It is a strange thing to admit, but I am getting old.
Retirement is no longer some distant abstraction lurking beyond the horizon, a problem for another version of myself living in another age. It stands much closer now, waiting patiently in the shadows like a villain at the end of a dark alley. And with age comes an unexpected companion: perspective.
I belong to Generation X, and among that tribe I sit closer to the front than the back. We were known by another name as well: the latchkey generation.
It sounds almost romantic now. It wasn’t.
We grew up in a world that offered material security but precious little else. We did not starve. We were not abandoned to genuine destitution. There was food on the table, clothes in the closet, and a roof overhead. The basics were covered.
Beyond that, however, the world largely shrugged and left us to our own devices.
There was no endless stream of entertainment. No social media algorithms competing for our attention. No smartphones. No carefully curated childhoods supervised by armies of anxious adults. No permanent emotional support infrastructure standing by to rescue us from boredom, discomfort, disappointment, or failure.
We were bored.
Spectacularly bored.
The kind of boredom that modern society treats as a medical emergency.
And because we were bored, we built things.
Not always physical things. Sometimes it was treehouses. Sometimes it was bicycles modified beyond recognition. Sometimes it was entire imaginary kingdoms constructed out of little more than sticks, dirt, and stubbornness.
But more importantly, we built inner worlds.
We learned to entertain ourselves because nobody else was coming to do it for us.
We learned to solve our own problems because nobody else particularly cared to solve them.
We learned resilience not because somebody taught it in a seminar but because reality demanded payment up front.
The strange irony is that we grew up during an era of growing prosperity. Materially speaking, many of us had more than our parents. Yet compared to today, we had almost nothing.
No constant validation.
No endless reassurance.
No permanent supervision.
No protective bubble.
Just freedom.
Raw, unfiltered freedom.
And freedom comes with scratches, bruises, mistakes, humiliation, failure, and the occasional spectacular disaster. Yet those experiences are precisely what forge adults.
We were too young to shape the outer world. That world belonged to the Boomers, who held every lever of power. Then, before our generation ever fully consolidated influence, newer generations arrived and seized much of the cultural spotlight.
So we built elsewhere.
We built inside ourselves.
We developed private landscapes that no institution could regulate and no committee could redesign.
And one thing we largely did not possess was fear.
Not because we were braver than other generations.
Not because we were wiser.
But because fear had not yet become the dominant currency of public life.
Today fear is everywhere.
Fear of words.
Fear of opinions.
Fear of exclusion.
Fear of social judgment.
Fear of economic uncertainty.
Fear of environmental catastrophe.
Fear of saying the wrong thing.
Fear of thinking the wrong thing.
Fear of not belonging.
Fear of belonging to the wrong group.
Fear has become a growth industry.
Entire professions now exist to manufacture it, amplify it, monetize it, and distribute it.
The modern citizen is bombarded from morning until night with warnings, alerts, emergencies, crises, catastrophes, and apocalyptic predictions. Every day carries a fresh reason to panic. Every news cycle introduces a new monster lurking beneath the bed.
And because fear is profitable, there is never any shortage of suppliers.
The generations that followed us inherited vastly more comfort than we did.
They inherited better technology.
Better medicine.
Greater abundance.
More convenience than any humans in history.
And yet many of them seem burdened by something we largely escaped.
Permanent anxiety.
The more prosperous society became, the more fragile it seemed to grow.
The safer life became, the more danger people appeared to perceive.
The richer the world became, the poorer its emotional resilience often seemed.
That is not a criticism.
It is an observation.
Humans were never designed to live in perpetual comfort.
We are creatures shaped by friction.
Remove enough friction and something odd begins to happen.
The imagination turns inward.
Threats become abstract.
Dangers become symbolic.
Monsters become psychological.
The mind starts manufacturing problems to replace those reality has kindly removed.
Fear rushes in to occupy the vacuum.
I sometimes think that the greatest luxury any civilization can provide is not wealth but the opportunity to be afraid of things that are not immediately trying to kill you.
That luxury is remarkably expensive.
And like most luxuries, it eventually creates its own problems.
Perhaps that is why every prosperous civilization seems to develop strange obsessions before reality inevitably reminds it of the rules.
History has always been remarkably efficient at administering such reminders.
The generations before us endured depression, war, occupation, reconstruction, scarcity, and uncertainty on a scale most modern citizens struggle to imagine.
Those experiences forged them.
The generations after us inherited the fruits of that labor.
Now, slowly but unmistakably, reality is returning to collect unpaid bills.
Economic pressure.
Political instability.
Institutional decay.
Declining trust.
Rising costs.
Shrinking certainty.
The comfortable assumptions of recent decades are beginning to wobble.
And with them, many of the fears that dominated public discourse may prove surprisingly fragile.
Because reality has a peculiar talent.
It has a habit of pushing imaginary fears aside when real ones arrive.
That process is rarely pleasant.
It can be ugly.
Painful.
Chaotic.
But it is also clarifying.
The world has not become less dangerous.
It has simply remembered that consequences exist.
And consequences are powerful teachers.
Perhaps that is why I find myself strangely grateful for growing up with less.
Less supervision.
Less entertainment.
Less comfort.
Less certainty.
Less protection.
Because having little taught us something valuable.
It taught us that fear is not the default state of existence.
It taught us that boredom can be productive.
It taught us that resilience is not something you purchase.
It taught us that confidence emerges from experience, not affirmation.
And most importantly, it taught us that freedom and discomfort are inseparable companions.
The generations that come after us will learn their own lessons.
Every generation does.
Reality always makes sure of that.
But if there is one thing I am grateful for, it is this:
We had very little.
And because we had very little, we learned not to fear losing much.
That may have been the greatest gift of all.
Keep the comforts.
Keep the distractions.
Keep the endless reassurances.
Keep the carefully manufactured fears.
I will keep something rarer.
The memory of a time when boredom was normal, consequences were real, and fear had not yet become the dominant language of public life.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/05/25/climate-anxiety-get-a-life/