Are Gen X-ers Really Over & Out Or Are We Just Getting Started? Interview With Journalist Stephen Armstrong

In this episode, we’re joined by the insightful journalist and author, Stephen Armstrong, for a candid conversation about Generation X - those of us sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and Millennials. 

Having seen Stephen’s article 50 And Out in The Independent, where he talked about the future of Gen X, we just knew we had to get him onto our podcast to dig deeper.

Stephen reveals the unique struggles Gen X men face as they hit midlife, from career crossroads to dealing with the weight of unspoken expectations.  We reminisce about the freedom and world of possibility that followed the end of the cold war, backpacking, music and of course, we can't talk about Gen X without touching on the island that defined a generation and inspired one of Stephen’s books - Ibiza. 

Tune in for an eye-opening, fun chat about where we are now, and what it means to be a Gen X-er in 2025.

Read Stephen's Article Here: 

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gen-x-work-jobs-b2727513.html

Connect with Stephen on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/stephenarmstronguk

Find Stephen's books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B0034O40M8

JOIN OUR IBIZA RETREAT: https://themidlifementors.com/retreats/

The Midlife Male Handbook available now:
Amazon
Waterstones
WH Smith

Please remember, if you find the show helpful or it makes you laugh, motivates and inspires you - please do like, share and rate us. We don't run ads on the podcast or for the show, because we want to keep it as enjoyable for you to listen as possible. So if you can help us spread the word, we'd be incredibly grateful.

For more information about The Midlife Mentors, click the below link:
https://linktr.ee/themidlifementors.com

Tik Tok: @themidlifementors
IG: @midlifementors

Transcript

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The Midlife Mentors: Hello and welcome to another episode of the midlife mentors with me James and me, Claire, I feel like, I haven't recorded A podcast for ages, but it's only a couple of weeks. It is only a couple of weeks you did. You flew solo for one of them, though, didn't you? I did fly solo. That's why it feels like a long time. Yeah, I've had a bit of a break. But what have we been up to, Mr. D. You've been like here, there, and everywhere. To be honest, you've been doing lots of corporate bits and pieces, corporate bits and pieces

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The Midlife Mentors: around Andropause men's health some other bits and bobs loads more coming up. We had a cocktail party on Sunday, which was lovely. Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: that's it, really. And also we have launched our retreat that we're running in Ibiza in October, and it's taking a slightly different slant to kind of like the wellness approach that we've done before for midlifers, and it's very much about what's next for you, because you've done a lot. But you're not done yet. So it's about really us taking you through a journey of discovering what's working and what's not, and I'll put the link

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The Midlife Mentors: for that in the show notes. We've already got some bookings. We're keeping it to a small group of 10 to keep it intimate, and for you to get the most out of it. But yeah, super excited to be back in befa. That'd be amazing. Right? We're super excited to have him here. So

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The Midlife Mentors: today we're going to be talking all things. Gen. X. And maybe a little bit of Ib. You know. Listen. We love talking about Gen. X. So we have author and journalist, Stephen Armstrong joining us. Welcome, Stephen.

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Stephen Armstrong: Thank you very much. Hello.

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The Midlife Mentors: Hello and like, let's explain why why you've written a few articles around the. I guess we call it the Gen. X. Experience. But I think, the one we most recently was. It was in the Independent here in Uk. 50 and out, I think, was the title.

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Stephen Armstrong: That was not my chosen title. But yes, that was the article. Yeah, yes, that means

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Stephen Armstrong: never write the headlines. That's always the Freelance journalist defense. I never write the headlines.

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The Midlife Mentors: It's quite quite a good catchy title to be honest. Because the gist of your article was this is something. We've talked about on previous podcasts. And we talk about all the time with our friends is like Gen. X. We were promised so much, and it's been failed to be delivered and and we are almost like this forgotten generation. A conversation that we certainly had in the past is, you know.

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The Midlife Mentors: we were hot for a while when we're maybe in our twenties. And then advertisers and marketers. They focus on baby boomers. They focus on millennials. I focus on Gen. Z. None of them care about Gen. X. It was how it feels. And I wonder if that just feels like that, because we are Gen. X. But anyway.

