of pathos to Reeve’s tragic story. He lamented the loss of his power and athleticism, but what really bothered him was that he could never show the world what he was capable of doing as an actor.

This book is about Generation X, the relatively small cohort of Americans sandwiched between the twin generational behemoths known as the baby boomers and the millennials. Culturally, politically, socially, technologically, and economically, the torch is being passed from the older generation to the younger one while the one in the middle is being mostly ignored. With the baby boomers on the way out, the culture is turning its attention to millennial needs, millennial tastes, millennial peculiarities, and millennial preferences. Generation X is at best an afterthought—when we are thought of at all.¹

My thesis is simple: if Generation X doesn’t get its act together—and fast—we, like Christopher Reeve, will have the rug pulled out from under us just as we’re on the verge of realizing our potential. That would be a pity, both for the individuals who could have made a difference and for a society that desperately needs a counterbalance to the millennial rush to a digital world, with its ethos of instant gratification, public shaming, and isolation-by-technology. In this new world, everything from privacy to freedom of speech is viewed as a relic from a boring, underdeveloped, and less enlightened past.

If you prefer newspapers and books to screens and pads; if your tastes run to music made with instruments rather than computers; if you value privacy; if you don’t want behemoth tech firms spying on you in your home and your car, storing the data and selling it to the highest bidder so that you can be more accurately targeted by marketers and advertisers; if open debate is important to you and the chill winds of speech codes and political correctness on our college campuses have already sent a shiver up your spine; if saying what you like and laughing at what you find funny is your definition of freedom; if you’d rather work for a living than take a guaranteed government income financed by Silicon Valley profits; if drone deliveries and sex robots give you the creeps; if you’ve ever scratched your head in wonder after reading an article about what millennials know and how they think about the world—then this is the time to make a stand.

It is, as the title says, zero hour. Soon it’ll be party over. Whoops! Out of time.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a woman who is younger than I am. I’m 44. I’d say she’s about 25. I told her that I was working on finishing a book. She asked what it was about. I chose my words carefully.

It’s about Generation X, I said. She paused, a quizzical look on her face.

Remind me who they are again?

They’re people about my age, in our forties and early fifties, I told her. It’s about how we grew up in a world that was very different from the one that you and your friends grew up in and how that world is quickly slipping away.

Great. Another book about how awful millennials are, she said. Can’t wait.

An understandable reaction; nobody wants to hear about the supposed shortcomings of a group that they had no choice but to join. I nodded dumbly and shrugged.

Oh yeah, Generation X, I remember now, she said, flashing a wry smile. You’re the generation that isn’t going to get a president.

That’s pretty much it, I had to concede.

This is the moment when members of Generation X should be setting the national agenda. We should be entering a period of social, political, and cultural influence, if not control. We have the experience and the energy necessary to do the big jobs. We should be getting ready to steer the ship, but we are about to get swamped by a millennial wave that has already started crashing hard into the worlds of business, politics, entertainment, religion, dating, medicine, and education. Even the military is watering down its once-rigid standards in order to cater to millennial penchants and predilections. If we don’t act fast, the millennial wave is going to sweep Gen X overboard. We’re going to miss our moment, becoming nothing more than a demographic footnote of American history—the inconsequential, shade-strewn valley wedged between two enormous generational peaks.

Raised in a pre-revolutionary moment technologically, Gen Xers are children of paper, pens, books, handshakes, body language, and eye contact. We learned the virtues of patience, self-control, and delayed gratification, even if we didn’t always practice or appreciate them. We knew what it meant to be out of contact with someone we loved. Some of us, perhaps too few, learned how to fix an engine or wire a light fixture. Most remember how quiet things used to be; how easy it was to be alone.

Not so easy anymore, is it? Be honest.

America stands anxiously on the cusp of an unknown future. Unlike the baby boomers, Generation X’s race is not yet run. Unlike the millennials, we remember what life was like before the Internet invaded and conquered nearly everything. In that memory resides the hope of our collective redemption, the seed of a renewal that could stem the rot, decay, erosion, and collapse all around us. If that seems overly dramatic or impossibly grandiose, well, all I can say is this is my book, not yours. I’m not going to all this trouble because I think the stakes are low or the future is already written.

Gen Xers can write our own future; there’s still time for that.

1 I thought long and hard about whether to refer to Generation X in the third person (they), or in the first (we). I opted to acknowledge my group membership and—for the most part—refer to Generation X as us and we. As you will see, this is as much a memoir as it is history, social commentary, or policy proposal. If the habit unnerves you, I apologize, but I decided that I couldn’t get away with pretending that the subjects discussed in these pages aren’t deeply personal and informed by experience.

ONE

The Baby Boom and Everything After

In early 2017, Maxine Waters, a 13-term Democratic congresswoman from southern California, gave a short speech during a panel discussion of so-called net neutrality rules—the bewilderingly complex regulatory regime then governing Internet service providers that has since been repealed. The topic remains of seemingly great importance to the young, idealistic, hip, and tech savvy. Rep. Waters is none of those things. She is pushing 80, a feisty partisan, more than a little cynical about the prospect of working fruitfully with members of the other major political party, and—this is just a guess—she doesn’t really understand how the Internet works.

It’s not a knock; few 80-year-olds know how the Internet works. For that matter, not many 40-year-olds or 20-year-olds know how the mysterious, detached, electronic, networked brain that increasingly dominates our every waking moment actually works. We think we know. We have an idea, maybe, but we probably couldn’t articulate it in a way that would add up to much. It could be a