Field Notes on Generational Shame

Leading my first men’s retreat on sacred ground revealed the distance I feel from my generation — and affirmed my commitment to the young facilitators who are writing their first drafts of the future

What good is the bread if my niggas is broke?

What good is first class if my niggas can’t sit?

That’s my next mission, that’s why I can’t quit.

— J. Cole, “Middle Child” (2019)

For years, I tried to defend my generation.

Even though the movies, music, and touchstones that routinely define the mainstream Gen X experience never really saw me, I saw something in them. I could love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and everything John Hughes ever made while knowing full well nobody in those worlds looked like me, lived like me, or would’ve had me in the cast.

I guess you could say that I felt a sense of latch-key solidarity.

We were the forgotten generation — too small to matter, too cynical to believe, too off-center to ever be the heroes of the story. And yet I always thought we carried a quiet strength, a middle energy, the kind that could hold things together when it all started to fall apart. In his 2008 book, X Saves the World, Jeff Gordinier argued (and I believed him) that we were supposed to be the generation that kept the world from sucking — the BS detectors, the quiet resisters, the anti–sellouts who could smell hypocrisy a mile away. We weren’t meant to seize the spotlight; we were meant to keep the culture honest. To be the immune system.

And for a moment, I thought that time had finally come.

In the early days of the pandemic, when the old world cracked open and everything felt up for reimagining, I thought Gen X might step into its calling and become the bridge, the middle children of that moment. Not young enough to be naïve, not old enough to be entrenched. We were poised to show what we’d learned from a lifetime of being overlooked, underestimated, undercounted. I thought we might push something new into being.

Turns out I was wrong.

To my genuine surprise, my cohort shrank into reflexively conservative, conspiracy-prone, and downright conventional guardians of the status quo. In 2024, we helped return Donald Trump to the White House. In 2025 we doubled down on Andrew Cuomo in New York while young people and newcomers mobilized for Zohran Mamdani.

Look at the data:

In New Jersey, exit polls showed that only 51% of Gen Xers backed Democrat Mikie Sherrill — compared to 90% of Black voters.

In Virginia, we went hard for Republican Winsome Earle-Sears even when 9 out of 10 Black votes wanted absolutely nothing to do with her candidacy.

On the Supreme Court, there are four Gen Xers: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first three anchor the far-right bloc reshaping reproductive rights, voting access, and executive power.

That’s my generation.

Gen X now makes up the biggest slice of the House — a Congress already shaping up to be one of the most craven, cynical, and small-minded in recent history.

I see our small-c conservative handiwork in workplaces too. All too often the change blockers are Xers. We show up to the diversity workshop, the culture-building training, but I can feel the listlessness in the room. The breezy posture. The arms folded across the chest. The polite skepticism. The quiet message: I’ve seen this before. I know better. Nothing will really change. So we Xers indulge the conversation, nod at the right moments, maybe even contribute a sharp insight. But we don’t actually move. We don’t shift. We don’t risk. When pressed, we insist we’re just being “realistic,” and besides, things are better than they used to be.

But what if what we call realism is just fatigue with a fresh coat of paint, and what we call experience is just jadedness under a white label? What if we’ve become the very gatekeeping middle managers we mocked in films that defined our youth — Fight Club, The Matrix, Office Space — a Gen-X canon that ridiculed the soul-sucking absurdity of corporate life?

I find myself more disappointed by that truth than I expected. More embarrassed than I want to admit. In my mind, we were the bridge. Instead, we’ve become the barrier.

This epiphany surfaced last weekend, sitting around a fire under a big round moon at the home my wife, Alana, and I built in Atlantic Beach, South Carolina, without quite knowing why or what it wanted to be.

The realization came fast and clear: My generation has forgotten how to believe.

We’ve been captured by fear, by fatigue, by the instinct to protect what little we have left.

And the thing I was wrestling with — my hesitation, my doubt about even hosting this gathering I was calling Resilience House — was the same thing plaguing the generation I come from.

But to understand how that realization came into being, I have to go back.

Atlantic Beach: The First Spark

Resilience House began as a phone call. In 2022, Alana read an article about Atlantic Beach — “The Black Pearl” — a Black beach town founded in 1934 during the height of Jim Crow. A place where Black families carved out joy in a country building walls everywhere else.

She dialed the town manager and, lo and behold, they picked up. The manager directed Alana to a realtor who had once been the mayor and whose family had owned property at the beach for generations.

Within two weeks, we owned a parcel close enough to the beach that we could stand on the sidewalk and watch the ocean and sky touch. Or at least that’s what the realtor assured us, and what Google Maps seemed to corroborate. We bought it sight unseen, a true creature of the pandemic era if ever there was one.

A year later, when we finally visited, everything clicked.

