Why are midults more likely to experience road rage than millennials?
What springs to mind when you hear the term Generation X? Kurt Cobain? Slackers? Grunge? The Breakfast Club? The thing is, despite being labelled as generally disaffected and directionless, we are also furious. There’s not just weariness and worry in the melting pot of midult madness; there’s rage. RAGE.
A recent statistic from New Zealand suggests that we are far more likely to be involved in road-rage incidents than millennials (angry young people) and baby boomers (grumpy old buggers). Well, we could have bloody told you that. After all, midults are impatient even when standing still (why is everyone so leisurely?).
We also drive inconsistently. Because the mind drifts, don’t you find? One minute we are vrooming up someone’s back end screaming the most offensive expletives (with the window firmly closed because this is, after all, grown-up road rage, not lead-piping road rage), and the next, our minds turn to remortgaging or Justin Trudeau or sex or Ocado, and we slow down to 17mph and weave around, slightly igniting the loathing of others.
And cyclists? Don’t even... I mean, well done them and all, but they rather ruin their moral superiority with righteous indignation. And that superiority is further compromised if they choose to team their King Of The Worthy Road attitude with headphones. HEADPHONES? We could blow you over. Generation Xers are constantly triggered.
Endlessly dealing with feelings concertina-ing up on us. We’re OK. And then we’re not OK. There’s a pulse behind our temples. We’re seething. We’re all right. And then we’re not all right. We’re so sad. You get the picture. Bouncing from feeling sunny to feeling haunted, like one of those balls in a pinball machine. Remember those?
We recall looking at grown-ups and thinking that they had surely grown out of this microcosmic rushing and falling and swooping and panting. But it’s still there. Just more secret now. The triggers are so small that we sometimes don’t notice them. Could be a slightly strange text – one that perhaps makes us feel low-level guilty or defensive.
Could be someone not saying ‘thank you’ when we stop the car to let them pull out. The knife goes in before the armour goes on. Why are we so vulnerable to these feelings? They are only feelings, right? They’re not big, fat, threatening things. Why can’t we regulate? Or prevent the stab, because that’s what it feels like. And then, logically, we start to feel vulnerable in those moments of OK-ness. Because what goes up…
In some circumstances we are measured: we don’t kill the flies any more, don’t hurt the slugs. We buy the ethically harvested coffee and use the environmentally friendly cleaning stuff and recycle. Give money to charity and sign petitions and buy The Big Issue and, all the while, don’t really care about any of this.
One minute we’re screaming, then our minds turn to Justin Trudeau and we slow down to 17mph
No, these days we attempt to do the right thing because we have got to the point in life (death maths anyone?) where we want karma on our side. True, trying to buy clothes stitched by adults rather than infants may not stop us getting cancer or boost our love lives or give us a quick and peaceful death in our sleep. But it might.
Karma might be a thing: an active universal force. Now pass me a Fairtrade banana. Anyway, a midult, low on sleep, high on anxiety, in a car, with thoughts exploding out of her ears, is not the ‘och, bloody woman driver’ of old.
She is like an orc or a White Walker or a Dementor, or whatever your cultural reference might be. And I’ll tell you this for nothing: if Generation X drivers are angry in New Zealand with all those sheep and all that sky, then imagine how deranged they are in the rest of the world. It’s not pretty.
The Midults: Guides to midlife