I keep thinking of this encounter I had with a woman in her late 40s a few months ago. The day wasn’t going all that well for me in the first place. And I almost completely lost it.

I was driving down California St. in San Francisco and smoking a cigarette. It was a Saturday and I had to go into work (a stressful job I hate but keep to pay for my student loans — wasn’t education practically free when you were young? I’m $100,000 in debt), but first I was going grocery shopping. I threw the cigarette out the window. OK, I know I shouldn’t do that. But the next thing I know, this woman in a huge SUV was riding my tail honking and shaking her fist at me. She followed me for a few blocks. Finally, at the stoplight, I got out and not-so-politely asked her what her problem was. She said, “How dare you throw your cigarette out! Do you even care about the environment?”

You see, there is one issue I do care very deeply about, and that’s the environment. But the environmental problems we face are much more serious than some fucking litter on a city street. I’m thinking of maybe global fucking ecological collapse and global warming, famines, drought, etc. I got red in the face angry, but didn’t raise my voice, yet. I tried to politely ask how she could claim to care about the environment when she was driving a large, gas-guzzling vehicle. She said, “I take it to Tahoe, besides what’s that have to do with your littering?” I lost it at that point. I said she was right, I shouldn’t have littered. But it was her self-righteous attitude that was bothering me. I was screaming at this point, how could that bitch drive a gas guzzling monster and ask me if I cared about the environment?

She rolled up her window. I went back to my car and lit another cigarette to calm down. She didn’t even listen to me. She certainly didn’t see her own hypocrisy. I pulled into the store. There was a 40-ish couple strolling the aisles ahead of me. They stopped at the fish counter. The man pointed to some salmon. No, his wife explained, that fish was farm raised and that is bad for the environment. Do you have any “natural” (what does that fucking word mean anyway?) salmon? Yes, said the dopey 20-year-old know-nothing behind the counter. Well, the “natural” salmon was placed in the cart and the couple gave each other a brief “we solved another of the world’s problems and we still got our shopping done” hug. The whole scene was such consumerist bullshit fantasy.

Yes, there are environmental problems with farm-raised fish. But meanwhile, we’re fishing the “natural” fish to the verge of extinction. And these old farts walked away feeling self-righteous? I almost puked on the Phish-fan, know-nothing, jackass jerk-off clerk. Instead I opted for some tofu and tried to put the idiotic couple out of my mind.

Actually, your generation has grown to be a lot like the World War II generation. The WWII generation got back stateside with the attitude, “We just won the war. The world owes us a life of simplistic luxury and that’s all there is to it.” Your generation arrived at middle age in much the same way. We marched on some fucking antiwar, pro-civil rights marches and now we can do whatever we want. Except while the World War II generation had an attitude of attempting to forget what they had gone through, your generation wants its accomplishments writ large over everything they do. Not only was that couple buying fish, they were saving the environment. Not only was that old bitch driving a monster SUV, she was saving Pacific Heights from vile cigarette butts.

Many other voices from “my generation” will chime in. Few will be as frustrated and angry as I am (at least I hope). But their stories, I think, will show that we live in a very complicated age. We don’t have anthemic problems that are easily sloganeered to rally the mass “youth culture.” We have very complicated and very controversial problems to solve. They are fundamentally different from the much more clear-cut (at least to me) problems your generation faced. We already have to solve them, carrying your parents on our backs. We can’t do it with you up our ass too.

— Name withheld by request

No black socks with shorts

Seeing my parents’ generation go kicking and screaming into advanced age is a double-edged sword. It’s at once oddly disconcerting while at the same time it is incredibly uplifting. It’s strange to see, perhaps, the generation of the 20th century becoming mild, pudgy, balding consumers who are trying desperately to relive their youth or who are very accepting of the aging process. Ah, the contradictions!

Like many youth of my generation (the children of you boomers), I have held the children of the ’60s in very high regard. You brought about such wondrous and desperately needed change to the world. Not to mention the musical heritage you’ve bestowed upon us (a heritage that we’ve a hard time eclipsing).

In answer to your question about being young and in a relationship in the early 21st century: the lasting effect of Free Love is felt by youth today, despite AIDS and other frightening diseases that penicillin can no longer cure. Sex is frightening in many ways, and so is love, but in some ways not.

For example, some of the relationships that we have today and take for granted would likely never have been if not for you boomers. I am a white female, aged 23. Do you think in 1952 that I could have easily had a black lover? Or openly gay friends? Or a romantic interest who is 20 years older (well, prejudice against age is still rampant, but I’m sure you guys could fix that too if you wanted!)?

We get a bit annoyed at you all when we see boomer entertainers like the Rolling Stones charge completely outrageous prices for their shows. And we wonder (more than you may think we do) where things went wrong. I hear Jethro Tull songs being used to sell cars and realize where some of the priorities and worldliness of your generation have been redirected. Have you simply given up or have you just gotten tired? In this regard, it’s secretly refreshing to see the arrogant youth of yesteryear becoming AARP candidates.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s a bit tough for us to see such powerful figures of the ultimate youth culture becoming potentially doddering grannies and grandpappies. The fact that many of you will not consciously succumb to the stereotype of an “old” person gives us hope and positive reinforcement about our own impending advanced age. You’ve not yet seen a reason to wear black socks with shorts, thank God.

This is why it’s also so totally fantastic to see someone like my mother (at nearly 50) wear sexier clothes than I do. She doesn’t feel old. And it’s also so refreshing to see a group of guys like the Who bring Madison Square Garden to their feet with energetic renditions of music written 30 years ago (more contradictions, I know! Isn’t that grand?) Such music is timeless, just as your generation is as well.

It’s humbling and healthy to see your heroes and contemporaries fall and grow old. It’s at the same time remarkable to see people refuse to feel “old” and who think that age is truly, merely, only a number. You boomers have shown us that love and life cannot be confined by age. At least, not without kicking and screaming.

Off to see the Who,

— Jennifer Carney

Oral sex

You are our parents. You are the only vision of grown-ups we have ever really seen. We fully believe in your adulthood, but we are not terribly impressed with it.

I know that is a universal sign of youth, to be flippantly disrespectful of one’s elders. You may be more interesting than your parents, but you seem less noble to us. You are hoping to save Social Security so that you have it when you retire, but none of us ever expect we’ll see that money when we get old. AIDS exploded because you all slept with everybody. And most of you can’t even use the Internet.

You all got to have sex like no other people in history. For one brief moment, sex had no consequences. People my age don’t complain about condoms being like taking a shower with a raincoat on. We’re used to it, the way you get used to wearing flip-flops in the shower at the gym so you don’t get athlete’s foot.

My 31-year-old sister thinks that oral sex is more intimate than vaginal sex; I’m 24 and none of my friends think that. I think that, because of AIDS, people my age wait longer to have sex with someone. But we are young and frisky and there needs to be a trade-off. That trade-off is oral sex. It’s become much more casual than it used to be, a fairly normal first-date sort of activity.

— Julia Frey

The Age of Disillusionment

I happen to be quite young. Eighteen years, to tell the truth. And you want to know what it’s like to be young? Damn frustrating, that’s what it’s like. You’ll probably find it hard to understand, but there are just no causes left.

