Generation X: The Last Survivors of a Dangerous, Unsupervised Childhood

Tammy Landsiedel
Mar 9, 2025
3 min read

If you were born after 1980, let me just warn you now: you’re probably going to be offended. But that’s fine—we’re used to people being offended by everything these days. Meanwhile, Gen X spent our entire childhood dodging actual death traps, only to grow up and watch younger generations lose their minds over unheated oat milk and the trauma of being told ‘no.’

So, welcome to Generation X: the world of feral children, unmonitored chaos, and absolutely no sympathy for your emotional distress. If you fall down, walk it off. If you’re bleeding, blow on it. If you’re looking for someone to care, look elsewhere.

We Were 30 at 10, and We’re Still 30 at 50

While other generations got to experience a gradual transition into adulthood, Gen X had their childhoods replaced with a crash course in self-sufficiency.

By age 10, we were:

Cooking our own food (and by food, I mean SpaghettiOs and grilled cheese cooked directly on a burner).
Riding our bikes 10 km away from home with no helmet, no phone, and no idea when we’d be back.

And now? We’re still acting 30 in our 50s, mostly because we’re too cynical to act our age and too tired to care.

The Childhood Olympics: A Series of Death-Defying Feats

We didn’t just survive childhood—we barely escaped it alive.

Wooden spoons? Not just a cooking utensil, but a disciplinary device.
Lead paint? Definitely chipped off a windowsill and possibly ingested.
Blistering metal slides? If you made it to the bottom without third-degree burns, you weren’t doing it right.
Minimal adult supervision? We spent more time unsupervised than most of today’s kids will in their entire lives.
No car seat, no seatbelt? The backseat was a lawless space, but if you got the bed of the pickup, you won.
Garden hose drinking? Our version of filtered water. Extra minerals included.

Surviving childhood was basically training for the Hunger Games, except no one called it that because we didn’t romanticize trauma—we just got over it.

The Anxiety of Calling a Friend’s House

Forget social media DMs, text messages, or FaceTime—if you wanted to talk to a friend, you had to call their actual house.

The fear was real.

There was a 50/50 chance their dad would answer.
You had to politely ask if your friend was home, which involved speaking in a clear, adult-like manner so you didn’t sound like a complete idiot.
If the answer was “No”, you had no choice but to accept it and hang up in shame.

And if someone was on the phone when you called? A busy signal. No voicemail. No callback. Just pure uncertainty and regret.

Feral Kids, Built Different

Today’s youth require accommodations for things we didn’t even know existed. Meanwhile, Gen X? We couldn’t afford to be delicate.

Immune to everything (including common sense).
Older than Google. (That’s right, we used encyclopedias. Like savages.)
Fought in real life. If you had a problem, you handled it behind the school, not behind a keyboard.
Not allergic to gluten. Our diets consisted of Kool-Aid, processed cheese, and whatever we found in the fridge.
No safe spaces. If you cried, someone told you to ‘suck it up.’
No participation awards. If you lost, you just lost. No one pretended you were special.
Raised on mix tapes and VHS. If you wanted to hear your favorite song, you waited for it on the radio and recorded it with terrible quality.
Not the bigger person. If someone wronged us, we held grudges like Olympic champions.

Raised by Chaos, Conditioned by Trauma

It’s no wonder Gen X is deeply cynical and generally unimpressed by life. We didn’t just live through major world events; we watched the world repeatedly fall apart in real-time.

The fall of the Berlin Wall. We saw the end of an era, back when history wasn’t rewritten for the internet.
Columbine. The first time we realized school could actually be dangerous.
The Oklahoma City Bombing. A reminder that the world wasn’t safe, and no one was coming to protect us.
After-school specials. These had us convinced we were seconds away from being kidnapped, addicted to drugs, or pregnant at 14.

We weren’t just paranoid—we were trained to expect the worst.

Final Thoughts: We’re Not Mad, We’re Just… Unimpressed

At the end of the day, Gen X doesn’t care if you cancel us, dislike us, or try to ‘educate’ us on why everything we say is problematic. We’re too old, too jaded, and too stubborn to change now.