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.

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.

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.

Though there never were enough of us to demand the undivided attention of advertisers and hitmakers, we have been happy in our little joint, serving from can till can’t astride the Sahara. We have been witnesses, watching and recalling. Not the children of the boomers, but the little brothers and little sisters. We do not believe what they believe but can imitate them if necessary. If I’m overly cautious with pronouns, for example, if I occasionally express sentiments that I do not believe, if I’m careful not to always say what I know—that the long arc of history does not in fact bend toward justice—that’s why. We watched them at play, studying them as you study an older sibling. They blew pot smoke in our faces at parties and called us “little man,” but we persisted. We could hear them, as we lay in bed, racing up and down the street in muscle cars. The boomers at leisure were pop culture, but it was still the old America at school and at home. Our teachers and parents had grown up in the 30s and 40s and 50s—the Silent Generation, Korean War vets who still spoke the language of exceptionalism, which does not mean we are better, just different. It might not be true, or might be, but it’s a story—we knew that. We knew that you choose your story or a story is chosen for you. The past is as unreal as the future, so why not invent one that makes sense, that gives you the illusion of being on a train moving down the track?

Members of Generation X carry this sensibility. It’s coded in their constitution, turns up in their posture and pose. Jeff Bezos, Michelle Obama, Matt Dillon, and John Leguizamo, born 1964. Chris Rock, born 1965. Kurt Cobain and Liz Phair, born 1967. Jay-Z, Cory Booker, and Patton Oswalt, born 1969. River Phoenix, Melissa McCarthy, and Beck, born 1970. Sofia Coppola and Marc Andreessen, born 1971. Seth McFarlane, Nas, and Dave Chappelle, born 1973. Leonardo DiCaprio and Derek Jeter, born 1974. Tiger Woods and Chelsea Handler, born 1975.

Our generational works of art, those monuments—many of them share this sensibility. It’s a kind of enough-already detachment, an exhaustion, an opting for comedy over morals, lessons, rules. And look how they stand up! How much newer and better those movies and books can seem than works made five or three years ago. Everyone can make their own list. Mine includes: Exile in Guyville, by Liz Phair; A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace (‘62). Everything by Quentin Tarantino (‘63). Ditto Wes Anderson (‘69), Richard Linklater (‘60), and Tina Fey (‘70). The key lyric—it can serve as a coda—opens the Nirvana song “Breed”: “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care . . .”

Each of these works was made for a different reason and under different circumstances, but each carries the same message: I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care; get it off, get it off, get it off; go away, go away, go away. Detachment, remove, disgust with the busy-handed do-goodism of the older brother in the peace shirt. History is big and we are small; grand projects end in ruin; sometimes the best you can do is have a drink—that’s what we know. And that we’re all going to die anyway. Think about that scene in Pulp Fiction: after a terrible night in which Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman, ‘70) nearly dies of an overdose—she ends up wild-eyed, a needle plunged into her heart—Vincent Vega (John Travolta, ‘54) walks toward her door, lingering to see if anything important or profound will be said. “What’s the takeaway?” the boomer asks—for this is the moment when you usually get the takeaway. Mia turns to Vincent but does not give him a lesson. She tells him a joke instead, a stupid joke. And that’s the takeaway—that there is no takeaway.

Irony and a keen sense of dread are what make Generation X the last great hope, with its belief that, even if you could tell other people what to say and what not to say, even if you could tell them how to live, even if you could enforce those rules through social pressure and public shaming, why would you want to? I mean, it’s just so uncool.

I never really believed the notion of a generation. If four people are born every second of every day, how can you have a generation? But I get it now. A generation is the creation of shared experiences, the things that happened, the things you all did and listened to and read and went through and, as important, the things that did not happen. We are the last generation to grow up with crappy video games, with actual arcades instead of quality home consoles. If you wanted to play, you had to leave the house and mix it up with the ruffians. That is, we are the last Americans to have the old-time childhood, wherein you were assigned a bully along with a homeroom teacher. Our childhood was closer to those of the 1950s than to whatever they’re doing today. It was coherent, hands-on, dirty, and fun.

I made it onto the plane just as the door was closing—this happened a few months ago. I found my seat next to a businessman who was as handsome as Cary Grant. He wore a beautiful suit and had a beautiful leather briefcase. His glasses were made by Armani. His hair was thick and dark and going gray at the temples, distinguished, and I realized, with a shock, that this man, this picture of elegant adulthood, was more than a decade younger than me, a member of another generation. He was working so furiously at his phone, concentrated and intense, that I craned over in hope of catching a phrase from whatever memo, launch plan, or prospectus he was hurrying to finish before the markets closed. What I saw shocked me. It wasn’t just that he was playing a video game but that in that game he was guiding a chimpanzee down a candy road. I stared at him and stared at him, but he did not notice. When the flight attendant told him to buckle his seat belt, he looked up. And the look on his face was one you see a lot now, blank and unfocused. A mole pulled out of a dark tunnel, yanked from a cheap and common dream.

I grew up outside Chicago. I went to one of the high schools where John Hughes set all of those iconic teen movies. I studied them as a religious scholar might study the Bible, searching for answers, clues. The Breakfast Club was not one of my favorites, but it was said to define my generation. In that movie, Hughes has a bit of dialogue that says more than he probably intended, which is the way with art. Now and then, you are telling the future without meaning to. It’s spoken by the teacher, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason, ‘39), the only adult with a major role in the movie other than the janitor, Carl (John Kapelos, ‘56). Vernon is talking to Carl and his words trouble me. It’s the truth of the sentiment and the fact that I actually identify with the heavy: “Now, this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night,” he says, “that when I get older these kids are gonna take care of me . . .”