Whatever happened to Generation X?

They raved through the 1990s on the path to a fairer, more tolerant world. Or so they thought. Now they are middle-aged and their liberal ideals have fallen out of fashion. But don’t write the (former) 24-hour party people off yet, says Tiffanie Darke

Last summer I took my team at work on an outing. I wanted to do something where we could all be ourselves, have a high old time and not think about the office. I couldn’t face the pub (hangover), so instead I chose Morning Gloryville, a dance party that happens once a month between 6.30 and 10.30 in the morning. My team thought I was mad. A rave, before work? “Come on,” I said, “it’s Danny Tenaglia! He’s flying in from Ibiza!”

You can’t imagine Morning Gloryville until you’ve been. Greeted at dawn by technicolour-winged creatures offering free hugs, coffee and raw cocoa snacks, the house music is insanely good, people bounce around spraying glitter guns, letting off klaxons and waving “One love” signs. Once inside, you have to join in the raving — otherwise you are the odd one out. There’s nothing for it, you have to jump, you have to let go, you have to reach out. Then everyone leaves and goes to work.

For those of us who grew up in the late 1980s and 1990s, rave is our homecoming. It’s infectious, extraordinary and familiar. Unlike clubs today, rave does not require you to truss yourself up like a vamp, rather you wear practical gear (trousers and trainers). You talk to everybody, you wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care, and you thrill in the moment. Back then, this happened in a field or a warehouse, and was often illegal — and yet it made the greatest sense. Clambering over walls and trekking through fields in the dark in search of booming sound systems, we created a network of like-minded individuals — strangers at the beginning of the night, but as the sun came up at dawn, you’d be best friends with the person dancing on the car roof next to you.

“We were doing nights called Trip and Sin at the Astoria,” says the London club DJ Nicky Holloway. “Everyone would empty out of the club in the morning and start dancing in the Centre Point fountain, singing songs and hugging each other. The police just stood there. They didn’t know what to make of it!”

Rave, fuelled as it was partly, but not wholly, by the dance drug ecstasy, equipped Generation X to rewrite the rulebook for society — peace, equality, love — and gave the generation who owned it the authority to refashion culture in the way we saw fit. When the authorities tried to shut it down with the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, it was an affirmation of how far removed youth was from the ruling party.

Not long after, the Tories were out, allowing Generation X and New Labour to usher in a new world order, one that mainstreamed liberal values, celebrated creativity and passion over money and greed; that championed communities without prejudice, wherever you might find them.

So where are Generation X now? All we hear about is millennials, those pesky digital natives with their lumberjack shirts and artisan coffee habits who are annoyingly entitled and totally overanxious. Or baby boomers, with their big fat final-salary pensions, who have decades of Saga holidays ahead. Not traditional cruises: boomers go wolf trekking in Eritrea and swipe right on silver Tinder. Generation X, commonly identified as those now between the ages of 35 and 55, sit between those two very different mindsets and monster demographic groups. We have a crucial part to play as this new world, fuelled by unpredictable politics and rapidly evolving technology, begins to take shape.

It was Douglas Coupland who first identified us. His 1991 novel, Generation X, portrayed me and my peers as a listless, directionless, cynical bunch of slackers who drifted from one McJob to the next in search of a thrill. Back then I was waitressing at Pizza Hut in Bournemouth, saving money to go backpacking round India before I went to university. Once abroad, I knew my money would go far and my experiences would be all m y own. (Well, mine and all the other thousands of backpackers shacked up beside me in the Lonely Planet hostels.) Together, we would live in tie-dye trousers, dance at full-moon parties, drink chai latte and buy some very dodgy drapes. Coupland’s book perfectly defined my life at the time.

Early to rise: raving at breakfast time at Morning Gloryville before going to work

That summer, KLF’s Last Train to Trancentral was playing on the radio, the Soviet Union was breaking up, Operation Desert Storm was coming to an end and Tim Berners-Lee quietly announced the World Wide Web project.