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The Midlife Mentors: over to you, Stephen, what do.

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Stephen Armstrong: Well, I think that it is not. I think this is a bona fide thing, and I'll tell you 2 reasons why I think it's a bona fide thing. If you are wandering around Youtube of an afternoon. And you are curious. There is an advert called The Generation Gap by the Australian lamb commercial organization. It's 2024 commercial, and it is an advert which shows the 4 generations

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Stephen Armstrong: on separate parts of a splitting apart continent being torn apart from each other, and the solution, of course, is Australian lamb that brings them back together. What they do is they pastiche each generation? So they pastiche the boomers. They pastiche the millennials.

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Stephen Armstrong: and they pass street past these Gen. Z. And then they go to Gen. X's. And there's a some gen expert goes, I've got something to. And then they cut away. So that's how they see and around the time that I saw that I was interviewing a guy who used to do the social media for Ryanair.

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The Midlife Mentors: But I don't know if you've seen social media Friday. It's hilarious, so brilliant.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah. So you know one. The most obvious one is some guy says, listen, Ryanair, I understand random seating allocation. But could you not put me and my girlfriend together, and the Twitter feedback is you do not understand Random seating allocation. So he's the guy that came up with that with that strategy. And in our conversation we was talking, and he started talking through the generations and what they want and what they are. And he just skipped past Gen. X. Completely.

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Stephen Armstrong: And I said, Well, well, what about Gen. X.

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Stephen Armstrong: And he said, Oh, yeah, the

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Stephen Armstrong: he didn't call us the Silent Generation, because that was the immediate post-war generation. But maybe it was the silent generation or the quiet generation. Yeah, you don't do anything on the Gen. X. Don't do anything on social media. The thing about Gen. X. Is they are terrified of getting into some kind of Twitter war with someone they're all just like, Oh, I'm not quite sure about this whole scenario, so I'm not going to get involved. Let the boomers and the millennials fight it out, and I'll just.

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Stephen Armstrong: But the millennials are terrified of getting into an argument with someone from Gen. X. Because at some point someone from Gen. X. Will say to them.

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Stephen Armstrong: Well, which book would you recommend? I read on that or something.

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Stephen Armstrong: So he says, we're very, very quiet, but no one really wants to talk to us, because we have a whole different approach to negotiating with people, because we're very, very specific, very different generation. And so he would. He would pick us out. But also he'd say that we're quite hard to reach on social media because we're not.

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Stephen Armstrong: We're extremely, I don't know, and I'm sure that by the very nature of the people that I'm talking with right now that it's probably a very socially media, active group of people. But he was saying that as a rule, as a generation. We're quite. We're quite hovery, quite observy on social media. We don't really get involved because we don't. We don't want to get into any trouble. I can see the way both of you are going. We don't agree with either of you. Let's just not say anything.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, do. They were quite private.

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The Midlife Mentors: I yeah, I I would say that just word popped into my mind because I actually

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The Midlife Mentors: it might be. I mean, we need to be careful that we don't generalize right? But I I personally, James, doesn't get involved in any arguments on social media or Twitter or anything like that, because I'm just like I just haven't got the energy. It's so boring. And actually, I want to keep that part of my life very separate. I'm quite private.

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Stephen Armstrong: This is, I mean, this would play into exactly what he's saying. But I mean, I also think that I mean, I don't know about you guys that you're when you go to Ibiza you go for a healthy retreats, and I think that's very admirable.

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The Midlife Mentors: It hasn't always been the case, for James has it.

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Stephen Armstrong: But I think that there's a particular point in a large, certainly the Uk. Gen. X. Experience. Where we were. We were. We badly behaved in a way that didn't really hurt anyone, I would hope. And the idea that that would appear sprawled across Facebook absolutely petrifies us. The concept of having your youth played out on social media. Just seems so chilling to so many. Gen. X's. What that field that gun no way.

