Long before we had much life to look back on, North Americans my age knew that nostalgia was a sickness. It’s not that we were aware the term was coined to describe the crippling melancholia that overcame many 17th-century Swiss soldiers when war took them away from the bucolic mountain landscapes of home. It was that, being in our teens and 20s in the early 1990s, we had grown up in the penumbra of the great eclipsing nostalgia of the baby boomers, with their 1950s “Happy Days”; their 1960s (the Greatest Decade Ever Told); and their serial losses of innocence, via the Kennedys’ assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, etc. — a record of revirginization to rival any evangelical chastity-pledge campaign.

We bristled when we heard them wax self-congratulatory about ending segregation and war, even as they voted for politicians who would deregulate banks and invade Iraq (the first time). We resented their monopoly on cultural space, realizing that “boom” also described what their collective voice would always be, compared with our demographically feeble squeak. And when they did briefly notice us, in the Generation X media frenzy of the mid-1990s, it was only to reduce diverse people and experiences to catchwords like “slackers” and “grunge” and dismiss paralyzing economic and ecological anxiety as privileged extended-adolescent angst. (Which, granted, some of it was.)

If my generation had anything in common as a group (aside from AIDS-phobia: quoth Coolio, “ ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste,’ that was the slogan/But now it’s ’95 and it’s ‘Don’t forget the Trojan’ ”), I would say we were marked by two traits: our dislike of nostalgia and our irritation whenever our barely formed narratives were appropriated and marketed back at us. So it brings on something of an identity crisis to see Gen X’s formative years become part of the cycle of retro revivalism. How does an anti-nostalgic generation deal with the human reflex to sentimentalize its youth?

At first I shut my eyes to the slow reappearance of jean jackets, floral-print dresses, lace shirts and platform wedges. And I could dismiss as temporary flukes the recent reunions of foundational “indie” (then “alternative”) bands like Hole, Pavement and My Bloody Valentine. But denial waves a white flag when the list of acts touring this summer includes Third Eye Blind, Limp Bizkit, Alice in Chains, Faith No More and the Stone Temple Pilots — Lollapalooza gone county fair — not to mention the Backstreet Boys and New Kids on the Block, now merged into a supergroup, “NKOTBSB.” Meanwhile MTV is exhuming “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Pop-Up Video,” while Nickelodeon is offering a 1990s-themed block of late-night programming with old shows like “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” presumably to help herbally sautéed 20-somethings regress in giggly reminiscence.