Less Static
Living abroad hasn't made me ageless. But maybe it made generational noise irrelevant.
Americans talk about generations constantly. The gap. The divide. Boomers versus millennials, Gen X checked out in the middle, Gen Z and Alpha coming for everyone. The discourse is relentless and exhausting.
Abroad, this so-called gap feels less contentious and less loud. But why?
Observation: life in Italy communicates with less static. Generational labels still exist, if more lightly. The generations in question are just not hurling them at one another from opposing trenches over a minefield. A semblance of generational respect remains in force in both directions.
My working theory is that American generational identity is largely driven by consumer cycles — what’s cool, what people are buying or driving, where they’re eating, what they want to wear, where they want to go. Strip away the marketing and distinctions begin to blur.
That being said, I’ve done a bit of my own blurring.
I’m a Gen X middle kid born in 1973. I became aware of the world outside our home watching network news in the seventies. I remember the eighties. I felt the nineties deeply, especially the early part, with grunge music, flannel shirts, the irony, the cultural weather.
Something shifted after I moved to Seattle. The house shares, the single apartments throughout my twenties, the career choices extended a kind of prolonged adolescence that blurred generational lines. That Y2K bliss, in hindsight, when things were still affordable on my low-ish wages.
I spent a decade working on campus in international student services as a director, managing staff who were significantly younger — what Americans call millennials. Their sustained proximity impacted me. My speech, my career goals and frustrations, even my wardrobe (ballet flats, skinny jeans, voluminous cardigans over fitted t-shirts) for many years were, I came to realize, more millennial than Gen X. Which felt strange, because I very much identified emotionally as a Gen Xer — I remember it, I lived it. Somewhere along the way I drifted to the back of the Gen X pack.
I got married at 32. We had our first child when I was 37. (In other historical periods, I’d have been approaching grandmother age at that point — a thought I find both bracing and clarifying.) All of this made me, generationally speaking, a bit of an outlier.
Now I’m raising American children in Italy, in a particular third culture with a particular idiolect. I don’t know what generation they belong to. But I no longer think it matters. We’re not playing for the same stakes in taly as we would be in the US. Generational labels — Gen Z, Gen Alpha — will never accurately describe my kids. They’re not growing up inside the same consumer cycles, the same cultural pressure systems. They’re something else.
My church work — in the US and here with the Episcopal community in Florence — has kept me networked across ages and life stations. Some days I move between conversations with people in their eighties and nineties, my own kids (eleven and fourteen), and everyone in between. This feels like part of the antidote to what is widely termed the epidemic of loneliness.
Being woven into a community of various ages isn’t incidental; it’s the main thing. Italy makes this easier for me, and more enjoyable — though I’ll say that in the US too, through writing and church, I was often in contact and in friendship with people across very different careers, educations, and backgrounds. And while parenting infants and small children narrowed that funnel for a while as I wound up mostly talking to babies, parents and teachers, it passes.
The further I get from my country of origin — really get from it, not just visit but live differently — the more those generational labels start to loosen. Italians are not grappling with the same consumer cycles, the same cultural references, the same specific American anxieties that generated the labels in the first place. Generational categories become less useful.
What a relief.