I know what you’re hoping for, because it’s what I would hope for when clicking this;
A powerful piece on why Gen X is a badass generation who should strap on their doc Martens and save the world.

Has already been written!
Here it is:
Five Gen X values from the ’90s that can save today’s world

The rest is just my more personal grappling with it.
So be prepared to be disappointed, as I’m sure if you’re Gen X, you’re well-accustomed to.

For almost 20 years I wrote diaries under this penname, until I finally cut the chord and quit, last month. And I find myself wondering where I am, where I have been, and what has changed.

20 Years further, and the answer is, of course, a lot.
We were living in a totally different time back then, and even if I compare it to 2010, the year I started writing online, the difference is stark.

Both the internet as well as the real life world, with its surveillance and facial recognition software, are spaces where your should present your most-guarded self, or suffer the consequences.

In the calm no-longer-diary-writing brought me, the peace of no longer living inside the bubble of my own writing, I find myself looking for answers.

Who was I before I became a writer?
Does my youth in the 80s and my twenties in the 90s;
Does it provide answers?

What was its mindset that protected me from alienation, for decades?

This tiny post has been taking me hours.. I keep changing it, because I barely know the right questions to ask let alone knowing any answers.

But I keep coming back to our whole lives, and therefor our Happiness, having been rooted in privacy.

BMX biking, playing records in your room, a secret club in the basement and your first kiss, all came with a safety that stopped existing a long time ago.
We were anonymous to those we did not know and even when someone did know your name, they still did not know anything.

Can the generation that alchemized neglect into freedom, ever get used to the  era of digital surveillance?
Or should we all turn our backs on it, and move off grid?

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Harteveld 2025*
Are 2200 characters, or less.
The name is inspired by the book Fretz 2025 by Johan Fretz and asterisk by the 2025 movie Thunderbolts*