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Stephen Armstrong: I don't think we ever bought into it.

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The Midlife Mentors: No, I think you're right. And I think also, culturally, you know, we were brought up like that very kind of like. It's not good to be a show off, you know. Be humble, don't don't brag, whereas social media is the opposite. It's all about. This is why you've got. You know people with 0 talent. Now we've got tiktok followings in the millions because they're like, Well, where's the cult? Where's the filter, though? Because you shouldn't, you shouldn't be producing this content. You've got no talent, and no one should be watching it. But they are. Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: That's why podcasts are good for us, because we like to sit around and have a chat and try and work things out. We're just not very good at like. This is quite a complicated subject. I'm not sure it's a hashtag, so.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: And and the other final point I'd make about that is is the this is this is, I think, other people. I'm not the 1st person to have said this, but I think it's

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Stephen Armstrong: I like to think I know for myself, just as we all do in Gen. X. We all like to think we notice things for ourselves, but we also had that we were in that unfortunate position, and this I'm only speaking for myself.

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Stephen Armstrong: where on Sundays my parents would go to the pub for lunch, and they would take me and my brother, and we would sit in the car park with a bottle of coke and a packet of crisps until they'd finished drinking in the pub at lunchtime.

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Stephen Armstrong: and then, when I got to be a parent, I had to take my kids to a fun pub with a slide and a high quality garden, and I had to spend the whole of my time at the pub playing with my daughters on the slide.

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Stephen Armstrong: I never got to choose the pub, and I found that this is this is not, I mean, not unique in this, that there is a point in which the boomers that our kid everyone tells us we never, really ever got the chance to tell you what to do. So what we did is we went off and did it all by ourselves in the corner, and we don't really want to tell anyone much about it.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that. Yeah. And it's also just going back to. I did a place the other day about famous for nothing, you know, and I think that I still I still can't get my head, but more, maybe, like my heart around the fact that there are people out there spouting off absolute bollocks, which is utterly dangerous. They have no qualifications, and no one's going

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The Midlife Mentors: hang on a minute.

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The Midlife Mentors: should I, you know. Maybe I should use some of my, you know cognition here and think

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The Midlife Mentors: qualifications she's got rather than just following her aimlessly, like what? And her telling me that I should be doing this diet because it really worked for her. You're like, where's where's people's

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The Midlife Mentors: and thinking process around that? And I think for us, Gen. Xers, I still can't get my head around the fact that all of these people have become famous just because they're good in front of the camera, and then they do great posts. That's it.

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Stephen Armstrong: I mean you look, you both look younger than me, and you both look a lot healthier than me again. This could be because you live a very healthy lifestyle, and didn't involve yourself. But I was growing up in the eighties, and at that point the qualifications for fame were by and large, a really aggressive reluctance to be famous, and the concept of selling out was really really powerful. The idea that you

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Stephen Armstrong: were famous on the back of no talent was just despicable. I mean, the really really famous stars would be the ones who are actually quite rude about fame. I remember, like some of the people I really love like

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Stephen Armstrong: so true.

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Stephen Armstrong: or the Dexes, whatever they'd go on top of the Pops, and they wouldn't mind, because this is stupid the whole, this whole sort of despair of fame culture that our generation venerated. We venerated the kind of people who thought fame was stupid, and that this is not serious. And so that's, I think, also, our Pop culture was very

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Stephen Armstrong: passionate and small. P. Political and very opinionated, and all of the people that I really related to whether they're people who made films, or whether they wrote for the Nme. Or whether they played music or whatever they did like. They had a really had something to say, and they said it was a long term thing, but they didn't do it to be famous. I mean, they were hypercritical of people who just wanted to be famous.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, I think that's true. I was saying this the other day. We have these conversations. Between ourselves, it's nice to have someone else to have the conversation with back in our day. People who were famous were generally they were famous because they had a talent. They were a talented musician. They were an amazing actor. They happened to be very good looking, and became a supermodel, but they had a definable talent, and that's the reason that they were famous, whereas now

