If you were a young, "alternative" kid in the early 1990s you had a free pass to do bugger all. University was the best place to drown in inertia - you could attend a lecture here and there and scrape by with a BA ("bugger all") and spend most of your time hunting out rare Steve Albini side projects on vinyl.
Nights were spent in a haze of cider and live music. Live venues abounded; dark and dirgy music spilling out of grimy bars as lank-haired kids queued to see their favourite Flying Nun bands. It was exciting, scary, fun and short-lived.
Generation X's midlife crisis isn't hard to spot: problem drinking, pill popping, dancing to Underworld in pine forests; we're growing old disgracefully.
As with many of my contemporaries, the ethos of the Slacker generation was branded on to my subconscious. As my 20s became my 30s I continued to embrace non-conformity, anti-capitalism, and a healthy disrespect for authority.
But as more of my friends acquired kids and well-paid jobs, the gilt edges of my idealism became tarnished.
Adulthood crept up slowly and I fought it for years. A friend of mine, upon seeing where I lived, exclaimed "you live like a student!" I was appalled but it was true. I was 35 at the time.
Resisting adulthood involved alcohol, night life, expensive travel and a lot of sleeping. When I moved into my flat in a central Auckland suburb there were a lot of people my age doing pretty much the same thing. When I left (10 years later) I was becoming the local weirdo in a street of rich, white people 10 years younger than me.
I started to ask myself 'how does a person who was raised to question authority, be pessimistic about the future, and celebrate oddness move happily into middle age with their values intact'?
So I resisted until I couldn't resist any more.
Pregnant at 43, adulthood finally caught up with me. I was transformed from the world's oldest adolescent to the world's oldest parent.
It hasn't been easy. I have a job and a nice house and a constant stress headache. Responsible adulthood is not something I ever thought I'd tackle, and I have to confess to the (recurrent) desire to run for the hills. But I haven't and I won't because I've grown up.
How did I get this way? And why are so many of my friends having the same issues?
American thinkers William Strauss and Neil Howe are best known for their work around generational theory. While their books Generation and The Fourth Turning were based on the history of the United States, their four-stage analysis is used to understand generational traits worldwide.
The archetype they use to describe Gen Xers is "the Nomad". Children of people raised in eras of social cohesion (in this example Baby Boomers in the late 40s and early 50s) Nomads are typified by their sense of alienation, their resistance to authority and individualism.
It's somewhat reductive (and Steve Bannon is one of Strauss and Howe's biggest fans so that's a mark against them) but it makes sense.
Children tend to rebel against their parents; Baby Boomer parents favoured conformity and stability, so their kids went for individualism and chaos. No great surprise there.
The threat of nuclear war also contributed to the overriding nihilism of my generation.
In 1983, at age 11, I had to sit through the horror The Day After at intermediate school. It remains the highest-watched television movie of all time - 100 million people in the US tuned into watch it.
Based on the lead up and aftermath of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, it was a nightmarish apocalyptic vision that was guaranteed to scare the bejesus out of such young kids.
Along with Mad Max, who rode through a post-nuclear wasteland throughout the late 70s and 80s, The Day After was a cultural touch point for a generation.
No wonder adulthood seemed like a pipedream for so many of us. But here we are, three decades on and the world is still - just - intact.
The same can't be said for our youth. Generation X's midlife crisis isn't hard to spot: problem drinking, pill popping, dancing to Underworld in pine forests; we're growing old disgracefully.
The only difference between our midlife crisis and that of our parents is that our behaviour hasn't actually changed. We're doing the same things, but can no longer get up in the morning.
It's hard being a 40- or 50-something in 2017, especially when Millenials are so clean and focused and assured. Cynicism is no longer cool in an era of social media, where everything's shiny and perfect and fresh.
But we still have each other and we still know how to party.
Our musical heroes are still in bands and we still flock to see them.
Mikey Havoc is back on mornings at BFM, Flying Nun is still going strong, and vinyl is undergoing a massive resurgence. E-books never took off and you can still pick up Camus paperbacks on the cheap.
It's a cliche, but time catches up with all of us.
We may have worse hangovers and less hair than our 20-year-old selves, but at least we lived through a time when music was great and rebellion was sexy.
I'd chose my middle-age over youth and Ed Sheeran any day.
