What's Eating Generation X?
We like to celebrate our status as "latchkey kids", but the neglect it signified continues to have profound psychological consequences.
This piece isn’t on the most uplifting of themes, and I’ve been putting off writing it for a while. But I think it follows pretty naturally from the last dispatch, and it is important to talk about, so it’s probably time to get to it. We’ll get back to more fun stuff later this week — ap
A FEW YEARS AGO, I was driving once again down the 401 from Montreal to Toronto. It is a tremendously boring drive, and on this occasion it was saved only by my car radio’s ability to pick up The Edge 102.1 just as the station launched into a countdown of the Top Twenty Grunge Hits. As I whiled away the kilometers humming along to the sounds of the 1990s, I was struck by just how nihilistic and gloomy so much of the music was. I was also struck by how many of the musicians I had been listening to were dead. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon, Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, Doug Hopkins of the Gin Blossoms, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Scott Weiland of STP, Chester Bennington of Linkin Park… on it went, all of them gone, the direct result of either suicide or drug overdose.
As the Huffington Post put it when Chris Cornell died, suicide and death by drug overdose is sadly familiar to Gen Xers. The list includes a plenty of musicians, but also actors such as River Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Corey Haim, Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy, Anna Nicole Smith and plenty of others. And then there is David Foster Wallace, probably the single most influential Gen X writer, who hanged himself in 2008 after fighting depression for decades.
It’s hard to know exactly how to parse this — it’s always dangerous to draw any broad conclusions based on the self-destructive lifestyles of celebrities, especially rock stars. But what is definitely true is that when Kurt Cobain killed himself in April 1994, it was quickly interpreted by many as the quintessential Gen X act of rebellion. As one writer put it, “Self-destruction is to Generation X what playing chicken was to '50s rockers, what taking hard-core drugs was to flower children. It's the ultimate rebellion in a world of youth culture where the forms of rebellion have been exhausted.” On this analysis, suicide is just what happens when you take the Gen X worldview to its logical conclusion.
We have explored the elements of that worldview already in this newsletter, notably here and here, but I’ve been avoiding the argument about suicide being the logical consequence. But unfortunately, it does seem that suicide rates are higher amongst members of Gen X, in a manner that suggests it is an actual generational characteristic, and not just a cohort effect.
In 1897, the sociologist Emile Durkheim published his book Suicide, which documented a robust fact that held steady from the beginning of the 19th century. Across almost all societies, suicide rates were much larger for adults aged 25-64 than for youth (15-24), while suicide rates for the elderly (age 65 and up) were much higher than for adults. The explanation for this also seemed straightforward: the young have the most life to look forward to, and also the least knowledge about how their lives will turn out.
That monotonic relationship started to fail around 1950. In the United States between 1950 and 1990, suicide rates for youth tripled, while the comparable rate for adults dropped by seven percent and for the elderly it fell by 30 percent. By the mid-Nineties, suicide was the second or third leading cause of death for youth across the countries of the Anglosphere and Western Europe, and in 2004, an Australian newspaper described Gen X as “the suicide generation.” But what is interesting — and somewhat disturbing — is that in many jurisdictions that trend continued even as Gen X moved into middle age. Far from mellowing out, from 1999 to 2017, members of Gen X consistently showed higher rates of suicide compared to other cohorts, while a 2019 American study lamented rising rates of despair amongst adults entering middle age.
Just why Gen X is so morose, and why it so often manifests itself in self-harm, is hard to know, though in many cases the spike in suicide overlaps with the rise in the use of opioids. That is, those born in the 1960s and 1970s continue to be the age group with the highest number of deaths attributable to suicide or drug overdose. But that just invites the question of what is eating Gen Xers in the first place.
When it comes to suicide, it is important to distinguish between “successful” suicide versus suicide attempts, because they are different phenomena. Many attempts, in particular amongst youth, can be best understood not as a desire to end one’s life so much as a strategic action designed to exercise some sort of control over peers, their parents or other adults. There are also crucial demographic and gender-based differences: to give just one example, the suicide rate in Nunavut is ten times that of the general Canadian rate. And while women attempt suicide 50 per cent more often than men, they “succeed” only one sixth as often. But in sheer numbers, something around 70 per cent of those who take their own lives are white males.
There have been a lot of attempts at explaining just what triggered the rise in suicide rates across the developed world in the 80s and 90s, and frequently cited factors include Robert Putnam-style “bowling alone” elements such as the rise of individualism and the decline in community and other forms of social capital. It has also been blamed on structural changes in the economy, the rise of consumerism, and the decline of meaningful work in the age of globalization. But an important paper published in 2001 by the Harvard economists David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, along with the psychiatrist and Boston University professor Karen Norberg, zeroed in on a narrower possible cause: divorce rates.
When it comes to suicide attempts, they found clear evidence for a “strategic” model arising out of a desire to punish or control others, especially parents, which is exacerbated by social contagion type effects. For completed (that is, “successful”) suicides, they found mixed evidence for both social contagion as well as economic factors. But by far “the most important of these variables is the female divorce rate. In areas where more women are divorced, youth suicides are greater. This effect is large; if one takes the increase in divorce rates over time in consideration, one can explain as much as two-thirds of the increase in youth suicide.”
How the causal path might work here will be left to the reader to ponder. But if this explanation does hold, there is a bit of good news to be found. In Canada, the divorce rate started to rise in the mid 1970s, spiking to an all-time high after some legal reforms in 1986, before levelling off and beginning to drop sharply in 2005, to the point where it is now back to 1975 rates. Divorce rates in the U.S. show a similar pattern, peaking slightly earlier in 1980, but falling to a 50-year low in 2019.
This is probably not the whole story. But it does suggest that one of the big bragging points of Generation X, namely that we were “latchkey kids” who grew up resilient and self-reliant, free of adult supervision, is actually a bit of a fraud. It might very well have done an enormous amount of psychological damage, much of which is still with us.
Help is available
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, please call 9-1-1.
Help is available 24/7 for suicide prevention and mental health. Here are some resources:
Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 (or text 45645 from 4pm to midnight ET)
For Quebec residents: 1-866-APPELLE (277-3553)
Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868 or text CONNECT to 686868
Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous peoples: 1-855-242-3310
Trans Lifeline: 1-877-330-6366
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Also, I just want to say that this Substack is excellent. I love the analysis and storytelling re: our generation. It is so well done - and not an easy thing to do, to weave together various cultural elements into a coherent and accurate analysis a la Klosterman. Few can do it well. But this has been spot-on across all posts, and with some good humour and nostalgia to boot
At my 13 year-old son’s request, I was making him Spotify playlists of the “top songs” of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. For my own benefit, I kept going to the 90’s and beyond. I noted then the increasingly dark progression in mainstream music over this period. When I hit the 90’s I too was struck by the abrupt shift to bleak and “angsty” subject matter and tone of much of that era’s music.
I also proudly wear a t-shirt that proclaims us GenXers as “raised on hose water and neglect”. It rings differently now.
Great read.