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The Midlife Mentors: people are just famous for being famous. You see, these like celebrity reality shows. And it's it's it's the celebrities in inverted commas are people of other reality shows who came from another reality. But you've never even heard of them. They've got no talent at all, and you're like, and what I think what's sad is I'm going a bit off topic here. What you hear when you go into schools is, you know, when you apparently. Now, if you ask, children, what do you want to be when you grow up? It's just like, I want to be famous.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, if you follow up with like, but for what they just go just just famous. I don't. I don't know for what a Youtube star we've.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah. And I mean, it's

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Stephen Armstrong: it, just it was something it's hard for for anyone who might be listening to this, who's not our generation. And and I'm I'm aware that when people from Gen. X. Get to sit around and talk, we can be really tiresome. But I mean, I.

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The Midlife Mentors: I know that.

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Stephen Armstrong: We are my favorite people. It is that thing that you don't quite understand what it's like when the people who you venerated for being famous, were scornful about the concept of fame, and felt that talent, even having talent, was something that you ought to preserve and not sell out the concept of selling out was so significant when I was growing up. I mean God, I remember when Adam Ant sold out like I mean, what on earth

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Stephen Armstrong: sold out like you can't like him anymore. We invented a form of cancel culture which is the Sellout culture like, yeah, I'm going to buy that. He was too famous, you know. It was kind of. It's a.

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The Midlife Mentors: Bye.

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Stephen Armstrong: Weird culture that we came.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah. And we said also the other day, you know, like some of these things that you that I've seen on Tiktok

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The Midlife Mentors: before, I mean, I don't. There's a lot of like piss. Take things I see on Facebook. What's his name? Illegal and something. Anyway, there's this piss take guy, so he takes stuff off of Tiktok from like the Gen. X's sorry the Gen. Z. Or the millennials and then he takes the piss out of them. It's very, very funny. But he there was these, this group of lads getting off the tube and like

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The Midlife Mentors: flicking their hair and like posing as they got off the tube, and we were like, if any of our mates, when we were that age saw us do that.

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The Midlife Mentors: we would have been like we would have been bullied. Basically, I'm not saying that's a good thing. But we would have been like, you're going to get a slap, mate. This is so embarrassing.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, I. The word poser was such a potent word when I was growing up.

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The Midlife Mentors: It was a really, it was really negative one.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah, really, it was the worst. One night I was at a club. I can't remember when it was. Must have been like late nineties, and I had, through a dint of good fortune and a generous girlfriend, acquired myself a Tom Ford Gucci shirt. That was the only one I ever.

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The Midlife Mentors: Oh, I oh.

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Stephen Armstrong: My God! Tom Ford cut shirts for men! He made us look beautiful, and I was just sort of standing in the club, and I was thinking to myself, this is an amazing shirt. I look pretty fucking good in this shirt. I really do. I was just leaning there just thinking about. I wasn't saying anything. I wasn't doing anything. I was just thinking about how good my shirt looked.

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Stephen Armstrong: and this woman went past. I didn't notice her, but she just whispered in my ear, still posing.

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The Midlife Mentors: Oh! What!

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Stephen Armstrong: By the time I turned around she'd gone, but she destroyed me.

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Stephen Armstrong: And that's just a very gender racial thing like these.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, I know. But even though you just said Diss, you do realize that's like a nineties phrase, don't you? Yeah, let's talk about where it's gone wrong for our generation, because here's the thing. Most of us, probably, like our early childhood, being the seventies, which, by all accounts, was a grim time. But as kids, you don't really remember that aspect of it. So we grew up really in the eighties, which were amazing.

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The Midlife Mentors: Great music, great fashion, great culture. I'm talking about the Uk here and then into the nineties, which was also incredibly incredible. Musically, culturally, the Uk was a real powerhouse. We had rave culture. Then we had, like, you know, Brit, pop creative. And I think when we looked ahead and you referenced this in your article, actually, that

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The Midlife Mentors: anything was possible, and you could genuinely have some sort of career. Okay, you weren't going to make Megabucks, but doing something creative in those creative fields. Yeah. And now

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The Midlife Mentors: that's almost impossible. And I feel like our generation.