Those backpacking years — widely ridiculed now as “gap yahs” — were not just self-indulgent holidays for students to sit around smoking dope. They challenged a generation into thinking more globally, to break out of a conservative mindset. They launched the easyJet lifestyle, lastminute.com, the NY-Lon commute. We didn’t come back itching to make money and live the capitalist dream, instead we came back resolved to be culturally liberal and follow our dreams. The 1990s might have begun with a recession and a preoccupation with grunge, but out of that came one of the greatest pop-cultural decades of all time — Britpop, logomania, Paul Smith, Madchester, Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss, Marco Pierre White, the Turner prize, Loaded magazine, the Wonderbra, The Big Breakfast, Trainspotting, the Spice Girls — I could go on.

It was the decade when further education was still free and housing just about affordable, before mobile phones hit, (Generation Xers still remember a time before email — imagine that now, millennials). Youth movements were allowed to grow organically because culture wasn’t travelling at 1,000 trends per second. Instead we physically went places to meet up, swap hairstyles and be cool, whether it was a club or a record shop or a field or a street or a store. We didn’t connect on chatrooms or on WhatsApp groups. We did it face to face, in places where we met other people and exchanged ideas and felt our rebellion physically together. “Although Britpop made us cringe, we were just so lucky to live in this tiny country,” says Alex James, the bassist from Blur. “At the beginning of the Nineties I arrived in London for my first term at Goldsmiths art college. I’m getting out of my parents’ car with a guitar and Graham Coxon [Blur’s guitarist] is getting out of his parents’ car with a guitar and that was it — fasten your seatbelt! It was, and still is, the place where anything can happen.”

Once Tony Blair came to power, there was a palpable change in the way people felt — everything was exciting and full of possibility. It was the era of lads and ladettes — men who had figured a way to be modern and masculine (Baddiel and Skinner, the Gallaghers, Reeves and Mortimer), and women who thought feminism was done, so it was OK to swig from bottles and pole dance for fun. After all, at work we women were getting promoted: television, magazines and newspapers were proliferating all around us and our male bosses were forced to recognise that half their audience were women. No sooner did I get one job than I was offered another.

As one female ad exec put it to me: “All you had to do was turn up in trainers and talk about the club you went to the night before and they threw another pay rise at you.” Although as women we were mostly given “lifestyle” jobs, once you had a female features editor in the room, it became much more acceptable that you should have a female news editor, comment editor — or even editor. Rosie Boycott was the first to ascend, and when she came to edit the Daily Express in 1998, I looked around the newsroom and counted no fewer than 11 female section editors. Girl power, as five rather more famous women were saying at the time.

It hasn’t all turned out right, though, has it? Girl power went only so far. Here we are, 20 years later, still fighting a battle for equal pay, equal representation on boards and the right not to have to wear high heels at work. Ladettes and girl power did not defeat misogyny, feminism was not done. Generation X women dropped the ball. That Wonderbra poster seems positively offensive now.

We didn’t connect on chatrooms or WhatsApp — we did it face to face and felt our rebellion physically together

But those were heady days of economic independence for women. The freewheeling lifestyle peddled by shows like Sex and the City made us think it was OK to focus on our careers, put off marriage, spend our money on handbags and keep knocking back the cocktails. It left many of us broke (in one of the last episodes of SATC, Carrie realises she can’t buy her flat because all her money is invested in shoes). Worse, it also left many of us on the shelf — we did not apply the necessary focus to finding a long-term partner, or struggled with a field of men who didn’t find our independence that enticing.

And then, for some of us, came kids. As the “have it all” generation, we have become cannon fodder in the new 24/7 work culture — a daily struggle for work and family that terrifies younger women. As the millennial blogger Emma Gannon admits, the sight of a Generation X working mother makes her not want to have kids. She looks at us and just doesn’t want what we have. Have we really emancipated ourselves from the structures we so roundly rejected at the beginning of the Nineties, or are we just living in a new kind of cage?