Your generation had Vietnam, the peace movement, flower power, Watergate and environmentalism. We have — what? Sure, there’s anti-globalism, opposition to the coming war against Iraq, a few other scattered things. And there would be some other, maybe less glamorous causes if somebody would care to take them up. But tell me, when was the last time you heard about a student protest on a campus? Nobody cares, that’s the problem. The Age of Irony, indeed. We’re so goddamn ironic, cynical and jaded that we don’t think any cause is worth fighting for. The Me Decade is supposed to be over, but I sure don’t see a sign of it.

We look at the adults who have remained politically active and we laugh because they’re so naive. We look at those who have gotten rid of their ideals to become CEOs and we make them our role models. Yes, it’s a bleak picture. Young people are supposed to be idealistic, full of vigor and enthusiasm. Yet somewhere along the way, the idealism got lost. I notice it, even in my friends. They’re good people, otherwise I wouldn’t call them my friends, and they’re certainly not self-centered. Yet few of them take an interest in politics, in how our country (Luxembourg, by the way, not the USA) is governed, in what’s happening in Afghanistan or Iraq. They’re not interested in high causes; they might even find them slightly amusing. I propose we rename it the Age of Disillusionment.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest, and I hope you’ll get a few e-mails that are more positive than mine, as well.

— Frank Dondelinger

Keeping youth alive

At 20, I hope to God I still qualify as “young.”

My parents have kept their youth alive, really. They’ve kept themselves in shape, they’ve kept their sense of humor and their passion. My mother is beautiful and she sings and dances in public; my father is as at home with a guitar at a campfire as he is in the operating room, where he saves children’s lives every day. Granted, they are very financially successful, so they are spared the day-to-day financial worries that make Botox such a popular cosmetic treatment, but I can honestly say that when I look at their wedding pictures from 25 years ago, they look exactly the same to me. They’ve kept their exuberance and passed it on to their children; we are forever grateful to them for loving us so much that they’ve shown themselves to us as not only authority figures but as human beings.

I think one of the major differences between your generation’s parents and mine is that my generation’s parents (I’m speaking really about my own parents, but most of my friends have had similar family-life experiences) tend to be far more open-minded and place far more trust in our own judgment. Gone are any traces of the ’50s “little boxes all in a row” ideals; my parents enthusiastically embrace my individuality and my capability to make my own choices and learn from my own mistakes. There is no pressure whatsoever from them to have a certain career or to be friends with certain people or to stay away from certain substances; they would prefer if I dated only Jews (I’m currently with a delightful half-Mexican agnostic), but that’s more of a cultural than a generational phenomenon, I believe. Premarital sex? “No problem, just be safe.” Drugs? “If you can tell the difference between use and abuse, then go for it occasionally, but nothing harder than weed.” Bisexuality? Um … maybe they have a bit farther to go, but I really can’t complain.

As for your generation, well, yes, you look like people who have not accepted their age. But this is a profoundly good thing. Please, please, never settle into the coffin of normalcy. Hold onto your passion. It doesn’t embarrass us. It gives us hope that when we too grow up and even grow old, we can still retain much of what made us young.

— Jessica Langer

Male hippies run the world now

I hope I still qualify as young. Externally, at least. I am 25 years old as of a month or so ago. My analysis of my parents’ generation is this:

In the beginning, there were two foci: the squares and the hippies. There were about six people in each group, and everybody else was in between. This included my mom, who was just a few years too young to be a hippie, so she just did drugs by herself to keep her hand in. Or my dad, who went to Vietnam because king and country told him he had to, because every male figure in his life had done so. He came back and became a hockey player, of all things, after two tours in ‘Nam as a medic. I guess he hadn’t seen enough blood and guts over there.

Generally, female squares don’t matter. That’s Laura Bush. Is she relevant? I don’t think so. Generally, male squares went to ‘Nam, unless they were rich. They got killed or messed up real bad. The ones who didn’t went back to Squareville and raised Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and all the other kids that rebelled against the media-driven nightmare world we live in now.

Generally, female hippies became wives, mothers, worked careers or didn’t — but their vigor was slain on the altar of false feminism and free love. It didn’t work out real well for them. Generally, male hippies run the world now. Evidence: Alan Greenspan was once tight with Ayn Rand. The male hippies either went through Vietnam so high they didn’t notice a damn thing, and so retained their sanity, or they didn’t go at all.

Against that backdrop, my answers to your questions: My parents grew up. All the other boomers I know grew up too. They had to, since there was nobody else around to run things. They don’t cheat on their wives or husbands any more than the previous generation. If their parents spent any less time grieving over their lost youth, it was because World War II was a total shock to everyone in the world, and they never recovered. It damaged their introspective abilities beyond repair.

No one accepts aging, at least nobody with any damned sense. I stare at 25 every day in the mirror and know what it was to be 17. Already I mourn.

— Jon Burgess

What’s the difference between a punk and a hippie?

I remember when I was 20 in 1991 and home from college for the summer. My mother had purposefully left a Newsweek magazine on the kitchen table along with a plate of fresh-baked corn muffins and some now cold coffee. It had been sitting there since she had risen at 8 and it was noon when I moseyed into the kitchen. I tiredly looked at the magazine: “Twentysomthing” blared on the cover. Cued by the microwave’s beeps, she entered as I choked down the warmed-over coffee.

“Did you read the article?” she asked, hiding her excitement.

“Not yet,” I said. “Coffee.”

She nodded and sat down at the table. “It’s all about people your age, I thought you’d find it interesting.”

“No,” I thought, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her. She loved articles that made me make sense. She still kept one in my baby book about how to raise kids without pigeon-holing them into gender roles — “Baby X” it was called and it was all about having little girls play with toy cars and Legos. Twenty years later she has a new article with a new set of rules — this set the world right for her.

I think the ’80s were as confusing for her as a parent as they were for me as a teenager. Thank goodness for John Hughes movies, the perfect instructional video for disaffected youth. So I read the Newsweek article while she watched. It talked about how my generation was bored, unemployed and unmotivated, undirected, unimpassioned, disjointed, disillusioned, distilled … I munched a muffin as I read. When I lifted my head, my mother caught my eye for an answer. I said “Well, of course we are, you guys did all the good stuff and the yuppies took all the good jobs. What else is there for us to do?” This statement then became her pet sound bite at cocktail parties for the rest of the summer. Frankly, the article upset me.

In the months and years that have passed since that article, it’s crossed my mind many times. Generation X, the Lost Generation — and how did my grandparents get the title of the Greatest Generation? All of this makes us sound like we don’t count, like we’re a burden to society — but who’s getting old now? Who’s becoming the burden? Those baby boomers that told me I didn’t matter. Like the Reagan years, punk rock and the Gulf War are meaningless blips on the radar of history. But raves are to love-ins what the Gulf War is to Vietnam, at least as far as youth culture is concerned. We’ve partied, we’ve protested, we’ve fed the homeless. I’ve even met people who have had wild, unbridled, unprotected sex (why they did this, I don’t know but they did) and somehow we still don’t count? Why? Because we happened after 1969.

What’s odd about generationalism is that people fail to realize that the experience of being young and the experience of being older are at root the same, regardless of the cultural decor that surrounds an age. What’s the difference between a punk and a hippie? Nothing. They are young, and anti everything they see as being wrong with their world. The specifics are different but the motivation is the same. It’s a youthful protest that settles down with college loans, a job, a significant other, and a new VW.

So you asked what it’s like to be young now and I tell you it’s the same as it was for you with a variation of costume, soundtrack and set dressing.

— A. Colvin

All of those things make me feel old. I left school to pursue my work, and I’ve worked 60- and 70-hour weeks at times. Those are the things that you do when you are young but make you feel like you’re an old man with popping joints and jaded eyes. Typical dot-com burnout, I guess.

