I have always considered it a privilege to have been born right in the middle of Generation X, largely because I got to experience puberty at the peak of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album. To have been on the brink of maturity the summer the fourth single “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” gave way to “Human Nature,” the fifth, is to have pondered an approaching adulthood full of joy, pain, and possibility. Anything can happen, I remember thinking that sultry St. Louis summer, in this beautiful world that keeps getting better and better.

A constant in my life is that I think a lot of stupid things.

My generation has hit key moments in our personal histories at key moments in history history. We gained legal admission to bars as the Berlin Wall fell, became eligible for military service just in time for Endless War to begin, and entered the workforce right around the time technology made it possible—and then very shortly thereafter, necessary—for human beings to be connected to it all the time. We—well, those of us who benefitted from what we now recognize as privilege—were born into a predictable, optimistic America, and got to watch day by day as it turned into … this one. It’s possible that the experience has made us wiser and more empathetic. (Update: I just took a look at social media. It hasn’t.)

My consolation is that it may have made us more stylish. My older brothers arrived at the tail end of the baby boom, eight and 10 years older than me, and if we sometimes struggle to speak the same language, I chalk most of it up to this important fact: MTV arrived when I was in fifth grade and they were in college. What for a young adult was a pleasant, candy-colored distraction, for a 10-year-old was a window into a newer, better world with more aggressive haircuts. Duran Duran were a bunch of Brits wearing rouge to my brothers, but to me they were superheroes. To a boy picked last for soccer, their lifestyle—to my understanding, mainly wearing suits on boats—seemed like a perfectly respectable career option. If I didn’t understand what “mouth is alive with juices like wine” meant at the time, I was fairly certain I’d figure it out someday. (Update: just looked at the “Rio” lyric sheet and did a little oral checkup in the mirror. Still haven’t.)

“Duran Duran were a bunch of Brits wearing rouge to my brothers, but to me they were superheroes. To a boy picked last for soccer, their lifestyle—to my understanding, mainly wearing suits on boats—seemed like a perfectly respectable career option.”

Music videos turned my world from black-and-white to color all at once, at the time I needed them most, and while I have a hard time understanding why my parents were so terrified of the medium, I find it equally hard to relate to people who have never known a world without it. Can you even be ready for Madonna when you’re five?

Speaking of sex and danger, I’m fairly certain that I am alive right now because at the exact moment that my head started to learn what sex was and my body started to want that shit, my brain got the message that it could kill me. AIDS was all over the news in 1984, so brand-new there was still a popular diet candy with a homophonous name. Mortal terror, along with a megadose of old-fashioned Catholic guilt and shame, kept my early sexy dabblings quick and clothed, and once I worked up the nerve to really go there (lights off, thank you), I all but laminated myself. Guys a few years older than me didn’t know what hit them; guys a few years younger got to fool around in a world where a diagnosis wasn’t a death sentence. Guys now have PreP, and while some are using it as license to party like it’s 1979, I can’t scrub the terror off. As a Gen X-er, I’ll never not be expecting the next virus. It’s a shame, and I probably owe it my life.

The summer I graduated college, I moved to New York, where Mikey, my best pal from high school, had just started a job for a massive entertainment corporation, to develop something called their “website.” Weeks before, my main interaction with computers had been in my school’s computer lab, where I tended to tap out term papers, and where in my senior year the school developed messaging technology, which meant you could send a short text message to someone on another one of the school’s computers five feet away. (Text messaging, I thought to myself, will never catch on. See above re: my thoughts and their accuracy.)

But on a July Saturday afternoon, while the rest of the city had escaped toward things I could not afford—things called Hamptons—old Mikey showed me a new, connected world. “It’s called the World Wide Web,” he said, during the seven minutes we waited for the Yahoo landing page to load. “Name anything, and I’ll bet there’s already a website about it.” I threw him a curveball: “Small Wonder.” He typed it into the search bar, and several dial-up-era minutes later, there they were: three different sites devoted to the syndicated ’80s sitcom about the robot girl and the family who tolerated her. Fan communities, and then later the actual content that inspired fan communities, would never be more than a few keystrokes away.

“As a Gen X-er, I’ll never not be expecting the next virus. It’s a shame, and I probably owe it my life.”

I do find myself missing the scarcity, the special thrill that comes with finding that rare 45, or book, or human being whose first idea on being told they can search for anything is also “Small Wonder.” But then I remember: the same thing that’s making the world more impatient and rancorous is also making it possible for the current 12-year-old version of me to be less lonely. A world with endless content and infinite possibilities for connection is shortening our attention spans, but it’s also making it easier for young people to find their tribes and stop wasting their time feeling strange, to make their teenage romantic mistakes when they’re teenagers and not when they’re 32, as I did. Tower Records is gone, but maybe isolation is too. It’s a fair trade.

Within reason. Recently, I had a talk with a younger friend who told me the tale of his first kiss. It was a charming story until I asked him how he’d met the guy, and he said Grindr. I recoiled, only partially from doing the math and despairing at my advancing age. The idea that a person—many people, a generation of people, the rest of people—wouldn’t be able to negotiate something as simple as a smooch without first selecting a profile picture and writing up a paragraph of marketing language was too much.

I thought of this again on rewatching the first season of “The Real World,” in which the first group of seven telegenic strangers have what we now recognize as discomfort in having to talk about themselves, in which they aren’t quite sure where to look in their one-on-one interviews, in which their body language indicates that being on display at all times is an unusual thing. These might have been the last seven completely guileless people in America. I’m glad reality television and dating apps exist, but watching the degree to which they’ve made a generation of people both themselves and their own press agents, I’m glad I remember a world before them.

Even though I only barely do, and I forget it a little more each day.

“A world with endless content and infinite possibilities for connection is shortening our attention spans, but it’s also making it easier for young people to find their tribes and stop wasting their time feeling strange, to make their teenage romantic mistakes when they’re teenagers and not when they’re 32, as I did.”

That might be the essential condition of Generation X: we are the perpetual middle kids. Born into tradition, our bodies began to change just as the culture did. The gleaming, innocent “Happy Days” world my brothers knew has transformed into the rapid-fire, connected world my nieces and nephews take for granted, and we’re right in the center. We’re old enough to remember a simpler life, young enough not to waste all our energy trying to force culture back there.

The unusual, even the shocking, becomes commonplace pretty quickly, particularly when you’re young and adaptable. I wonder whether this new, locked-down, 2020-model world that we adults keep telling ourselves is temporary will, for the very young, just become the world. I think about this kid:

My first reaction, obviously, is “I feel you.” But then I think about what it is to be young, what it is for your understanding of the world to be forming, and I realize that by the end of the week, she’ll have internalized this new normal so completely that she’ll just call it “normal.” Maybe the embrace of a friend will be as strange to her as the lack of it is to me.

Remembering a world before, as painful as it is, is a gift. Having seen and adapted to massive change in our formative years is, too. Maybe it will give us the energy and the openness to keep us focused and fighting so that there’s a better world after.