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The Midlife Mentors: if I think about it, feel a little bit betrayed because no one reads magazines anymore. Everything's digital, disposable, the threshold to entry stuff. So you know, when I started out as a music journalist, it was like.

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The Midlife Mentors: Write your thing. Send it off. Send it off. Send it off, and you literally hundreds of that. But now people just like I'm putting it out there. And it's it's yeah. It's where did it go wrong for us.

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Stephen Armstrong: I mean, it's interesting. I tell you it's probably finished now. It's the 18.th Yeah, unfortunately, it's finished now. But there was an exhibition at the portrait gallery, I think of covers of the face magazine, and I was there for a day, and I was watching the people going around, and there were a lot of people much younger Gen. Z. People.

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Stephen Armstrong: and the the awe with which they encountered the imagery and the concept of the face magazine, and I heard 2 girls going past me, and they walked into the nineties room, and they looked around at all the covers of the nineties, and one of them said to the other, Wow.

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Stephen Armstrong: this is what Cool was. And it was just this kind of thing where there was this, this

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Stephen Armstrong: I think there was something valuable about the nature of the culture that came from the eighties and nineties experience. Now, of course, the problem with cool culture is also this. It comes alongside uncool, and therefore it's easy to be told to. Are you still posing, you fool? Because we walked a very fine line. But I think that we for a start. I don't think we had the same dreams as the previous generation, partly because I think I can speak for myself.

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Stephen Armstrong: I spent most of the 19 eighties working, broadly speaking, on the principle that I would die in a nuclear war. I mean, I was shown threads. I was shown this I was shown that I expected my death to be the 4 min warning, and I would die of virgin. So that was a big problem for me.

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Stephen Armstrong: and then 92, well, 91, 92 that stopped, and

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Stephen Armstrong: 2,001. It started again. So we had 10 years where you could go anywhere and do anything, and no one wanted to kill you, which was just unbelievable. The freedom that decade gave us, who had time to plan a career, who had time to think through what was going on like we were just like, because this is bound to be going on forever. Because look at the amazing freedom.

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Stephen Armstrong: and plus people kept chucking stuff at us like, have you had a pompire that you go? Oh, this looks good, and that's gone. Have you had this. This looks, DVD, okay, CD-ROM Philips, CD, ROM, plus. All of these technologies were being.

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The Midlife Mentors: You need this? Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: We? And we just got tech after tech after tech every year. Oh, the Internet. And yeah, the Internet, there's another interesting thing, that's all be that'll be gone in a year's time, just like the rest of them. And then suddenly we kind of screech to a halt like wile E coyote running off the edge of the cliff in the roadrun. And we look down. We go. Wait a minute.

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Stephen Armstrong: The Internet's really here, and so I don't think we took it seriously for a long time we didn't understand it. We were the people. A lot of my friends did a little bit of tomfoolery around the.com boom where they didn't understand what the Internet was for.

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Stephen Armstrong: And they went into things. That idea of what it's the Internet. There needs to be something you can do. Maybe we just set something up, and eventually it'll make money. And no one quite realized. And then younger people came along and said, No.

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Stephen Armstrong: what this is. It's a way for you to meet people and have sex with them, to watch people having sex or to buy stuff. It's what people always do. They talk to each other, try to have sex with each other, watch people have sex buy stuff. That's it. And then so you get social media and you get e-commerce. And we missed that we were doing these really complicated, like blue.com kind of nonsense we just. We didn't like. We tried to apply what we were used to onto the Internet. And then suddenly, you realize that you can't those jobs our jobs have gone. But I

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Stephen Armstrong: I think for a long time we didn't care. I don't think, because I don't think any of us really want to be Mark Zuckerberg. I don't think I mean it's not

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Stephen Armstrong: like I don't envy that lifestyle. It's just they seem like weird, dead people who are in charge of billions. It's like no one goes. Oh, God! I wish I was a coder! It's no, that's never what we wanted to do. So it's this weird situation where the world that we dreamed of vanished. We didn't fight too hard for it. And the New World jealous of this, it's just like, do you know what used to be beautiful back then I wonder how that's going to work out.

