Gen X in a Box

The Only Generation That Knows the World Before and After the Internet

Just a few days after the purchase of my first house, my dad showed up unannounced, happily deposited seven boxes on our front porch, and then drove off with a wave. Since I didn’t get around to buying my first house until I was aged 38, he was mighty pleased to clear out their storage space for their own junk.

Those boxes were transferred to the attic of my first house, where they sat unopened for seven years. Then we moved them to our current house, where they sat in our basement for another twelve years. Last month, our hot water heater burst turning that corner of the basement into swamp land. Considering the amount of junk down there, it was remarkable how little was actually trashed.

One of those teenage memory boxes was too close to the boiler, but I was able to scoop out its contents from the sodden box in time. Inside I found notes from friends, transcripts, letters, and other assorted important things that I had collected during the 1980s, that period between high school and the early grad school years.

I’m sorting out all those papers on a large folding table, giving letters back to friends and tossing almost everything. I’m also feeling nostalgic for that time before the Internet where there was some permanence to words and a physicality to our memories. Gen-Xers were young enough when the Internet happened to become digitally fluent, but were old enough to know a world without cellphones, email, and social media. We straddled that line between the past and the future, and probably experienced the best of both.

Most of the items in this particular box are letters, cards and notes. It’s all got to go. It’s Swedish Death Cleaning time.

The letters are going back to the original correspondents. I’m actually still friends with about most of these letter writers, thanks to Facebook. Our pre-Internet friendships were maintained by connecting again in the early 2000s when everyone got Facebook accounts.

I’m sorting those letters into piles by author without re-reading them. We were all idiots back in our 20s, so I don’t have any interest in revisiting the details of our lives back then. But they might, so all those letters will be sent out in big manilla envelopes next week.

One of those friends was killed in college in the Pan Am 103 flight in Lockerbie Scotland. I’m not sure if I’ll send those letters back to her mom and just burn them.

My parents wrote me letters when I was in college, too. We only talked on the phone once a week, because phone calls cost money. But taking a quick scan through the letters, neither parents was the chatty sort. Dad sent me clippings on Walker Percy and Hannah Arendt. Mom sent me checks and reminders to do my taxes. Any real correspondence from home came from sister; she’s going to get a towering stack of old letters next week.

Not only did my parents not hear from me regularly, they also had no idea where I was and what I was doing most of the time. I travelled around Europe for six weeks one summer, without them having any real knowledge of our specific locations on a day to day basis. We weren’t supervised by a school or special program. It was just me and a couple of friends with our backpacks roaming around with a Eurorail pass.

Am I glad that I can contact my kids every day and know exactly where they are? Yes. Did I really enjoy my independence? Yes. Do I recognize that contradiction? Yes.

Back in high school, girls corresponded to each other during math class with notes that were tossed back and forth when the teacher’s back was turned. I actually saved hundreds of those little scraps of paper. The contents were all about boys and the weekend party situation. “OMG. He TALKED with you at lunchtime. You are SO lucky!!!!” After a quick glance at those masterpieces, they’re all getting tossed in the garbage.

These notes are identical to today’s texts. Teenage girls never change, but now they have more tools at their disposal. Social media and cellphones would have been my crack. I would overanalyzed every classmate’s instagram and gushed into their comment section. I’m so glad that I was born twenty years too late.

Do most parents today think that they had better childhoods than their kids? Is that normal?

And then there are just some wonderful random things in the box, too. Like a dot matrix print-out of my college schedule, a magazine article about Matthew Broderick, free tickets to dance clubs in NYC, a conference badge from my first job, and early pay stub ($475!).

While it was amusing to read my old notes and letters, this box and its six cousins will get reduced to a very small pile of essential items soon. The past is the past. Matthew Broderick is grey, and my high school crushes are bald. To the dumpster, it must go. When I die, I hope that my crap doesn’t occupy too much space.

Another benefit of modernity is that we can take pictures of the things that we love, rather than creating boxes of stuff. There’s something so neat about having all records of our lives reduced to small external 4 terabyte external drive. The rest of me is spread all over the Internet on the mainframes of Substack, Facebook, WordPress, and more. If my kids ever miss me, they’ll find me here.

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