At the so-called height, I was making twice what my father was. In any terms, an obscene amount of money. All of it is gone now, pretty much — a lot of lunches, a lot of going out to dinner, and a lot of rent payments. I was supposed to be an adult, but I was just a geek who was being paid to do what he had always done.

Now, after the crash, I feel old from everything that has happened but still young for what is in my future. Tomorrow I start one class at a local junior college — Intermediate Algebra. I got a D in it five years ago. I think I can get an A in it now, I’m pretty sure. Nothing makes me sure except looking at all of the things I have done at work. In school, they try to help you learn. With the computer industry, they don’t care about learning, they care about doing. In six hours. And please move it into production tonight.

Taking the placement test, I felt old. I looked around — some of these people are still in high school. Then I felt young again, knowing that I was in school and going to be learning things this time around instead of playing Tetris on my HP calculator. To have the earnest interest of youth, that seems to amount for a lot.

I skateboard. Sometimes off and on, sometimes fanatically, but it doesn’t matter. When I am on my board I am ageless. I am 8 years old careening down the driveway. I am 14 learning how to ollie for the first time. I am wearing combat boots and am skating a deck with skulls on the bottom and it’s 1989. I am 17 and almost getting mugged behind Best Buy. I am 22, sitting on a curb near my apartment watching the airplanes go overhead and sweating.

I have been seeing an older woman for eight months now. She is 39. She was 37 when I met her, when I told her that she didn’t look a day over 26. We were friends for a long time before getting involved. She seems so young in so many ways. She has so many friends, of all different ages. Her mother is mentally ill and she is the only one in the family that takes care of her. She loves animals, and houseplants, and children. Of all of the people I could be involved with, she is tremendously loving and supportive.

She is older and feels young to me. When people see us together, they don’t really notice an age difference. Our relationship makes me see things from a different perspective, but the wisdom we share is definitely a two-way street. We laugh at the generational differences — I have grown up with computers my entire conscious life, and to me a Nintendo controller is just as intuitive as a telephone. She finds interesting my fetish with vinyl records and doing some of my writing on a 1955 Smith Corona Sterling typewriter.

I feel like I haven’t answered the question, really. What is it like to be young? Being young to me is realizing that I have a few more times I can fuck up before it really matters. I’m thinking of buying an old VW Beetle. I go to punk rock shows and write music reviews. I’m doing some of the things I really should have done in high school. I don’t view this so much as regression as tying up some loose ends.

Being young to me is trying to convince myself that anything is possible. Being wise to me is realizing over the past six years that money has never made me happy.

Being young is drinking a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English 800 in a parking lot and being hung over for work the next day. Being wise is skipping the 40, going to the show, and taking two aspirins and going directly to bed so that you can get up and enjoy your weekend.

Being young is skateboarding and falling down a lot and getting angry. Being wise is skateboarding and falling down a lot and realizing that gravity teaches you things.

Being young is watching MTV and wishing you could be a part of it. Being wise is realizing that you don’t need anybody else to tell you how to make or listen to music, and stepping out of your role as consumer.

So, in some ways I’m young, in some ways I feel old. I really don’t know what else to say.

— Kevin Jamieson

In the shadow of our elders

Since I turned 30 this year, I don’t know if I qualify as youthful anymore. But I do have two baby boomer parents, divorced, naturally. I was born in 1972, which qualifies me as a Generation X-er. Since both groups seems to be the subject of much debate and conjecture, I thought I’d try and shed some light on what it is like to be part of a generation constantly in the shadow of its elders.

I think the best way to explain this is using the example of why Nirvana became so popular in the early ’90s. I was in college at UC Santa Cruz, and to be there in 1991 was like stepping in a time machine to 1969. The Grateful Dead was selling out more shows than it had in its heyday and classic rock could be heard booming from every sound system in the dorms. We were a generation of kids imitating our parents. We had been so inundated in our childhoods how their “rebellion” was so fierce and cool, their experimentation so daring, their ideals so cutting edge, that I think we (or most of us) wanted to feel those things too. And since it had been done before we just sort of followed the trail that had been blazed before us.

But there was always something lacking, and it was originality. Then along came this new “grunge” movement, where the singers and bands were young, our age, not an aging Mick Jagger selling out arenas on nostalgia alone. Kurt Cobain looked like us with his Converse one-stars and vintage Hang 10 shirts. He screamed and yelled and sometimes didn’t sound all that great, and yes, some uptight boomers could argue he was derivative like anything post Led Zeppelin, but he was new. His music was new and it was ours. Finally we could tell our kids about the first time we heard “Smells like Teen Spirit.” I will never forget seeing Pearl Jam, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Cow Palace New Year’s Eve 1991 turning into 1992. I was so excited that I had my own distinct memory of a rock show that my parents couldn’t usurp.

But as hard as I try to create my own identity, mom and dad are always close behind. If you talk to my dad, he loved Kurt Cobain because “he seemed cool.” If my mom is in my car and hears a song by X that she likes, she’ll beg me to make a mix tape. How can I ever be cooler than my parents if my mom is driving around listening to X or the Clash?! She’s even begun to rebuff the whole boomer nostalgia thing, she now groans when they have a singers & songwriters CD advertised on TV and asks when people will put the ’60s to rest. My dad is anxious to hear what books I like to read, what places I go to, how “we” feel about “them,” what our dating rituals are. Hmmm, sounds suspiciously like a certain Salon.com column writer.

The conclusion I have come to is, as long as we have parents and superiors who shaped their own identities on youth and coolness, it gives us less chance to express ours. And as long as you guys are obsessed with how the world sees “you” you’ll never be able to see all of the things you weren’t a part of creating, and I know you may cringe to hear this, but it’s quite a few things. So, stop stifling yourself and accept the wheel of life, you’re getting old (like all of us!) — and stop stealing everyone’s thunder!

— Lisa Waggoner

Not wanting to be cynical

Remember if you will the movie “High Fidelity.” One scene finds Rob describing, in voice-over, a relationship he took up with someone who had just had a bad breakup while he himself also just had a bad breakup. Paraphrasing: “It takes a certain disposition to be worried about being alone for the rest of your life at 26 — we were of that disposition.” I am by no means searching for a wife at this point; the whole notion of marriage is still very unrealistic and foreign to me, and yet (turning 25 recently) I feel I am beginning to understand why people desire it.

I have run into what is surely a more modern early to mid-20s dilemma. I spent quite a long time espousing and living my independence (from 23 to 25) — dating but without a girlfriend per se. After those two decisive years I found that I did in fact want again the joy of a relationship. Simply someone to spend time with, to love, to be loved back, and of course physical intimacy. I admit two things at this point. 1) I have only made two specific attempts at relationships these past few months and 2) that I fall hard and easily for the women I choose to pursue. I find it difficult to brush away the feelings of “not being wanted.”

It seems that there is a dilemma among those in their 20s, myself included. We have a certain fear of commitment, a desire to not be tied down because of what limitations that means. I find I no longer feel like that, and am sad that this is the current state of relationship ideology among those I want to date and my friends.

I can envision myself turning around when I meet someone in the future and we fall in love and give each other the happiness that enraptures and plagues (happily) our consciousness-ridden selves.

— Lance Fuller

Fine with love that isn’t free

I guess I’ve never read a bio on you, but your writing never suggested to me that you are old. I’m 30 and I also “want my world back.”

