\n\tWarner\u2019s passing at 54 in a drowning accident hit hard. And not just his passing. For anyone considered a part of Gen X<\/a> \u2014 roughly, those of us who were kids at some point from the mid-\u201870s through the end of the \u201880s \u2014 this is now the third year in a row we\u2019ve lost someone pretty much indispensable from our youth. First Matthew Perry in 2023, then Shannen Doherty in 2024 (a double whammy with Our House and 90210, and especially painful given Luke Perry\u2019s earlier death) and now Warner. All born in or within six months of 1970. Which is to say, too close to any of us.<\/p>\n \n\t(And, yes, I know Perry also was a millennial favorite since Friends came on in 1994, but he was Gen X himself, and also, are we really going to shade Second Chance<\/a> like that?)<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\u201980s-era Ozzy.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett<\/p>\n \n\tAnd then Tuesday, Ozzy Osbourne<\/a>, who of course transcends generations with all his early 2000s second-life reality-show MTV popularity <\/a>but who was inextricably tied to Gen X, first with the crazy 1980s schoolyard stories (the original internet) about a PETA-unfriendly activity at his concert (actually an accident<\/a>), and then with his music. If you didn\u2019t blast \u201cMama, I\u2019m Coming Home\u201d out your dorm window on the last day of classes in the \u201890s, could you really be said to have gone to college at all?<\/p>\n \n\tOzzy was the embodiment of early MTV. And now he\u2019s gone. Along with, of course, MTV itself. It\u2019s hard not to feel the symbolism. The stuff we thought would be here forever has left before its time. Theo was teenage possibility; MTV was the cutting edge incarnate. It was all supposed to tell us what was coming. Not remind us of what is gone.<\/p>\n \n\tOzzy at least reached a relatively ripe age of 76. But Gen X has lost too many of its childhood musical heroes far too young, Prince and Tom Petty and Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson and George Michael. They would have filled the best cassette mix tape that one summer in camp, where if someone from the future showed up to say they\u2019d all be gone before most of us left our 40s (and, outside of Petty, before any of them got out of their 50s) we would have shooed them from the basketball court and just cranked up the boom box louder.<\/p>\n \n\tThese deaths and the sense of dread they bring are on the one hand a surprise. But also, maybe not? Gen X is often defined as the first postwar generation to believe it would do financially worse than their parents; bleakness is hardwired into us from our formative years. We were the first to experience parental divorce on a mass scale, the first to be exposed to the idea that the bad people who grabbed Etan Patz and Adam Walsh could well grab us, the first to see 20th century techno-optimism go up in a fiery cloud of space-shuttle smoke \u2014 the first, maybe, to be told the world was garbage, and that\u2019s if you live through it.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tKurt Cobain in 1990. <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett<\/p>\n \n\tThe defining moment of being a Gen Xer, after all, was Kurt Cobain\u2019s suicide in 1994. I know, I know, people say the generational divide is the internet or cellphones or being an adult on 9\/11. But I think it will always be Cobain. If you are old enough to remember what happened and how you felt that April day he took his life, you\u2019re a Gen Xer. If you\u2019re not, you\u2019re not. And how we felt was, well, everything sucked, everything will always suck and\u00a0the one guy who was clear-eyed enough to point out how everything sucks was so overwhelmed by said suckitude that he couldn\u2019t go on anymore. A kind of generational irony grew out of that realization. But it was cultivated in a greenhouse of despair. (There is an upside to being forced to adapt to a world that is out to get you, as this post enjoyably makes clear<\/a>: it can render you fearsome.)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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