Demographics are destiny. We grew up in the world and mind of the baby-boomers simply because there were so many of them. They were the biggest, easiest, most free-spending market the planet had ever known. What they wanted filled the shelves and what fills the shelves is our history. They wanted to dance so we had rock ‘n’ roll. They wanted to open their minds so we had LSD. They did not want to go to war so that was it for the draft. We will grow old in the world and mind of the millennials because there are even more of them. Because they don’t know what they want, the culture will be scrambled and the screens a never-ending scroll. They are not literally the children of the baby-boomers but might as well be—because here you have two vast generations, linking arms over our heads, akin in the certainty that what they want they will have, and that what they have is right and good.

The members of the in-between generation have moved through life squeezed fore and aft, with these tremendous populations pressing on either side, demanding we grow up and move away, or grow old and die—get out, delete your account, kill yourself. But it’s become clear to me that if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.

Just think of all the things that have come and gone in our lifetimes, all the would-be futures we watched age into obsolescence—CD, DVD, answering machine, Walkman, mixtape, MTV, video store, mall. There were still some rotary phones around in our childhood—now it’s nothing but virtual buttons.

Though much derided, members of my generation turn out to be something like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—we’ve seen everything and grown tired of history and all the fighting and so have opened our own little joint at the edge of the desert, the last outpost in a world gone mad, the last light in the last saloon on the darkest night of the year. It’s not those who stormed the beaches and won the war, nor the hula-hooped millions who followed, nor what we have coming out of the colleges now—it’s Generation X that will be called the greatest.

Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Anthony Michael Hall in 1985’s The Breakfast Club. Photograph from Universal Pictures/Everett Collection.

The philosophy of the boomers, their general outlook and disposition, which became our culture, is based on a misunderstanding. In the boomers, those born after World War II but before the Kennedy assassination—some of this is less about dates, which are in dispute, than about sensibility—you’re seeing a rebellion. They’d say it was against Richard Nixon, or the Vietnam War, or the conformity of the 1950s, or disco, but it was really against their parents, specifically their fathers. It was a rejection of bourgeois life, the man in his gray flannel suit, his suburbs and corporate hierarchy and commute, the simple pleasures of his seemingly unadventurous life. But the old man did not settle beneath the elms because he was boring or empty or plastic. He did it because, 10 years before you were born, he killed a German soldier with his bare hands in the woods. Many of the boomers I know believe their parents hid themselves from the action. In truth, those World War II fathers were neither hiding nor settling. They were seeking. Peace. Tranquility. They wanted to give their children a fantasy of stability not because they knew too little but because they’d seen too much. Their children read this quest as emptiness and went away before the fathers could transmute the secret wisdom, the ancient knowledge that allows a society to persist and a person to get through a Wednesday afternoon.

We are the last Americans to have the old-time childhood. It was coherent, hands-on, dirty, and fun.

In this way, the chain was broken, and the boomers went zooming into the chaos. Which explains the saving attitude of Generation X, those born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, say. We are a revolt against the boomers, a revolt against the revolt, a market correction, a restoration not of a power elite but of a philosophy. I always believed we had more in common with the poets haunting the taverns on 52nd Street at the end of the 30s than with the hippies at Woodstock. Cynical, wised up, sane. We’d seen what became of the big projects of the boomers as that earlier generation had seen what became of all the big social projects. As a result we could not stand to hear the Utopian talk of the boomers as we cannot stand to hear the Utopian talk of the millennials. We know that most people are rotten to the core, but some are good, and proceed accordingly.