I’m not as quick to condemn anyone in your generation as I might have been when I was full of arrogant and ignorant bluster (and blaming your numbers for my job at a photocopy shop). The preservation of youth and its psychological corollary, fear of death, are ancient afflictions. Members of your generation or any other, who cling to superficialities, nostalgia and consumerism disguised as youthfulness are easy to criticize and all too common. Botox and Jimmy Buffett’s enduring popularity just make your generation’s youth obsession a bit more obvious.

What’s it like for me to be young and in a relationship these days? Your generation had something to prove. You fought the sexual revolution so I don’t have to. Now I can use every vibrating toy or restraint in any magazine, or have missionary position sex once a year or never, and I don’t have to justify it to anyone. Despite the shocking infection rates, AIDS can be avoided by adding some brains to your bacchanal. Love that is slightly less than perfectly free is still far better than what you started with. We are doing fine in this department, thank you.

What does this mean for the dynamics of my relationship? Whatever backlash may have developed from the revolution your generation brought about in our notions gender politics and society in general, I credit you guys for at least defining a line of inquiry by which we can reflect on ourselves and our mates. I don’t need to feel that women are any big mystery. If you have the dreaded talk about the relationship (or sex or money or in-laws) honestly and openly, it’s over faster and everyone is happier. Pain and confusion still exist, but obviously that will never change.

— Peter Lenardon

We’re cleaning up your messes

It’s true that the flower children of the ’60s were the first generation to celebrate youth. I think my generation (at 22, I fall into the very tail end of Gen X) envies that, even if we don’t want to admit it. This is a topic that is inevitably discussed in contemporary college settings, and I hope this structure-less torrent of free thought does some justice to the views many Gen Xers have.

The Baby Boom generation has managed to prolong their youth — the number of ’60s-based TV shows premiering this fall, not to mention the ever-touring Rolling Stones, proves that much. Some of my generation selectively celebrate that culture: Free love, drugs, and Grateful Dead music abound in many circles. Yet the optimism that fueled the hippie dream of recreating the world died alongside the GIs in Vietnam. Those Gen Xers who engage in the free-spirit lifestyle often don’t share the drive to fight for social reform.

Still, another group resents the presence of their parent’s culture in their lives. We may benefit from the social changes brought about by the Baby Boomers, but we also pay for the mistakes. I live in a culture that (generally) accepts an unprecedented level of moral, sexual and identity diversity, yet I have no concept of the once-simple reality of sexuality existing without AIDS, because I have never witnessed it. This group has rebelled against their parents in unusual ways. Young Republicans celebrate the ideals their parents dismissed as frivolous, “Deep” (which runs the gamut from the pensive youth who writes poetry all the way up to the under-appreciated Goth community) Gen Xers embrace the beauty of darkness many flower children overlooked, and others fill their lives with all things artificial, from drum machines to Ecstasy.

So how do we look at the aging Boomers? There are plenty of Boomers who may have grown up, but never matured. The party-hearty lifestyle of, say, the Van Dams perfectly illustrates the segment of the Boomer generation many Gen Xers feel complete contempt for. We never participated in your party, yet we’re cleaning up after it. Watching Boomers who have yet to mature is too painful — their children will be cleaning up after that party for the rest of their lives. Still, the majority of Boomers have grown up and understood that they have to leave youthful gallivanting to the youth. As adults, these Boomers tend have wonderful relationships with their children, and have a youthful quality that most other generations sacrificed at the threshold of adulthood.

The moral of the story? All Gen Xers celebrate the freedoms that their parents fought so hard to obtain. Boomers who recognize that the world they once inhabited has changed are generally embraced by this new generation. But those who try to hold onto their culture are doing a great disservice. We may have inherited the freedoms you worked so hard to bring about, but we’re cleaning up the messes you made along the way. Many of us want to know one thing: Why is the generation that fought so hard for social freedom pushing their culture onto us?

— Stefanie Brychcy

Spiritually undecided

I just read your plea for youthful narratives, and I suppose that mine might be typical of the 20-somethings of today.

I’m male, 25 years old and college educated. I was raised by one parent. My name is that of a Hindu demigod, yet I’m white, and my parents are no longer in the “Hindu” cult into which I was born. I am undecided spiritually, some might even say confused, because of my own parents’ lack of commitment to a path, and because of being raised in an open-minded and multicultural setting.

I have a half-brother and a half-sister (both older than me) that were raised by their stepfather (my father). My mother is still on a flighty spiritual quest for enlightenment of which she never grew out, and by which she finds herself in Nepal, Germany, India and other random places sending her abandoned children e-mails on birthdays and holidays.

Because of the morals that my parents (most notably my father) took as their own, I have been a registered member of the Green Party, but have since rescinded any political affiliation. My parents’ failure to bring about the utopia of their dreams left a politically sour aftertaste in my mouth. I went to school looking for unassailable truths to find only some loose guidelines by which to live and call oneself “liberal.” I know that that label is so twisted up in its historical origins as to be useless, but that’s what the quotation marks are for.

I graduated from Humboldt State University only seven years after dropping out of high school and heading off to my local junior college. Sixteen changes of my major, a felony DUI and four months in jail couldn’t stop me from gaining a useless piece of paper proving I finished. A B.A. in political science from a school known for its pot and its tree-sitters.

All of this is leading somewhere, I assure you.

Our culture’s acceptance of “divorce as the norm” doesn’t help to build any faith in long-term relationships. Not only the fall of my own parent’s union when I was 5, but the general failure of all the marriages in my extended family and family’s friends (if not failure, then horrible pain and misery and malicious treatment) has led me to believe that it is not in human nature to tie oneself to another for a lifetime. The happiest couples that I’ve met have had “alternative” relationships, be they open or queer or serially monogamous.

My own best relationships have also been “alternative.” When I say “best” I mean that there was mutual respect, honesty about emotions and issues, simple and mutually beneficial separations and great sex. These relationships were always with other like-minded people that saw the uselessness of trying to tie oneself to another with an arbitrary promise of eternal commitment. These relationships were based on a common understanding that people ALWAYS change, and that, for now, our lives are compatible. Not forever, just now.

The politics of sex and love, influenced as it is by the ubiquitous Hollywood machine, has for as long as I can remember been shaping notions of the ideal relationship. Believing in these unrealistic and unattainable ideals leads one to either disillusionment or self-delusion, both of which make for unhappy campers. Growing up as part of this generation, the generation of hippies’ kids, does have benefits, though: Buddhist nonattachment, acceptance of impermanence, a skewed and media-driven concept of the sexual revolution and dogmatic use of contraception have kept me both physically and emotionally safe from harm (thus far).

“How should life be,” you ask.

Here’s how life should be: some disaster should wipe nine-tenths of the human population from the earth so that what’s left will have the ability to live in a manner congruent with the planet’s unaided productivity. Preferably this disaster will be obviously linked to human activity and overpopulation/consumption, so that those few that are left will know better next time. The now-sparse population exceeds all expectations and remains peaceful; after all, what is there left to fight about when everyone has everything needed for survival? Relationships follow the unhindered course that nature intended: tribes raising children, with sexual partnerships lasting only as long as they are mutually advantageous. The rule of law is accepted as irrelevant and discarded. People aid each other when necessary and live their own lives for the rest of the time. In short, they live as they lived before history, before mono-crop agriculture, before property and before marriage.

Hope this is helpful in your quest for the youth’s understanding of the world.