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Stephen Armstrong: But we got. I think we get we get again

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Stephen Armstrong: one. And I know that what we're doing is we sound like we're moaning.

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Stephen Armstrong: But I think there's something beautiful about the Gen. X's that I know that which is. There is this kind of innate curiosity and goodwill that we generally have. I mean, I don't hear people.

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Stephen Armstrong: That piece sounded like it was a little bit moany.

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Stephen Armstrong: but actually, most of the people I spoke to who were talking about their jobs going. They weren't boomer angry. They weren't so Brexit angry. They were kind of, you know. Oh, well, that's.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: It's kind of it's we're not. Well, we had a good 20 years. It was quite fun, wasn't it? Now let's see how we can raise our kids. And it's really strange.

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Stephen Armstrong: I have a group of friends. I have a group of 7 male friends who.

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Stephen Armstrong: when I went to my secondary school, my comprehensive secondary school in South London. It wasn't a crack, riddled school, it was a but it was a. It wasn't a great comp. It wasn't a bad comp. It was all right.

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Stephen Armstrong: This is when it was still, like various classes gathered together on the playground, and if I introduce you to me and those 7 friends when we were 1617, you would say, these men are terrible, terrible people. Probably the worst thing that could happen to women. Certainly the worst thing that could happen to children, and they would amount to nothing.

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Stephen Armstrong: And what one of the things I've noticed that I think is really interesting, and I'm kind of proud of all of them is that we all went into marriages which, for various reasons, fell apart for better or for worse, and all of the men have followed their children around the country. So I've got a guy in the Isle of Wight, a guy in Ireland, a guy in the sunset a guy in Britain, as soon as they became fathers, and what they did is they did that becoming a father became more important

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Stephen Armstrong: than

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Stephen Armstrong: staying and pushing your career than fighting for your house than being fathers for justice. They they. They took a different approach to things like fatherhood, to things like caring, as Gen. X's things, like looking after someone in a way, created the potential for all the chit chat that we have now about hair care products for young men, because there was a sense of moving away from that that old idea of masculinity which is, we all the men sit in the pub and complain about women and work. We sort of got rid of that, and then.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, it's true.

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Stephen Armstrong: You often do what you want with this. If you want Gen. Z. Millennials is just going to try and be dads now, or I can't speak to all the men in the world. But

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Stephen Armstrong: That's what I,

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Stephen Armstrong: in a way, was that there's a very different. We don't need Jordan Peterson's 12 rules. We kind of know

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Stephen Armstrong: what to do. Really.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, it's really interesting, because I always think we were also like the self-help generation as well. You know, the baby boomers. They they were all kind of like, get the job. And then we were like, No, no, there's something more which we kind of alluded to. There's something more, you know we had rave culture. We had all of it. It was just amazing, and our minds were just blown and we were free.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: But then that kind of led to the whole self-development thing, and wanting to be more self-actualized, I suppose.

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The Midlife Mentors: but I also.

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Stephen Armstrong: I think, yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: one thing about that. And I'm aware that this is a mentoring. Podcast. And I think that the question is, what can you learn from that? I suppose, to a degree, what can you learn from a generation

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Stephen Armstrong: that one of our anthems was clearly everybody's free to do what they want. I mean, we, that concept of freedom was really critical to us, and it still is, I think. And I think that's perhaps why we aren't coders, and why we aren't buying into certain kinds of things is because we still value. There's a lot of freelancing. There's a lot of doing our own thing, which is again quite a punk. Ethos like, set up your own podcast

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Stephen Armstrong: set up your own coaching business, do quite well out of it.