How we engage with millennials now is paramount. As we crest the middle of our lives, Generation X has the conscience, the insight — and the experience. Unlike boomers, we are still working, still raising our kids and focused on the future. We could just roll over and give in to the elasticated waist (not our style), or we can regenerate. As the designer Alice Temperley says: “I’ve got to the point where I feel I’ve grown up. Where I realise what’s wrong and what’s right and what’s important. I’ve worked hard to get to this point and now I feel poised to take it to the next stage.”

The creativity we championed so much has had to make way for a new kid on the block — technology, and the millennials are just better at this than us. They have a lot to teach us. They are not scared by tech, rather they celebrate it, it fits seamlessly into their lives. What they don’t have is experience. They are widely mocked for not having any staying power, being overdemanding and placing a high priority on free food and beanbags. They don’t get that sometimes it can take decades to reach your career nirvana, that you have to suck up a certain amount of drudgery before you can start making an impact. As their managers, Generation X needs to understand that a raw economic deal and some dodgy all-must-have-prizes parenting techniques have made them like this. There’s no changing them, so how do we help them?

The work/life balance is now an enduring discussion, one where progress is being made. Paternity leave, flexible working and career “on and off ramps” are part of the conversation now. Every political and economic decision Generation X makes needs to play it forward for generations living in debt, unable to get on the housing ladder, living in an increasingly deteriorating environment — we cannot vote to protect our pensions (if indeed we get one), to ignore sustainability or not to be inventive in the way we imagine our and our kids’ futures. As Martha Lane Fox says: “I think we were culturally ambitious, but not politically. I’m not sure we had a sense of social purpose. We didn’t want to change the health service, or change governments. We were just, like, ‘Fuck Thatcher, here’s a new way of being.’ That is no longer enough — our ideas and our famously open minds need to find a new focus.”

But we do have what it takes. Generation X may not have had much of a plan other than ripping up the rulebook, but that has opened us up to spontaneity. We are ready for newness and change; it excites us. “If you’re anyone who’s been inspired by doing things in our generation, right now you need to make a step,” says the fitness guru Matt Roberts, who is in the throes of reinventing his business. “I think we all have three, four, five careers in us. And it’s exciting: identifying the expertise you’ve built up, where your knowledge has got you, how you can take that on.”

Unlike boomers, we embrace emotional intelligence — all that touchy-feely stuff on the dancefloor opened us up to talking about emotions; the famous “new age hippies” of the early 1990s delivered mindfulness, meditation and yoga techniques that are now used everywhere from schools to factory floors.

We are not as anxious as millennials, who were recently reported to be overwhemingly gloomy about the future. Chill out, guys — it’s not all bad. Sometimes you need to throw your hands up in the air. Sometimes you need to say, Lord, I just don’t care. The art of joy is a precious skill.

THE GEN X DECADE

• 1990 Kate Moss becomes an icon for a generation after appearing on the cover of the influential style magazine The Face in May and July
• 1991 Douglas Coupland publishes Generation X in March — the novel identifies a new “slacker generation” of advertising-averse cynics .
  In August the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee publicises his new project, the World Wide Web. Gen X is too busy raving to notice
• 1992 Up to 40,000 hedonists converge at Castlemorton Common, Worcs, for a week-long illegal rave in May — Gen X’s Woodstock moment
• 1994 Loaded magazine launches in May with the strapline “For men who should know better”. It would soon transpire that men really didn’t
• 1995 The budget airline easyJet launches in March, enabling Gen Xers to satisfy their wanderlust, — or at least get baked in Amsterdam
• 1996 “Choose life ...” Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting becomes the definitive Gen X movie in February
• 1997 Tony Blair is elected prime minister in May to the soundtrack of Things Can Only Get Better, by the rave-pop band D:Ream. Noel Gallagher takes cocaine in a Downing Street lavatory at a “Cool Britannia” party. “There was a strange array of people,” he later said. “It wasn’t cool”
• 1998 The entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox co-founds Lastminute.com at the peak of the dotcom bubble. The bubble bursts a year later — though Lastminute survives the crash. Hey, maybe there’s something in this website malarkey...

Now We Are 40: Whatever Happened to Generation X? by Tiffanie Darke is published on February 23 (HarperCollins £17)