— Arjuna Twombly

Sidebar: You were raised on Kennedy. We got Reagan (the man who was busy fighting Legionnaire’s Disease while thousands of people were dying of an as yet unidentified disease known as AIDS). Cut us some slack if we seem a little uninterested in the political.

Next, pul-lease quit talking about all you did for the environment. If you drive anything larger than a Toyota Echo, leave us alone. If I see one more “Save the Earth” or “Visualize World Peace” bumper sticker on a Ford Expedition or a Jeep Cherokee, I’m going to scream. (I know, I know, you need those big SUVs to take your kids to therapy and haul people to the WTO protests.)

Oh yeah, and we are really sick of you talking about free love. You don’t think we want to have healthy, enjoyable, more casual sex lives? You did it, you enjoyed it and you lived. For us, one wrong move, one bad night, or one random condom with a pinprick and we die (and not from Legionnaire’s Disease). We’ve been trained to fear sex since grade school. Most of us learned how to wrap a banana in a condom by the age of 8, just in case.

We are also sick of hearing about how our music sucks. Believe it or not, some influential musical influences began creating well after 1969. Baby boomers, I’d like you to meet Public Enemy and Dr. Dre. (On the other hand, if you are a 45-year-old woman and you are dressing like Shakira in public and it is not Halloween, please stop. You are pathetic. Baby Boomer Men, I likewise beg you, if you are listening to the White Stripes in an ear wax-colored Pontiac Bonneville, realize that those young girls next to you at the stoplight aren’t smiling at you, they are laughing at you … hard.)

One last complaint: If I hear one more baby boomer start a sentence with, “One time, at Studio 54….” I’m gonna hurt someone.

Now, of course, not all baby boomers tick us off. But if you start your sentences with “You know, kids, back in the ’60s … ” more than twice a day, you may have a problem.

To quote Homer Simpson, “Shut up or we’ll put you in that crooked nursing home we saw on ’60 Minutes.’”

– Liz

The lost generation

I grew up a member of the ’80s generation. I graduated from high school at its conclusion, 1989. I grew up in a typical town in a typical state. I grew up around parents who grew up during the ’60s.

I grew up in a time when AIDS was a new thing — when medical science was just learning about this new disease. Transmission mechanisms were uncertain. Could you get it from kissing? Who knew — which is why my first girlfriend and I never kissed in the two weeks we dated. Not once. Sex education was neither sexy nor educating. Radical changes were pushed through the system by the more liberal-minded of our parents, but they were restricted from really educating by the more conservative. Mostly I learned that you can’t fail sex education, even if you mark “C” for every answer on every test.

I grew up in and around divorce. While my parents avoided the plague, everyone around me fell like flies. Parents longing for the freedom of their youth came and left like so many callers at a child’s wake. Some talked to my friends about it, some didn’t. None stayed for very long. All claimed needing to “experience life.” The effects are still being shown to this day — all of my friends either stay in relationships no matter what the cost or leave them no matter what the benefits.

I grew up around conflicting philosophies of life. I once caught a ride home from a dad of a friend. We talked during the ride as I often did with parents or step-parents of friends. We talked about what it was like during his youth. We talked about the ideals and the changes he wanted to make when he was not much older than I was. We talked about the free love and the love of issues and the love of life. And the music played all along: “You say you want a revolution … ” He dropped me off half a block from my house because my road was a dead end and it was notoriously difficult to turn around. He didn’t want to risk denting his new Beamer — with factory-installed CD player and leather seats that stuck to my thighs when I got out.

I grew up being told to “just say no.” I remember finding a stash of pot in my friend’s dad’s bachelor pad. I remember lighting a joint, inhaling and nearly choking so hard I almost threw up. I remember two years later when I couldn’t go out with my friend because he was in trouble for being arrested for possession.

I grew up asking the question, “What the hell is FICA?” when I got my first paycheck on my first job. Social Security, they said. What’s that? It’s so you have some money when you retire. Oh. Cool. Then I went to college and learned a thing or two (I hope). Apparently an aging population puts special pressures on society. President Clinton tells us Social Security will be bankrupt by the time I’m 50? Where the hell is my money?? I want it back!

I grew up being told all good music had been made already. Lennon was an icon for a generation (not mine). Hendrix was a god (but Eddie Van Halen, apparently, was a hack). The Ramones reflected the anger and discontent of a generation (while the haughty disdain of the Police was pretentious). Music is the voice of a cause of the people (Farm Aid, We Are the World, Free Mandela and I Won’t Play Sun City are the causes of bored teens, it would seem).

I grew up during two major economic booms. Unfortunately, I was both too young and too old to take part in either of them. And the future isn’t all that bright either — apparently the ’60s generation like their jobs. Who would you hire, a young buck with a few years’ experience or a retired person who can do the job without benefits and brings a lifetime of experience to the job?

I share little with the ’60s generation. Youth culture passed me by. Want to know where I turn for inspiration? The Lost Generation. Those who came of age in the ’20s and ’30s. Too young to enjoy the heyday of World War I and the boom of the ’20s, too old to be “the greatest generation.” That’s where I sit.

Hope that helps.

– Frank LaFone

Tragedy, sex and computers

I am one of those youth you talked of. No, I personally do not see most of the older population as doddering fools. But I get the feeling they see us as fools. But that’s the attitude in every generation and probably not an unfounded one. I think with most of the youth it’s the same thing as other youth. I don’t think our generation has much of an identity; we take other generations’ fashion statements. A lot of us wanted high school to be as simply stereotypical as the movies portray it to be. We wanted there to be the stupid jocks and the geeky smart kids, and some people try very hard to mold themselves into those things: I am smart therefore I must be a prep or a nerd. I have a blue mohawk therefore I must be angry at the world.

Most relationships I know have the consistency of popcorn, light and fun. I have been in one serious relationship out of seven, and let me tell you the one that was serious still hurts me to this day. I broke up with him and I’m not sure why; I wasn’t ready for the commitment of it, I think, but I still love him.

No one wants to talk about STDs, and if we do it’s to make fun of them. For all the sex ed we get, my friends still ask me if they can get pregnant when he didn’t come in them and didn’t even come close to it. A lot of us tune it out because we hear it all the time.

I think I am bound to mention (though I think it is the same with most generations) that everything is a bloody drama. I had the worst childhood or I have the worst parents or I had the most abusive relationship. Even if it was bad, everyone I know thinks that it could not possibly be worse when they know for a fact that it could be. They are so arrogant about it as if they are proud of being the “best” at something.

I live in Florida and when 9/11 happened a lot of my friends just made noises. They look at things like the Holocaust and say, “That was really sad.” I think that we as a generation are incredibly jaded when it comes to tragedy, sex and computers.

Arrggg.

– Sonnet Robinson

Youth is a state of mind

For anyone to know how being young is “different” now than before means they’d have to have been young both times.

Ultimately, youth is not a time of life but a (horribly clichéd) state of mind. Every man who’s left his wife after 20 years of marriage for a woman 20 years of age does it to feel young again. As do women who carve their faces and inject poison in their brows so that the evidence of having been thoughtful and alive can be replaced with the blank slate that is chronological youth. Seeking the comfort of established limits (i.e., when you can and can’t go outside) is not an indicator of youth, but a reflection on the uncertainty you feel about making your own decisions. Sure, the circumstances of being young change with the times, but, by and large, the experiences do not: Young men and women still exchange sex for recognition — still confuse freedom with a lack of responsibility.