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Stephen Armstrong: I think that when I look at the men I know who are uncertain in life now, they're probably the ones who took their father's roots and went for job after job after job after job and reached the point where this is definitely happening to a lot of men I know is that they are becoming

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Stephen Armstrong: not

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Stephen Armstrong: not employable. I mean, I know guys who've gone through 2 or 3 jobs in their fifties. Other guys have been unemployed for a long time. Yeah, they're particularly resentful about it. Oddly, oddly, not that angry just kind of well, let's keep going. Let's try what we do. But there is that there is sort of a there's a lot of kind of punk entrepreneur punk entrepreneurialism that our generation took, which was, well, we're gonna be free. We're going to do it. We're going to set it up. We're going to make it work. We're going to try it. We'll give it a bash.

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Stephen Armstrong: but we don't want it to be Silicon Valley. Try and fail, and try and fail and make a million. We'll just

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Stephen Armstrong: do it. See what it's like.

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The Midlife Mentors: And have fun doing it. I think you're right. And I think we're going to see more of that, because the thing you alluded to there. Yeah, I know from from my peer group guys that went down that path. But again, there is. There is almost that betrayal there, because when our fathers went into jobs. It was kind of like you went to the job, and you stayed there to your pension, and some people did that of our generation believing the same thing. But of course, the whole work working world changed as well. It's just like, thanks. We don't need you anymore. And then there's something like, Oh.

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The Midlife Mentors: I'm I'm 50. I'm 55 here. Can I get a job with you? And they're like, no, I've just seen your date of birth on the Cv, and yeah, it's interesting.

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Stephen Armstrong: But I think the the

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Stephen Armstrong: what's interesting is that the place that I currently work? I sit in a position where I've been very lucky to work here. It's a media organization. And

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Stephen Armstrong: I think the knowledge and experience we're in a, we're an interesting generation because we have a level of knowledge, a level of experience, a level of desire for freedom, and a level of curiosity, still a level of lack of huge resentfulness, I think, which means that.

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Stephen Armstrong: Whoa! I do beg your pardon. Let me start that again, if can you edit that.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: Sorry someone rang me on my on my computer.

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The Midlife Mentors: Bye.

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Stephen Armstrong: If you heard it.

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The Midlife Mentors: And I'll find it.

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Stephen Armstrong: So I think that what we do have is this, we, we the the thing that we have to offer? I'm still. I'm working well, I'm freelance. But I'm working a lot at an organization where a lot of people are very young and

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Stephen Armstrong: provided I think that we keep true to our generation. X. Searching for free themselves and don't fall into the boomer.

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Stephen Armstrong: You know, red in the face. Then actually, people really engage we've got a lot to offer and setting setting up by yourself, using the things you know, the things you understand. I think we can be real valuable players in the world. I mean, I think that your your podcast and your coaching business is a real example. I mean, it's, it's, it's taking that. You can't do that when you're 20,

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Stephen Armstrong: you can't do it when you're 78. This is exactly the right age to be going to people. Listen, tell you what we've learned from life. And also

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Stephen Armstrong: let's go to Ibiza. It's like great plan. What a great plan.

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The Midlife Mentors: I know, and then.

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Stephen Armstrong: Why should you not do? Why shouldn't anyone.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, we're free to do what we want to do. Yeah, yeah. And we still feel like that.

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Stephen Armstrong: What do you like doing? Well, why don't you give it a go now? I mean, you've hit this age. You've hit 50. Maybe you're not going to be the middle manager for plugs and sockets. What do you like? Give it a go? Because that's your generation. That's what we did.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: Give it a go.

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The Midlife Mentors: That's it. We did. We gave it a go, and that's what I mean. We believed anything was possible. We'd seen we lived up in the spectre, you know, under the shadow of the Cold War. And then that finish and the world is a really positive place for like a decade. Yeah. And it was. It's really funny that you should say that because I do always forget that that we we did feel like we were going to die. Yes, like it was literally like, I remember it was, Yeah, you are not going to. The world is going to go, I remember, like, Oh, this could be the start of the end. Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: Then, when we then, when we didn't die, and that all cleared up, it was almost like, Oh, my goodness! And I think that's that's definitely you've just kind of reminded me when you said that right at the beginning of the podcast. That sense of, oh, okay, well, if I'm not dead, anything's possible.

