A few years back, my buddy Chris taught me about bluegrass music. Because we lived in southwest Virginia, it was easy to go to bluegrass concerts and festivals, and it seemed like half the bars in my area hosted a bluegrass night with live music.

In 2000 and 2001, one of the themes of my education was the great John Hartford. As Hartford fought non-Hodgkins lymphoma, he continued to tour the country, playing an impressive schedule of concert dates and leaving a final legacy of amazing music. I was lucky enough to see him a few times over those two years, and I was left with a bottomless admiration for his skill and dedication. I realized that, like John Hartford, I never wanted to retire. I wanted to love something so much that I would be happy to continue doing it up until the moment of my death.

This was a fantastic revelation, as I also realized that, things being what they are, I would probably never be able to stop working. While my parents' jobs in the military and the government carried hefty pensions, my work in academia was only going to leave me with a small monthly stipend. While my grandparents' generation could look forward to fairly hefty social security checks and private pensions, it was pretty clear that I couldn't count on living off the government teat. Assuming that Social Security still exists in 30 years, I am willing to bet that my monthly checks will cover a few packets of ramen and some cat food, with enough left over for a box of Tic-Tacs.

For some people, the world is divided racially or economically, along gender lines or by political borders. For me, the big divider, at least in the United States, has always been generational.

I was born in 1971, smack in the middle of what would later be called Generation X. I was part of dropoff generation, the calm after the storm, the first generation to undergo wholesale tranquilizing at the hands of school districts and the first generation to come of age under the threat of AIDS. I was also part of the generation that had the unfortunate task of following behind the Baby Boomers.

I don't need to tell you about the Boomers, and I'm disinclined to rehash their legendary exploits. Let's just say that they were the ones who defaulted on student loans while my generation was left begging for college money. They were the ones who complained of censorship while we had to crawl out from under the heavy blanket of classic rock. They were the biggest generation in American history, and one of their number spat on my mother when she was pregnant with me, stating that having children was "irresponsible."

Not that I bear them any ill will, mind you.

If you were born between 1961 and 1981, you have probably heard the name "Generation X." The title of a novel by Douglas Coupland, a band fronted by Billy Idol, and a groundbreaking sociology textbook, "Generation X" also became the moniker slapped on the generational cohort that was bookended by the demographic wave of the baby boomers and the coddled generation comprised of the baby boom's children. In other words, Generation X was the neglected "middle child" of the late twentieth century: undereducated, over medicated, and generally pissed off, this group has become famous for its unwillingness to allow itself to be defined or demographically manipulated. It's also fairly well-known for its tendency to live in Mom and Dad's basement well into its thirties.

Over the years, marketers, demographers, and pundits have refused to leave Generation X alone, choosing instead to constantly poke and prod at it, seeking to uncover a generational identity that could be placed in opposition to the Woodstock generation, presumably as a lead-in to an inter-generational caged fight that would pit boomer selfishness against X-er self-loathing and the boomer "cause of the moment" mentality against Gen X's supposed apathy.