I’m 31 and have more freedom, feel more alive and tingle with more possibility than ever before. As a married man, in a loving relationship with a wonderful woman, life is more adventurous — and I get much more than recognition from sex; I get far more satisfaction and experimentation and surprise, as well. The responsibilities in my life that I’ve acquired with age haven’t made me old — my mortgage means I live in a wonderful place of my choosing. (I can always sell — heck, I just moved from a large city to the edge of farm country without a problem and I can move again, if I need to.) The school loans, rash road trips, unplanned jobs and the adventures I’ve taken weren’t in a vaccum — my current job and interests are a result of trying to answer questions I’ve had about the world since I was young. I still ask those questions and, on the odd occasions I stumble across answers, I’m invariably led toward more questions.

All the truly “articulate and bursting” youth from whom you are seeking validation don’t have answers to your questions. They’re too busy trying to find their own way — which has nothing to do with comparing their experiences to what other generations rebeled against. And if you have to ask if you look like the fuddy-duddies your parents resembled, you already have your answer. Let’s all look forward at the same world together and stop obsessing about whose youth was best — or the most fun. There is little useful to be learned from pitting one generation against others — that’s how the racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia of the so-called greatest generation stays embedded in our culture. We are on a constant, forced march forward in time — to focus only on what we thought was great about yesterday makes improving the reality of today harder.

– Travis Sullivan

It was the young man’s glance, or rather lack of glance, that shocked me. For I had developed over the years a subtle but habitual gesture of recognition of youth, a nod of the head that spoke of solidarity, that said, as the gap of age grew, that I still was on the side of youth and not with the adults. And I expected some recognition in return, some validation that I still held a marginal membership in that world of endless energy, quick-witted alertness and physical power.

It’s true that a certain caution had crept into my life. Because of the penury that my slacker ways had brought me, I had been disguising myself as an adult in order to make money. The disguise had been getting better and better. For a period, I wore ties and slacks and leather shoes. In an epic gesture of accommodation, I had cut my hair. But even though I no longer looked particularly young, I thought my pedigree of youthfulness shined through.

That afternoon, though, it was not the shock of being called “sir” for the first time. It was more like literally ceasing to exist. It was the shock of being passed over in that arrogant and effortless way youth in its delirious solipsism has of passing over whatever is not shiny enough, quick enough, lustrous enough to warrant attention. This was the first signal that, as one letter writer put it recently, youth of today avert their eyes from my generation as if we were derelicts on the street.

So, being curious about this passage into irrelevancy, and realizing that only those who truly have forgotten what it’s like to be young fail to realize that they are old, I inquired of readers of the “Since You Asked” column what it was like to be young today, and what my generation looked like to them. The responses were numerous and quite moving. The issues they raise seem well worth thinking about and acting upon. Youth cried out that we seem selfish to them, that they see us as a lucky and indulged generation, and that struck a chord and held out some hope. For if certain ills of our world do stem from the selfishness of a whole generation, then the generation that follows, seeing our faults, might correct them in its own march to power.

Therein lies a bridge between us, although one fraught with ironic self-recognition. That is, it’s still about us, isn’t it? Even as we inquire of youth, what we inquire is, “How do we look?” Indeed, some letter writers pointed that out, while many others raised the myriad challenges particular to this age that cannot be laid at the doorstep of the boomers: AIDS, for instance, and its attendant effect on sexual relationships; the Internet boom and crash in which young and old conspired equally; the explosion of information and options about marriage, childbearing and work that, even absent a ’60s-engineered dismantling of social institutions, would make formerly clear choices fraught with ambiguity.

So listening to the young needn’t be a narrow exercise in self-recrimination; only some of the letters address the endless cycle of generational conflict. What is more important is that youth define itself and that others listen. One letter writer, Suzanne Morse, a young academic who has studied how the media portrayed “Generation X,” pointed out that the media has too often talked about youth and too rarely to youth. “In other words,” she said, “it allowed the media to impose their perceptions of younger people on the younger generation without actually giving younger people a voice to define themselves.”

So here is a chance for the boomer generation, through the supple and democratic medium of the Internet, to hear the voices of those in their 20s, and perhaps to respond. They are angry words at times, baffled words, words of quiet despair and bitterness, but also words of resigned hope and proud perseverance.

One hopes some good may come of this, that some people, hearing these raw and honest words, will be inspired to work, to change, to keep listening. For it would be sad indeed if we, the generation of the “generation gap,” blithely changed places with our elders, learned no lessons from our war, and quietly became what we beheld.

– Cary Tennis

Dating

I’m 28. Hope that’s youthful enough for you.

Being in a relationship today is like walking into a hail of gunfire with no bulletproof vest. You take your life in your hands every day.

Condoms, condoms, condoms. Of course. Always.

You try to date guys your own age, but they really only want anonymous fuck bunnies. Fuck and run, fuck and run, fuck and run. I’m tired.

So you decide one day, “I’m only going to date rich older men. To hell with my neo-feminist ideals; bring on the sugar daddy! But every man over 40 who’s single with cash always says right before you have sex, “We need to talk.” Then he tells you he has herpes. (Thanks to the carefree ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, I guess.)

Plus the old guys always act like they are so much smarter than you. Well, genius, if you’re that fucking smart how come you didn’t know your wife was fucking the guy who built your patio? How’s that alimony treating you, asshole? Why can’t you keep it up? Why am I here?

If you let a guy pay your way, he will treat you like a prostitute and you will eventually feel like one.

So you date younger guys. Or at least you try. At least they want to have sex all the time. So that’s a bonus. Sort of. They have enthusiasm if anything, but it’s sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet at Denny’s. It wasn’t great, but at least the portions were large.

You find a long-term guy. Or so he says. He’s 31 and Jewish and his parents would give you both their kidneys if they could just marry this sucker off. He’s the last of his friends to be single. He wants to be in love with you. He tries. Only you don’t know it’s all an act. You take the conversion classes. You pick out your new Hebrew name. You wonder if you’ll have a boy or a girl first. You never see the signs that he’s a classic narcissist — an obsessive-compulsive anal-retentive control freak. You never stop to ask yourself why, despite everyone’s best efforts, he’s single at 31 and has been for ages. You never ask that question until he disappears for two days and then calls the police on you when you show up at his apartment to find out what’s going on.

Right, sorry. I didn’t realize that you couldn’t fit me in among your alphabetized CDs and color-coded slacks. Sorry for disturbing the order of your sad, lonely life with my new sheets, pillows and gifts. I didn’t mean to mess your life up by adding love to it. Motherfucker.

You eventually decide to stop calling severe psychological disorders “charming personality quirks” and take out an Internet personal ad. You remind yourself that you were the prom queen for christ’s sake; surely someone will want to date you. People used to like you, right? You like your work. You’re a size 2-4 depending on the time of the month. You get asked out lots, just not by people who aren’t alcoholics or drug addicts. You’re really excited when your in box fills up. Then it tops 100 in less than five days and it’s too much. You realize half these yahoos didn’t read your profile. They just looked at the picture. You just delete everything.

Then you adopt a dog and stow the gross of condoms behind the waffle iron you never use. You just give up. It’s not worth it. You’ll never be able to afford a house anyway. You’ll never be able to afford kids. You’ll certainly never see a Social Security check. You just pray that you die in your sleep sooner rather than later.

Wait!!!! Is that the phone? Maybe it’s him! My guy, my dream, my hope, my salvation … Nah, it’s probably just someone I owe money to.

Ah, youth. Wasted on the young, my ass.

