my body fat percentage is flawless. joint pain? no idea, never heard of it. i sleep when i'm tired, eat what and when i want – no regret, no consequences. pain is a foreign concept. i call a ten-kilometer run “a quick walk.” nicotine, alcohol – not interested. i am in the best physical shape of my life.
then i turned 6.

we, the genX, are the generation without a net – literally and figuratively. no mobile phone, no parents calling after us, no gps. the rule was: “be back when it gets dark.” what happened next was our problem. what we got up to back then – unsupervised, creative, occasionally life-threatening – would today summon a parents-whatsapp group, child services, and allegedly a therapist.
back then it was simply called: tuesday.

somewhere along the way, schoolmates became real friends. the kind that are still around today. the kind that know what you were like at 14. and keep quiet about it.
we didn't have 847 friends. we had five. maybe six, if you count the guy from the parallel class you haven't seen in years – but you'd trust again immediately. our friendships weren't confirmed with a click. they were forged through real experiences. real boredom. real conflicts, resolved without screenshots and without cancel culture. a like is not recognition. a follower is not a friend. we know this – because we've known both.

chernobyl in elementary school. adolescence with the ozone hole and dying forests. career start during the dotcom hype. financial crisis. pandemic. now ai.
doesn't matter. we kept going.
this is the genx thing. no big movement, no collective trauma-processing on social media. just: keep going.

my son was born. suddenly everything was weighted differently and your heart beats outside your own body.
father died before he could grow old. some questions he still answers – in silence.
my wife. we got married. since then i've been a better person than i ever was alone – and that's not rhetoric, that's a sober assessment.
through her, i returned. to my mother. to my family. no drama, no grand gesture. just: back.
and then she brought me another son. not my biological one – and yet mine.
family is not where you start. family is where you end up.

we are the ones people like to forget. between the boomers' need for recognition and the millennials' self-marketing reflex – there we were. quiet. pragmatic. busy actually getting things done.
five decades lived, two centuries bridged, two millennia survived – and we look like we're in our late 30s. that's no accident. that's the result of a childhood without notifications. we are the generation that grew up analog and survived digital.
the kids of the street, the parents of the internet.
too young for woodstock. too old for tiktok. just right for now.

i'm constantly working on reclaiming the values of back then. rehabilitating the 5-year-old, so to speak. body fat: negotiable. joints: cooperative if you're nice to them. ten-kilometer run: possible.
what's new:
i know who i am. what i don't care about. and what i do. i have no more time for things that don't matter – and all the time in the world for the ones that do.