Atlantic Beach shouldn’t still exist after a century of storms, segregation, neglect, and predatory development swallowed every inch of coast around it.

And yet it does.

Ninety years ago, an entrepreneur named George Tyson believed in something that must have looked impossible in the dusty haze of depression and intractable discrimination. He bought 48 acres — then another 48 — and he paid for them under threat that if he missed a single mortgage payment, the owners would take it all back and mock the audacity of a Black man trying to own oceanfront land in South Carolina.

That was radical faith. Vision in the midst of darkness. And the people who followed him guarded it with their lives, long before the world believed it was possible.

Formed a few years after these purchases and in anticipation of the parcels being offered for sale to Black folks seeking a safe, welcoming beach community, The Atlantic Beach Company wrote deed restrictions into the land to prevent high-rise hotels, resorts, and large-scale commercial development from ever touching the beachfront.

That covenant, likely born out of the cruel backlash that crushed the promise of Reconstruction, served notice: This place will not be swallowed. This joy will not be paved over. This freedom will not be sold for a parking deck and a valet stand.

When Alana and I stood there for the first time, we realized what it meant.

This town still hummed with the original energy — a vibration, a pulse, a defiant magnificence. It’s a small place but at each end of town stands a literal, physical barrier keeping the outside world at bay. Back in the day, neighboring beach towns ran chicken wire into the ocean to keep Black bodies from crossing into their waters. Now, we are the ones holding the line. Perfect, no. Under-resourced, yes. But still, after all this time, it is itself.

Why would we hand that over to sameness?

Why wouldn’t we fight to preserve what was built in resistance?

We knew the sacredness of what we had entered and we vowed to steward accordingly.

But knowing the sacredness of the place and actually building something worthy of it were two different things. It required clearing trees, laying pipes, trusting strangers, wiring money, and taking the biggest financial risk of our lives. This could have easily become one of those disaster stories — cost overruns, corner-cutting, heartbreak.

Instead, something remarkable happened.

From December 2023, when the lot was nothing but trees and weeds, to June 2024 — six months — a home was built. Furnished. Solid. Real. Beautiful beyond my wildest dreams. A leap of faith made manifest. And even then, even after we slept in it that first night, I half expected the bank to call and tell me there’d been a mistake, that this couldn’t possibly belong to us. Only when the deed was in my hand did I finally exhale. This patch of earth in one of the last historically Black beach towns in the United States was ours to care for.

The Gathering: A Different Kind of Work

That leap of faith — that believing even when your eyes can’t yet see — was what I wanted to share. It wasn’t enough that my kids got to run through its rooms or splash in the pool. I wanted others to feel what I had felt: the impossible becoming real, the quiet thrill of a vision taking shape in its own time. This place wasn’t built just for us. It was built to be opened, to be used, to be a site of restoration and reckoning. I wanted the people I love, the people I trust, to step into it and feel the warmth of belief when it finally lands.

So after a year of dithering and doubting, I invited five men — all Gen Xers, all facilitators, creators, seekers, all people who spend their lives helping others make meaning — to join me at this thing I was calling Resilience House

I knew that what I had in my head wasn’t another men’s getaway. I’d just done one, down in the Kentucky hills, with six brothers I’ve loved since adolescence. That weekend required nothing from us but arrival, which, by the way, is no small feat. Once we arrived, the conversations unfurled on their own — the kind of memory-work that only thirty plus years of shared history can conjure. The laughter, the barbs, the old stories were waiting for us like time capsules.

This gathering was asking something different. Nostalgia wasn’t the assignment. We were were prototyping a space for wonder, for reflection, and for risk. And the Dax who showed up in Kentucky, light and unarmored, wasn’t the one these men needed now.

Each of us was asked to bring an offering: a story, a question, a dilemma, a practice. Something real. Something alive. I wanted to see what might emerge if we gathered not as experts or consultants or professionals, but simply as men asking: What now? What’s mine to carry? Where is my fire needed most?

Each man led a session: morning, afternoon, night.

No slides. No clients. No deadlines.

Just us.

We ended each night by the fire telling stories: About fathers. About fear. About failures we’ve never named aloud. About the young men we once were and the men we are trying to become. About the loves lost and the incredible partners who gave us the space to be together this weekend.

And underneath all of it, I kept seeing something familiar: Shame.

The quiet kind. The lived-in kind.

The kind you develop when life has disappointed you more times than you can count — and you’ve dialed down your expectations for anything different.

It hit me like a wave. And in the moment of submergence, I tasted my own complicity. Had I done enough? Had I pushed enough? Had I believed enough?

This wasn’t just personal shame. This shame on my tongue was generational.

The same instinct that made me procrastinate, hesitate, talk myself out of this gathering — that soft undertow of doubt — is the very instinct shaping my generation’s politics, our posture, our narrowing imagination.