— Katy Medders

Love and irony

One uninvited guest of the last 30 years is irony. Life today, as we all know, is constantly self-aware. “The Daily Show” has replaced the evening news. David Foster Wallace has replaced Allen Ginsberg. Reality TV has replaced sitcoms. Advertisement has replaced everything. Irony is anathema to love; it is its opposite. Irony takes a large world and makes it very small, conceals it within a turned phrase; love freezes the world, expands a point into the universe. Lou Reed, who has spanned our generations, sings that love is “turning time around.”

I have not been in love. So maybe love is not any of those things. Most of my friends my age (22, 23) have not been in love, either, even the ones who have been in ultracommitted, I can’t live without you type relationships. It is something, but it’s not love. Perhaps we’re holding out for something that isn’t there. In the meantime we date, date and date some more. Properly protected, there’s no harm in getting laid while waiting for The One to sway her hips in our direction. Maybe modern birth control reinforces this; condoms turn sex into a “yes, but” affair. But with all that sex, can a true love make herself heard? It worked for your generation.

Life since last September has not only been ironic, but also stained with the possibility of radical human evil. Unlike the hippies who begat us, I don’t think we have the confidence that we will change the world forever for the good, or even that this is possible. We have to think local. Italo Calvino writes of one way of escaping despair: “Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

The simple sentence “I love you” is the most powerful one in our language. It does not discriminate based on wealth, race or intelligence. Love is an unconditionally good thing, but the promise of it is a weapon, accessible to all. When I fall in love it will be with the fervor of a born again finding his Lord Almighty. Car commercials, budget cuts, half-caff lattes and existential loneliness can go screw themselves. Instead of irony and fear is certainty: this small thing, this love — I know, we know.

Of course, there are so many things in relationships between indifference and self-obliterating love, and not everything that is self-obliterating is love. Love may strike like a flash flood or may swell slowly over the course of years, but it will exist as long as we believe in it.

Fighting for it.

– Alexander P. Nyren

Beatlemania vs. Batmania

I think one of the key experiences in my cultural development as a child was sitting in my parents’ living room in 1989 at the age of 9, reading a story in the society section of Newsweek about the merchandising campaign behind that summer’s “Batman” movie. The writer had dubbed the craze “Batmania,” and it seemed to my somewhat naive 9-year-old mind that there were larger forces at work — perhaps I was mistaking commerce for something more profound.

Anyway, I wondered aloud to my father if this so-called Batmania could be something important, something to remember. I had an idea that each generation has defining events, and was there a chance that this one was mine? My father flatly replied, “No. Nothing will ever be as big as Beatlemania.” And that settled it.

I still think about that comment, years later. I think it still colors a lot of my perceptions. Dad was very specific: What would be bigger than Beatlemania? Nothing. Absolutely nothing that came out of my generation, no defining event, could ever hope to achieve the lasting significance of Beatlemania. I don’t know if Dad was consciously trying to perpetuate a sort of cultural imperialism of his generation, or if he was mistaking a personal reaction for larger social significance, or if he really was right: American culture being what it was in the early 1960s and before, no single event could ever have as much of an impact. I still wonder.

That’s what it’s felt like to me. There has always been this shadow hanging over my generation. This applies to any area of culture, from lifestyle to sex to relationships. I know other baby boomers and fortysomethings who have told me about the great sexual revolution of the ’60s, the complete accessibility to any kind of carnal pleasure and the total eradication of any kind of traditional value system that would inhibit such pursuits. Sex as metaphor for social revolution, I suppose. Today that seems impossible to me — unthinkable, really. My relationships with women have been very small in comparison. I certainly wouldn’t claim to speak for every man and woman born between 1970 and 1985, but as a 22-year-old male, I don’t sense that there’s any sense of history or global purpose or importance: It’s simply two people getting together and doing their best in a world that’s much, much bigger than both of them. I think the majority of my generation regards love and particularly sex as a completely personal act, with little or no political or cultural impact — that’s certainly how I view it. Perhaps that has led to some problems, particularly in regards to HIV/AIDS.

Regardless, it’s like sitting around listening to, say, Sleater-Kinney or the White Stripes. I truly believe that the music being made by these groups is the most important music in the world. But there’s that little nagging voice in the back of my head, cocking its eyebrow and saying, “How on earth do you think the White Stripes could possibly stack up against the Beatles?” And I don’t know how to answer that voice.

– Andy Sturdevant

Activism and idealism

I certainly don’t think your generation is anything like what your parents were like, though you do seem to have a vast repository of a particular brand of nostalgia that I’ll call “activist/idealist.” Just this weekend I debated my dad’s claims that people are growing up to be so much more superficial, disengaged and passionless than they used to be. He sounded like a cranky old man at the age of 47, except that he wasn’t bemoaning a decline in morals in the traditional sense, but a lack of spirited engagement with the world. He maintains the Internet and TV saturate us with so much that younger generations learn to passively accept these virtual realities as their own experience.

I’m 27, raised by parents who caught the tail end of the hippie era and have always been crazier than I am. Maybe that’s because they had me when they were 20 and divorced shortly thereafter, but it seems to me that they’re still trying to get their lives together, still trying to figure out what they want and how to be happy.

My dad always told me to experiment with life, with relationships, to do what makes me happy. He bought me my first bong, read me Richard Bach and Tolkien, and made furniture with fairies and flowers on it. My mom took another route and became a divorce lawyer, remarried and moved us to Connecticut. And now, neither has retirement savings or health insurance, one had cancer and still smokes, while the other has a host of new-age illnesses that no one can fix. I think of my parents as representative of the baby boom era, with their combination of passion, self-delusion, freedom and irresponsibility.

I say, as it has always been, there are many things both worse and better now, and it all balances out in the end. I may have a shorter attention span thanks to so much surfing on the Net, but I’m passionate and engaged and I’ve learned from my parents’ example — and the threat of AIDS and nuclear attack — to be strategic. Key rules I’ve lived by:

1) Experiment safely: Date people of different races and classes, but make sure they don’t trample over you.

2) Change jobs, but only when you’ve got another lined up or at least savings to see you through.

3) Look ahead for the breaking point in a relationship so you can leave first.

4) Pay off debt and put some away in a 401K.

5) Avoid musicians and artists at all costs unless it’s solely a one-night stand.

6) Try to change the world because it’s really messed up, but do it within the system or else you’ll burn out.

I fell in love with someone who balances me and makes me happy, not someone that sets me afire because I know that kind of passion is part delusion and always temporary. I’ve tamed my freedom a bit for the joys of a genuine commitment, but unfortunately, it hasn’t appeased that hunger you talked about, that unfillable spiritual emptiness.

I used to wait for the magic wardrobe/cairn/mirror to appear, the one that would take me to my real life in another reality, the one that would finally give me the sense of abiding comfort that I’d been missing. But then I thought about all the time I was wasting just waiting, and tried to follow the advice of spiritual texts that say the key to happiness is learning to appreciate what you have. It hasn’t really worked, but what else can you do?

In the end, I’m more like my parents than I’d like to be, and I feel sometimes like the parent/child role has gotten switched. They don’t have the answers either, and they’ve made a lot of mistakes, but they sure have had a lot of fun along the way.

