I don't know what I want. And in so very many ways I still haven't found what I'm looking for or maybe I'm not looking at all. I'm told this is one of the signs of my generation. Hi, my name is Anu and I'm a Gen Xer.

There is a solid chance that this not-knowingness is why I've never felt especially grown up. Or that could be a me thing and it won't do to blame my benighted generation. All the same, here I am, baby.

We're not, like, dying out or anything. There's no natural disaster coming to take just those born somewhere between 1965 and 1980 (everyone has different parameters, go on and check). No, we're not being wiped out. It's worse.

We. Are. Middle-aged.

And they say the awkward years happen in adolescence. But what could be more awkward than stumbling half-drunkenly (it's a state of mind, you don't actually have to, like, be an alcoholic) toward old age, with a weird feeling that you're still young? This illusion hangs over you. You're still cool. You still got edge. You have time to do, you know, stuff.

What did we get sold?

Don't get me wrong, youth of today. Your problems are for real, totally. They say Gen Xers feel overlooked. We heard about boomers all our lives right up until we started feeling overwhelmed my millennials. True, no doubt, but I think I must part company with the research here just a little.

I think we spent quite a lot of time thinking about ourselves and our place in the world. If you grew up in that time, you grew up in the time of USA for Africa and a song so big - We Are the World - you might be forgiven for actually believing it could make a difference.

It was the time of Band Aid, followed by Live Aid. Bob Geldof became a household name and not for his music but his music-driven do-gooding. We were hyper-sensitive to HIV/Aids and the likely drastic fate of turtles.

According to Mental Floss, in Russia we would be the last Soviet children because soon after there would be no Soviet Union. In Germany we are Gen Golf (they took a compact VW as the symbol for the dreaded materialism; go figure). They also give a small nod to something much bigger: children of Mauerfall. Because a little thing called the Berlin Wall came down.

I never really got into the surfer jargon beyond the Ninja Turtles script. When they were - I'll say it unambiguously - a cartoon.

How did we get to here? For reasons known to no one, a great many of my friends have birthdays clustered around this time. They're all close in age, a few years on either side of me, and I started to think about who we are.

They say ours is a nostalgic generation. Too right. We were the first to grow up with computers at home. We watched the original Seinfeld before the man became a parody of himself. (Don't we all eventually? Do we all eventually?) And the never-to-be repeated brilliance of My So-Called Life. All one season of it. Because we've never been able to handle the truth.

We got MTV, where the first song aired was the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. And did it ever. For a while. Until ever