Reporting From Inside the Breakdown
What Gen X learned from the 70s about chaos, selfhood, and the collapse of the American container
Paid post. Free for the next 72 hours, because this one wanted to be read, not gated. After that it goes behind the paywall. If it lands, a paid subscription is the whole reason I get to write things like this.
It’s a gray Monday in May, and I am on the sofa, working in my bell-bottom leggings, with the television on, which is a thing I do and have always done and would prefer you not interrogate me about. I have written every word of every essay you have ever read of mine with something playing in the background, because silence feels like a held breath, and I cannot think while holding my breath. Today it is Breakdown: 1975, the Netflix documentary, and the light coming through the window is the soft, depleted gray of a hangover you don’t mind, the kind that slows your brain down to a useful speed. I like this weather. It feels like permission.
On the screen, a man in a wide tie is explaining, in 1975, what it felt like to no longer trust anything. Watergate. Vietnam. The pardon. The gas lines. The city of New York, where I live, broke. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. The man in the wide tie says: what institutions can you trust to do the right thing?
And I sit up, because I have heard that sentence before. I have heard it in Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Pollack directing, Redford as the bookish CIA analyst who comes back from lunch to find every one of his colleagues shot dead in their swivel chairs because the agency he works for has decided to murder him over an oil scheme nobody bothered telling him about. Faye Dunaway in a brown turtleneck. The whole movie is one long whisper of they are not who they said they were. I have heard it in The Parallax View. I have heard it in All the President’s Men. I have heard it in Network. I have heard it, in fact, on nearly every screen and out of nearly every mouth from 1974 through 1979, because that was the question of the decade and the decade never answered it, so the question just kept circling the block.
I almost got this piece wrong. The first draft was basically about how 1975 keeps weirdly reappearing in 2026 in different clothes. Same distrust. Same institutional rot. Same feeling that the adults in charge may not actually be in charge at all. I got four pages into that version before realizing the documentary was not showing me a parallel. It was showing me the neighborhood I have apparently been living in my entire life without knowing the address.
I would like to tell you about my parents’ matching robes.
I am eight years old, maybe nine. My parents have gone away for a weekend to something called Marriage Encounter, which, if you did not grow up in a certain kind of Catholic-adjacent American household in the late 1970s, I cannot fully explain to you, but the short version is: structured retreat, married couples, exercises, dialogue, rediscovering each other.
They come back Sunday night. Monday morning, I come downstairs and my parents — my parents, whose interior lives had until this point seemed as inaccessible to me as the inside of a vault — are in matching velour robes cooking breakfast together and singing. A song. I do not remember which song and it does not matter, because my sister is standing next to me in the doorway and we are looking at each other in the silent telepathic horror of small children who have understood, before they have language for it, that the adults have been replaced.
This was my first time hallucinating, except it was real.
So we backed slowly out of the kitchen and went to watch television, which is what we always did.
Hold that scene in your head, because I increasingly think it contains the entire 1970s in miniature. Tom Wolfe named the thing while my parents were upstairs living inside it — The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening, New York Magazine, 1976, Wolfe in the white suit at the typewriter explaining the new American project: the self. The adults had decided to work on themselves. They sat in circles and came home transformed in ways their children had not requested. And somewhere in the suburbs, two little girls stood in a doorway understanding that whatever was happening upstairs was not really for them.
MASH. Three’s Company. The Love Boat. Reruns of All in the Family, where Archie Bunker said things I did not yet understand were jokes. The nightly news at 6:30 sharp, Cronkite saying and that’s the way it is, a sentence with a period at the end of it. A way of marking that the bad news had concluded for the evening and now you could go eat your tuna casserole in peace. We watched the Iran hostages on Nightline. Ted Koppel counting the days. We watched The Day After, which I saw alone in our dark den, and the next morning at school, we had to discuss it in social studies because the public school system had assigned us a movie about nuclear annihilation and wanted our thoughts.
I was also, unfortunately, a child who was terrified of fireworks, which was terrible timing given that I was being raised in Philadelphia during the Bicentennial. America turned 200 and the city spent a year detonating itself in celebration. I spent much of 1976 hiding in the bathroom while the nation’s birthplace lost its mind outside the window. To be honest, I do not feel entirely dissimilar now.
I realize every generation thinks it uniquely experienced history, but Gen X really did grow up in a strange emotional climate. Nobody explained anything to us because, honestly, nobody seemed to be explaining anything to themselves either. The adults were overwhelmed. The country was overwhelmed. So we just watched it all raw. Assassinations. Nuclear panic. Divorce. Cults. Sitcom laugh tracks immediately followed by footage of catastrophe. Then bed. Then social studies the next morning.
It also turns out not to have been a phase. The Challenger blew up on the classroom television in 1986. Fifteen years later, we were adults ourselves, walking to work through the dust of the towers. I think I spent a long time assuming stability would eventually arrive. That adulthood itself would feel sturdier than this. More supervised somehow. More resolved. Instead it was mostly the same feeling in different clothes. Different wallpaper, maybe. Better coffee.
