No Future: A Gen X Postscript

We weren’t taught to plan for the future because no one believed we’d have one.

Not really. Not when every school drill was about ducking under desks while grown men in suits played nuclear chicken on the evening news. Not when Ronald Reagan joked about bombing Russia and we all laughed, sort of. Not when the Berlin Wall was still a scar on the map and Bush Sr. was selling war like it was a car commercial.

Gen X didn’t grow up with retirement plans. We grew up with fallout shelters, MTV, and the lingering smell of gasoline from the ‘70s. No one taught us about money because no one expected us to live long enough to worry about it. The system wasn’t designed for our survival—it was built on the assumption that we’d either assimilate or combust.

And a lot of us did.

I didn’t just quit night school—I ran away from home. I fled an abusive stepmother who turned every day into a psychological war zone. I didn’t understand my trauma at the time—I just knew I had to get out or I wouldn’t survive. I left behind any illusion of a “normal” life and crashed hard into the only thing that ever felt real: music.

The bands, the late nights, the shitty garages and hand-me-down amps—that scene wasn’t just rebellion, it was refuge. I found something that looked suspiciously like love and family among my peers. Messy, chaotic, loud—but warm in a way nothing in my childhood had ever been. Of course I was drawn to it. That world didn’t demand I explain myself. It just handed me a guitar and said, “Play.”

And somehow, against all odds and with more hustle than stability, I got myself into music school. And graduated. That’s the part that still stuns me—I was running on fumes, trauma, and instinct, but I made it through. No trust fund, no roadmap, just raw survival and a backbeat.

Then I got good at it.

I became successful—booking bands, running clubs, building scenes. The Sunset Strip, East LA, underground joints and velvet-rope havens. I figured, like a lot of us do, that I was building toward something. Someday I’d own my own bar. That would be my safety net, my retirement plan.

And for a while, I did. I made it happen. I owned a bar, ran events, became the kingmaker of my own little nightlife kingdom.

But it didn’t work out that way.

You already know how that story ends.

Now add queerness to the mix.

Any part of me that leaned femme, that felt out of place in a boy’s body, that wanted anything outside the hetero-factory blueprint—had to be buried so deep I nearly lost it forever. I grew up in a conservative town in Michigan where the word “queer” was still a slur and “coming out” was something you did after you got the shit kicked out of you. We didn’t have the internet. No Reddit threads, no Instagram role models, no “It Gets Better.” Just a suffocating silence and a wall of cultural shame so thick it could drown a generation.

And that silence didn’t stop at gender or sexuality. We had no map for mental health, no guidance for trauma, no language for disability or grief or burnout. Just a collective shrug from the adults in charge and a growing list of things we weren’t supposed to talk about.

Now I’m in my 50s. Disabled. Sick after years of grinding through chronic illness that doctors still argue about. Not just a long COVID case, but a casualty of a society that still thinks rest is weakness and pain should be hidden. I didn’t crash because I was reckless—I crashed because the scaffolding that should’ve caught me was never there. We built lives out of duct tape and eyeliner, trying to outrun the quiet terror that everything could end tomorrow.

And now, in the age of AI and rent-gouging and disappearing social safety nets, the future’s being stolen from us again. But this time it’s not the bomb—it’s the algorithm. It’s the bots taking our jobs, the hedge funds buying our homes, the apps rewriting our identities. Gen X was raised for annihilation and ended up caught between analog ghosts and digital overlords.

Here’s the brutal math:

60% of Gen X has no retirement. No pension, no plan. We are not set up to age—we’re set up to disappear quietly, one overdraft or eviction at a time.

So here I am. Still here. No pension. No savings. Just stories. Stories I’ve been dragging like a trunk of haunted souvenirs from one broken promise to the next. And now, with time stretched out like a hallway with no doors, I’m left asking how the hell I got here—and how many others are stranded in the same damn corridor.

This isn’t an excuse.

It’s an autopsy of a generation that was handed nihilism in a lunchbox and told to “make something of yourself.”

Some of us made art.

Some of us made noise.

Some of us barely made it.

But we did make it.

And now we’re telling the truth.