We have traded possibility for caution. Skepticism for paralysis. Belief for self-protection.

We seek comfort.

We manage the doubt but we don’t confront it.

We vote as if politics is still about preference instead of survival.

We’ve lost the muscle for risk.

We’ve lost the imagination for change.

And the numbers in every election keep proving it.

After Shame: What Now?

Here’s the truth I came home with: I can’t save my generation.

But I can still be useful.

This year I turned fifty. And while age ain’t nothing but a number, I can feel that something in me has shifted. I’m in a different place than I’ve ever been. For so long my adult life has been about striving for stability, for recognition, for possibility. But now I’m having to sit with a different truth: I’ve arrived somewhere. Not at a finish line, but at a threshold. I’m not the scrappy kid anymore. And it’s a strange place to be because I have spent my life calling myself an underdog, an outsider. And while there may yet be truth in that, it’s also a way to hide. The truth is, I am an elder now. And with that comes a responsibility I can feel in my bones: I can help make room, clear paths, hold space, and pour into the people who still believe something else is possible.

The truth underneath all of this is that there are few places for people who do our work to practice our craft. We are the invisible infrastructure of movements and institutions. We are the ones who hold the room, guide the rupture, tend the wound, steady the chaos, name the thing no one wants to say, and help people see what they’ve been avoiding.

And yet there is no clear path into facilitation and few sector supports or resources dedicated to our well-being or our craft. No apprenticeships. No studios. If there are places to test ideas and fail safely, I certainly haven’t heard of them. Most of us stumbled into this work by instinct, by necessity, by accident. And now, in a political moment where the right is actively trying to kill the spirit of dialogue — calling it dangerous, divisive, un-American — the need for spaces dedicated to this craft has never been more urgent. Especially for younger facilitators.

They deserve somewhere to experiment, to stretch, to imagine, to make meaning without institutional surveillance or punishment. Somewhere to feel themselves becoming.

There are models out there — like one in Scotland that my friend Jack Graham introduced me to — TURADH, a space that provides subsidized retreats for young changemakers to pause, reflect, and gather themselves in the midst of struggle. Their mission isn’t the same as what I’m envisioning, but the spirit resonates: a place intentionally designed for younger people who carry the weight of change on their backs. A place that understands what it means to be young and committed and exhausted and still willing to try again.

That’s where First Draft Lab comes in.

I want Resilience House to become a place for emergent and seasoned facilitators to bring their ideas, frameworks, strategies, and experiments into the world before they’re polished. Before they have to perform. Before they’re asked to package themselves for institutions that aren’t yet ready to receive them.

A place where meaning-making professionals who guide leaders, move culture, build strategy have room to breathe and risk and imagine.

A place where young facilitators can sit by the same fire, stand in the same salt air, and feel belief vibrating under their feet.

Jeff Gordinier once wrote that our generation’s gift wasn’t optimism or idealism — it was the ability to call bullshit with precision. To question power. To refuse co-optation. To keep institutions honest simply by refusing to play along.

And he wasn’t wrong.

Even if we didn’t live up to that at scale — even if the polling, the politics, and people and culture departments tell a story of retreat — there are still some of us keeping faith with that original ethos. The ones who never stopped interrogating power, never stopped resisting the easy lie, never stopped trying to build something from the margins that could hold more people than the center ever imagined.

I count myself among them. It’s what I do every time I step onto a stage, into a recording booth or inside of an organization.

Maybe that’s why this next chapter matters so much to me. Because shame can paralyze, but it can also clarify. It tells you where not to put your energy anymore. It tells you whom you’re actually here to serve.

When I think about what kind of elder I want to be, I think of a story the late scholar Sterling Stuckey once told about how, during the darkest years of Paul Robeson’s blacklisting, a group of college students — Stuckey among them — invited Robeson to meet with them in Chicago.

Robeson showed up at Stuckey’s parents’ apartment because the other students were too afraid to ask their own parents to host a man the country had blacklisted. He climbed the stairwell. At one point he knocked on the wrong door; the neighbor who opened it took one look at this towering, world-famous, now-disgraced figure and shut it in his face. But he kept climbing. Floor by floor, door by door, until he reached the little apartment where Stuckey and the other students were waiting. And when he finally walked in, this man who had been silenced and surveilled and stripped of his passport sat down among them, looked around the room, and said,

“Let me have it. Tell me everything.”

Even in exile, he was listening forward.

I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois, running for Senate in his 80s on the Progressive Party ticket, abandoned by his peers but still carrying a global vision of justice and peace.

He aged without retreat.

That’s the lineage I want to step into. That’s the work Resilience House calls me toward.

Not to fix my generation. But to accompany the next one. To sit close to the fire — like we did last weekend — and say, as Robeson did,

“Let me have it.”