Which is maybe why the documentary unsettled me so much. It did not feel historical. It felt familiar in a way I did not entirely enjoy.
Here’s the part of the 1975 story that should probably make you put your coffee down.
While my parents were upstairs at Marriage Encounter trying to rediscover each other, somebody else’s parents were busy building institutions. Paul Weyrich co-founded The Heritage Foundation in 1973 with Edwin Feulner and — this detail remains incredible to me — Joseph Coors, of the beer.
And looking back, this feels important.
While a lot of middle-class Americans were experimenting with self-actualization and authenticity, another group of people was becoming extremely organized. Not happier. Organized. Think tanks. Judicial pipelines. Local politics. Fundraising systems. Mailing lists. School boards. One side came home from retreats wanting to communicate better. The other side came home with a strategy memo.
Or, to put it less elegantly: one group got very interested in healing itself while the other quietly learned Robert’s Rules of Order.
Looking back, the matching robes probably never stood a chance against the conference room.
The two girls in the doorway backed away from their parents and went to watch television. That is a true sentence about my childhood. It is also, I think, a true sentence about my generation. We became very good at observation. Suspicion too. We learned how to sense instability before anybody admitted instability was there. We developed an instinct for irony and side-eye and reading the subtext in the room. Which is useful if you grow up to become a writer or a filmmaker or a person who can immediately tell when someone is lying to you at brunch.
It is somewhat less useful for building power.
The conference room, meanwhile, was not making essays about any of this. The conference room was making judges.
I am aware that I am writing this in a form Tom Wolfe basically handed my generation in 1976. Wolfe and Didion and Thompson taught people how to report from inside the breakdown, which has apparently become a lifelong assignment. Stopping the breakdown was not really the emphasis. Observing it was.
Meanwhile, on the other screen — the one in my hand while Breakdown: 1975 plays across the room — somebody has tried to kill the president again. Or maybe that was six months ago. Or maybe there was another constitutional crisis I already absorbed and forgot because the feed moved on before my nervous system could catch up.
The chaos itself is not new. The delivery system is.
In 1975, at least the chaos arrived on a schedule. The man on television came on at 6:30, told you what had happened to the country, and then eventually said goodnight. The information could be horrifying, but it still arrived inside some kind of shared frame. The bad news had edges around it.
Now everything just bleeds together. Constitutional panic beside a lipstick recommendation. Assassination attempts beside linen pants. Air fryer reviews beside the possible collapse of democracy. Nothing ends. The feed just keeps dripping directly into your bloodstream while you stand in line at CVS.
And do not, by the way, tell me the becoming business is new. The retreats. The journaling. The breathwork. The endless search for the authentic self supposedly buried underneath the performed self. My parents’ matching robes were basically the prototype. Marriage Encounter was just couples therapy with worse lighting and more velour.
The vocabulary changed. The branding improved. The price point became punishing. But the basic American belief that personal transformation might somehow save us has been hanging around for a very long time.
I will say, mildly, that the conference room never went on a #JOURNEY. The conference room stayed in the conference room.
So here is what the documentary is doing to me, on this gray Monday, while I sit on my sofa and work and watch a man in a wide tie explain the country I was born into.
It is showing me the first frame. The emotional climate. The atmosphere I have apparently been breathing my entire life without fully realizing it. It is showing me that I developed a very refined ability to observe my country coming apart, and that this ability — while excellent for essays, cultural criticism, and noticing when someone has overpaid for a boucle chair — does not necessarily prevent the country from continuing to come apart.
The people who developed different muscles in the same decade are, at the moment, the ones with the judges.
I do not really have a stirring ending for this. The stirring ending is the move Wolfe taught all of us. You write the elegant concluding paragraph and drop the hard final sentence and everybody feels briefly satisfied while the conference room keeps quietly scheduling meetings.
What I can tell you is that the reason I am not entirely losing my mind right now — the reason a lot of Gen X women are not entirely losing their minds right now — is not because we have survived chaos before and returned to normal afterward.
It is because, for most of our lives, this has felt like normal.
There is no memory of a calm America somewhere in the distance that we are trying to get back to. There is only this room. This atmosphere. This low-grade national panic humming softly in the background while people unload the dishwasher and answer emails and try to remember if they took the chicken out of the freezer.
Somewhere in the kitchen of my childhood, two small girls are still standing in a doorway watching their parents sing in matching robes. In a minute they are going to back away and go watch television. They are going to become extremely good at observation for the rest of their lives.
The man in the wide tie is still talking. My coffee is cold.
I am going to go make more coffee.
And that’s the way it is.
Yes!! This especially…about the business of becoming…it’s back in full effect🤦♀️
“The vocabulary changed. The branding improved. The price point became punishing. But the basic American belief that personal transformation might somehow save us has been hanging around for a very long time.”
There never was "good old days". Another myth/lie bites the dust.