GenX on the Internet: An AARP Continuing Education Module

Totally not posed. The duck, the llama, and the muppet are silent. They are judging, though. They are absolutely judging.

I never thought I’d see the day there were AI Lego Iranian propaganda rap videos.

And yet. Here we are. Posting through it.

Let’s get something out of the way first: GenX does not have a technology problem. I need you to understand this before we go any further. We are the people who were human remote controls. We went to our friend Terri’s house to watch MTV because her family was the first on the block to get cable. We watched every show on the same night, at the same time, with zero possibility of spoilers because there was no mechanism by which spoilers could exist. We knew the 10pm PSA not as a cultural reference but as a lived experience — it’s 10pm, do you know where your children are — and the answer was frequently no, because we were roving gangs of unsupervised children exploring places our parents would have cringed about, except they were also the ones who let us rove, so.

We had rotary phones. Then push button phones. Then our own line. Then a modem on that line. Then a dedicated line for the modem because someone needed to make a call. Then pagers. Then mobile phones the size and weight of a decorative brick with buttons so small they required the focused attention of a jeweler. Those became flip phones, which somehow mated with a PDA — and I apologize because that image is now in my brain and I’m bringing you with me — to become the iPhone. We had mimeographs and copiers and faxes and scanners and then machines that were all of those things simultaneously and we just adapted, every single time, because adaptation was the only option on the table.

I had a Sega. Then an Xbox because my son wanted to be Master Chief. I have a LiveJournal somewhere on the internet that I am praying has been quietly composted, because it absolutely reeks of the tech libertarian influence of my early career and we don’t need to excavate that.

So when the whippersnappers suggest that GenX doesn’t understand technology, I have to laugh. Maybe even guffaw. We didn’t just witness the evolution — we lived every mutation of it in real time with no tutorial and no choice but to keep up.

Which makes it deeply funny that social media is the thing that’s getting me.

Not the technology part. I can post. I can take pictures of my food. I have followers. I share my Eric the Grownup moments and my ubiquitous #BeakertheCat content and I get likes and I understand the basic mechanics of the thing. I never duckfaced. You have to draw the line somewhere.

The part that’s getting me is the promotion. The performance of it. The pick-me girl energy required to stand in front of a camera and say: look at this thing I made, please like it, please share it, please buy it. That part is uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the fact that I was raised in a generation that expressed its feelings through ironic detachment and considered sincerity slightly embarrassing.

And yet here I am. Making nail polish in a Houston loft and trying to get strangers on TikTok to care about it while competing with AI slop and people who apparently TikTok their way out of the womb. The algorithm changes before I’ve learned there is one. The tools — Canva, CapCut, PaddyPost, and whatever launched this morning that I haven’t heard of yet — multiply and mutate. Planned spontaneity, which is the actual job description of social media content creation, is a circle of hell Dante never quite prepared us for.

Here is what I want: to take my time. To do it right. To make something I’m proud of before I put it in front of people. This is also, unfortunately, completely incompatible with the requirement that it be right now, posted immediately, while the sound is still trending and the moment is still alive.

I’m working on it. I am. I’m taking the planned spontaneous pictures and the videos and I’m learning the tools and building the rhythm. I want to do this. I even love the learning of it, genuinely, because of course I do — I’m GenX, adapting to new technology is basically a personality trait at this point.

But I will fall on my ass doing this. That is inevitable. Mostly it won’t be on camera, because GenX.

I really admire the GenX influencers who are fully on camera, selling their thing, going on their tours, being magnificently, publicly themselves. It looks fun. It also looks terrifying. I’ll get there. I always do.

In the meantime: forgive the learning curve. Stick around anyway. We’re making weird, small-batch, handmade nail polish and occasionally saying true things about what it’s actually like to build something from scratch when you’re in your fifties and the internet is a moving target and there are, inexplicably, AI Lego Iranian propaganda rap videos to contend with.

It’s fine. Everything is fine.

She says, posting this from a laptop because typing tomes on a phone with these nails is genuinely impossible and also I’m not an animal.