How do you define a generation while they're still in their prime? Though the subject deserves to be tackled in essay form, and has certainly inspired many an essayist and blogger, we may have to turn to a bulleted list right now just in the interest of time and outlining. It's a complicated subject, and on some level, especially when it comes to relating the generation to John Hughes, it starts to feel like it's about class -- specifically that Gen X, as it's been defined, is a white middle-class phenomenon. But it's not.

We suppose that a generation's defining characteristics arrive, necessarily, from their cultural output. With filmmakers like John Hughes, Richard Linklater, and John Singleton; writers like David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and A.M. Homes; and musicians like Kurt Cobain, Eminem, and The Smiths, one starts to see a specific picture emerge that's about non-conformity, disaffection, and a search for authenticity.  But weren't most of those characteristics also true of the Boomers who became hippies? The true defining edge for Gen X might then have to be irony, humor, and not a small degree of cynicism inherited from the failed revolution that preceded us.

Sevastian Winters wrote this short piece discussing what Gen Xers learned from each of Hughes' films, and he notes some very specific things like teen typologies that took shape in The Breakfast Club, the prototypes of Emo, Grunge, and Alternative as we came to know them. He also notes that Ferris Bueller showed how, for our generation, "forthrightness is preferred over obsequious[ness]," and that in Weird Science we see an early celebration of geekdom, which predates by about a decade the era in which many of us would end up making a living sitting behind a computer and writing various kinds of code.

But just to take a stab at a bulleted list, here goes:

Generation X: The Characteristics That Define Us

• Perpetual adolescence -- We don't put a lot of stock in growing up, certainly not how our parents defined it. Much like how in dot-com offices, and some even today led by Gen X managers, put almost as much emphasis on fun as on work. Also, as parents, we tend to want to be permissive and to not restrict our children in figuring out who they are.
• An ironic sense of life in general -- We take pleasure in seeing the alternate meanings of things, in exploring doubt, and in making fun of an "adult" world where such irony has no place. This also leads to the "slacker" characteristic that gets slapped on us a lot, but it's really just that most of us see work as something we must love for it to be worthwhile, and that achievement can't always be monetized.
• A quest for authenticity -- This gets at the whole forthrightness thing and Ferris, but it also relates to the ongoing popularity of live music as an authentic experience, and it comes out in books and movies a lot too -- things like A Heartbreaking Work, Stand By Me, and Ghost World.
• An acceptance of drugs and drinking as parts of life -- While many Gen Xers likely abstain, our generation took the druggie experimentation of our hippie forebears a few steps further, making marijuana all but completely legal. And the popularity of Ecstasy and the rave scene belong to us.
• Living on and via the internet -- Certainly there were plenty of Boomers involved in its creation, but the world of the web, the blogosphere, the notion that everything on the internet should be free... these all seem like distinct pieces of Gen X's legacy. We may have spawned a younger generation of incessant over-sharers, but it was us who got the ball rolling and moved our lives online in the first place.
• Breaking down of sexual taboos -- The Millennials may be the Show-Me Generation, but it was us who inherited the after-effects of the Sexual Revolution from our parents. AIDS may have killed the key parties and anonymous hookups for a while, but it was up to us to learn about sexual freedom in a world full of risk. We did it, in some ways, by talking about it more. Erica Jong's Fear of Flying was provocative for our parents, but for us it gets way more twisted -- think American Psycho, Michelle Tea's Rent Girl, or anything Dennis Cooper's ever written.
• Embracing differences -- This is probably the most mushy and debatable item on our list, but having been raised (most of us) in the 70s on Free to Be You and Me and Sesame Street, and having grown up and come into our own through the dawn of hip-hop, the gay rights movement, AIDS, and multicultural programs in universities, we are the first generation to truly be able to look past race, gender, and sexuality. As the oldsters die off, our country gets closer and closer to becoming a true bastion of equality, and we'll be the first generation to see that happen on our watch. Also, if you use our parameters for Gen X's timespan, Barack Obama counts as one of us.