Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30: ‘Generational trashing is eternal’

Three decades after his debut novel made him the unwilling voice of a generation, the author wonders whether – after Y, Z and now C, for Covid – individuality will become obsolete

I’m 59 and a half years old – and these days I no longer feel that I identify as a human being. I’ve turned into an app. I’m a filter for words. I filter the ways I experience the world.

How you identify has always been a big deal. In the late 1980s, I disliked being classified as a baby boomer so much that I had to invent my way out of it; my debut novel, published 30 years ago, was called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Why accelerated? By the tail end of the 80s and the start of the 90s it felt as if history was finally emerging from locked-in syndrome. The Soviet Union was over. Liberal capitalism was triumphing. Music changed completely. It became a cliche that every other advertising montage showed someone sledge-hammering the Berlin Wall – and there was this new group of younger people who obviously didn’t fit into any pre-existing category, so who were they? Marshall McLuhan wrote that the oversimplification of anything is always exciting, which is I think what happened with Gen X. The term became a meme back when society only had five or six of them a year.

Let me tell you from experience that nothing makes you cringe more on the inside than being introduced somewhere as a voice of a generation. I spent much of the early 90s in TV studios with perplexed interviewers saying: “But surely all young people are boomers. It would be preposterous to think otherwise.” The thing about a term like “Gen X” is that everyone has his or her own definition, and people always wanted me to agree with theirs. At some point I realised X had become something other than me. It had taken on its own life.

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