– Rachel DuBois

AIDS and divorce

I’m not so very young, but I can tell you what it was like to become sexually active after the dawn of AIDS. I was born in 1975, and everyone my age wears a condom every single time. It’s expected, and the men don’t complain. In fact, many sexually active women from my generation never even tried hormonal birth control. If we need to use a condom anyway, why bother? Besides, the pill is way out of most college students’ budget. Sex without a condom (using the pill or a diaphragm) is considered a luxury built into long-term relationships. A discussion about switching birth control methods is a declaration of trust, and a commitment to stay together for at least another season.

Among my peer group, there is a growing positive attitude toward marrying young. Marriage doesn’t seem to carry the same shackles that it used to. Children of divorce grew up watching their fathers cook, clean and do laundry, and their mothers fix the toilet, change the oil and cut the grass. The idea that husbands and wives have different roles is a foreign notion to many people my age. My husband and I view marriage as a piece of paper that makes it easier to deal with other pieces of paper — specifically the rectangular green ones with pictures of presidents on them. We’ve saved thousands of them on car insurance and health insurance since the wedding. When you hear about people who got married in their early 20s, they don’t necessarily have “traditional” values. They may simply want to share the love, the dental and the 401k.

– Heather Wiatrowski

We hate you guys

OK, you asked. To begin with I will let you know that these days I don’t even consider myself that “young” anymore, being in my early 30s and having bought a house last year. However, I am obviously younger than you, and since you asked what you members of the ’60s generation look like to us younger folk, I will give you the perceptions of this one Gen-Xer, which I know from conversations with my peers is not an unusual opinion.

We HATE you guys.

We have spent our whole lives growing up being told how “important” everything that happened in the 60s was. We have had the remnants of your hippie culture shoved down our throats since birth. We have heard how “No generation ever celebrated being young the way mine did” repeated like a mantra to deny the fact that almost all of you didn’t actually do anything in the ’60s besides take some drugs (if you have ever seen the movie “Rivers Edge,” the scene where Ione Skye and Keanu Reeves are in school listening to their teacher talk about “the ’60s” pretty much sums it up).

Meanwhile you wander around looking like fools, doing anything to avoid feeling old. So yes, the answer to the questions “Do we look like doddering fools? Do we look like people who have not accepted our age?” is yes and yes. I really do have respect for the people who made significant cultural and political innovations in the ’60s; I just know that most of them actually did it in the early ’60s, then everyone jumped on the bandwagon after the hard stuff was done.

OK, I don’t want to pile on here or seem excessively hostile. I think that even if things did “quiet down” a little in the ’80s as far as drugs and sex are concerned, kids have been drugging and screwing just as much if not more since the ’60s as they did then. The perception that things were “wilder” back in the ’60s has more to do with the fact that it was a new kind of thing then combined with the unwillingness of the boomers to admit that they are old.

Anyway, that’s just the opinion of one soon-to-be 33-year-old.

– Jotham Stavely

Political activism

I’m 19 and in college. Speaking at a demonstration these days will not get you laid. It might get you looked at funny.

Up until last year, I thought my generation was a repeat of the ’80s — career-driven, self-interested. When Seattle happened in late 1999 I was 16, and that was something I found inspiring. It showed me that there were other people out there who cared about the direction of the world. I was involved in local activism stuff in New York City in high school, around issues like police brutality and the drug laws, but for my generation the ’60s is like some distant memory or dream where people had lives that were interconnected with history. Kids who care about issues have a tough time surviving with MTV around telling everyone to drink up and party hard.

The sexual revolution pretty much just left us with no idea what to do. No one “dates” anymore — you “hang out” and “hook up.” You know someone’s your boyfriend or girlfriend after you’ve hung out and hooked up with them for a while. Courtship is abolished, I guess.

Most girls nowadays don’t want to consider themselves feminists. They think it makes them seem pushy or shrill, I think. I’m a feminist even though I’m a guy, but that’s because I know enough to know there’s no contradiction.

After 9/11 I think there was some sense that our generation might be entering history, that we might have something to do all together. Unfortunately, that was thought of in pretty militaristic and apocalyptic terms. And since there hasn’t been a horrifying terrorist attack since then, the end-of-the-world sense of last year has pretty much gone. Things are sort of back to normal.

To me it seems like your generation stopped its war in Vietnam but then stopped short before changing society. That was the promise you didn’t follow through on and now we’ve got to pick up the pieces, but I’m not sure we can with all this mental pollution everywhere. It’s gonna be tough.

– Sam Hayim Brody

Wimpy

I wish I could say that being young and swingin’ in today’s world was a fabulous good time, and it damn well should be considering all the possibilities out there, but all I could think about when reading your questions was how wimpy my generation is. Not just when it comes to the pursuit of true love, but it seems in the pursuit of any and every dream.

There are just too many choices. As a child raised by multiple baby boomers who’ve held on strong to their own youth culture, I’m jealous of the freedom they experienced in breaking through the ceilings and rewriting all the rules. While I’m grateful that they’ve given me so many options in how and why and where to live my life, I can’t help but be resentful that now I have to consider whether I would rather sleep with women or men, with or without the black leather accoutrements. And if I choose not to pick a personal fetish, am I boring? I could be and do just about anything, and that thought leaves me paralyzed with indecision.

And I am not alone in this dilemma. It seems like all my peers are having the same difficulty. Off trying to do their own thing, they don’t know whether to stick with what they started with or try something new. We’re a generation of those annoying people at parties who are always looking around to see if maybe there’s more fun happening over there.

Since now we don’t have to get married for money or to bolster familial connections, we’re free to hop relationships for the rest of our lives. We don’t have to stay with one career. You’re as likely to hear about a virgin-till-marriage 25-year-old as you are to read about a 23-year-old who put himself through college as a male prostitute. There is no more national youth consensus on what we want to be. Those with even a mild interest in self-analysis, therefore, find ourselves always thinking, always wondering, always trying to define ourselves and be different.

I know I’m making huge generalizations. I know that confusion about one’s future or one’s love interest is not limited to my generation or to people under the age of 35. But to be honest, getting laid has never been my problem. Sex and relationships are definitely out there to be had. The problem lies in how we approach love and the making of it once we’re in the middle of it. We spend too much time worrying about where this hand goes or whether that girl is the one. The legacy of our beloved partying parents is that they gave us the opportunity to try everything. The challenge is to figure out what to do with the smorgasbord of deliciousness we’ve been presented with, without the structure the previous generations took such joy in smashing.

– Alayne Freidel

Grateful

He asked if they looked like doddering old fools. Doddering old fools, she repeated incredulously in her head. Like the generation that preceded his?

No, they only looked like doddering old fools when they worried about what they looked like. She remembered her ’60s radical boss, an intellectual who chose to take on his father’s tool-sharpening business. He only seemed old to her when he was concerned about the effect of the advancing years on his hipness.

Otherwise, she was grateful to his generation. Grateful for the progress they pushed for, the culture they cultivated, and especially for those who did not succumb to greedy, self-righteous Republicanism as their idealism faded away. And in a more frivolous vein, she was grateful to them for having enjoyed their youth. They enjoyed it so much that they extended it.

She was grateful that because of this generation that refused to get old, she would not be as restricted by her age as women once were. She could have her cake and eat it, too. She could wear blue jeans and a sexy short haircut at age 55, and this would not even be considered eccentric. She could look forward to the oncoming years, rather than blow out a single birthday candle with dread and resignation.

And she felt that maybe, as they aged, this generation that previously warned against trusting anyone over 30 would change the unhealthy American obsession with youth. Or maybe they would keep chasing after it and searching for it in pretty little bottles. She hoped they would celebrate their young hearts.

– Amanda Vassigh