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Stephen Armstrong: And then we we started traveling around the world. We may have been slightly irritated.

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The Midlife Mentors: Great.

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Stephen Armstrong: Backpackers.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yes, not have

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Stephen Armstrong: mobile phones. That meant we could phone home. So when we were out there in the world, we had to improvise as we went around. I mean, this is the thing it's like, if you ever did go out into the world in the nineties and celebrate this great opportunity. You'd find yourself in some village where you had literally no way of communicating your existence to anybody, and you made it work. You got by.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yes.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: England.

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The Midlife Mentors: Your dog eared copy of Lonely Planet. Yeah, you'll laugh. Actually, Steven, we went to the Us a couple of years ago, and we traveled around a little bit, and we just refused to do on our mobile phone. So we bought lonely planets. And we were like, yes, it's like the old days.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah. And it's, I think. But that's a great. What we didn't think

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Stephen Armstrong: at the time was that this is an amazing life skill to go through

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Stephen Armstrong: these entirely different cultures and model it. I mean, look.

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Stephen Armstrong: race across the world, race across the world is essentially a TV program about what it was like to be Jen Hex in the 19.

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The Midlife Mentors: That's why it's our favorite program. Yeah, I love watching that we love it. And you're right. It is like how we traveled in the no phone, no money. We've applied for it.

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Stephen Armstrong: But again.

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Stephen Armstrong: the thing is we we will never, ever give up. I mean, I think that's the other thing about genetics is that I know people who who, I'm sure, if it's what you want to do, you'll apply again. You'll get on it because we are a dogged, fucking generation.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: No one gave us anything, nobody.

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The Midlife Mentors: Anyway, we'll take our own camera, Steven, you can come with us. You can.

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Stephen Armstrong: Let's do.

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Stephen Armstrong: And why not? This is how we become youtubers.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, that's true. This has been fascinating. But before we wrap it up I'm just gonna ask about White Island and your ibis connection.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: You've written an amazing book, and I read it. I read it a few years ago, which is kind of about the history of the island of Ibiza. What inspired you to write that.

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Stephen Armstrong: So again for your younger listeners. This won't mean anything, but there used to be a club on the island called Manumission, and the 4 people who ran that club, 4 mancunians there was. 2 of them had sex on stage at about 2 o'clock in the morning in the manumission sex shows, and it was like a big.

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Stephen Armstrong: It was amazing. Everyone was off their nuts, and this kind of sex show took place on stage, and it was just. It's hard to explain. It now. Sounds a bit creepy and seedy when I explained, but it wasn't. It was amazing. The club was huge. There was a swimming pool. It was.

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The Midlife Mentors: Surprising, yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: And then I found out that the

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Stephen Armstrong: there are 2 reasons for this. One is that the name of the island Ibiza is named after the Phoenician god of Dance Bez, and I loved that. So that means in the roots of the island the naming of the island by the Phoenicians. 4,000 years earlier they'd put dance. And then the next people came along with the Carthaginians, and they made the island sacred to their goddess Tanit, and Tanit was the goddess of sex and war.

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Stephen Armstrong: and the high sort of festival once a year in her temple, would have the high priest and the high priestess having sex on the altar, and I thought, there is something about this island that is about dancing and sex, and getting away from it and Bohemianism. And when you look at the history of Ibiza, that's

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Stephen Armstrong: what everybody has done for 4,000 years. Whether it was the ancient Romans, whether it was the Bohemians in the sixties, whether it you know, the artists in the early 20th century.

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Stephen Armstrong: when Ferdinand and Isabella exiled the Jews from Spain or killed them, and in Majorca, and they're the other 2 pole kinds. Anyway, they had their land stolen, and whatever in Ibiza they were sheltered and looked after, and they're still strong part of the I mean, it's just this island of

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Stephen Armstrong: welcoming weirdos and celebrating.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: Fun, and it just felt that selling the idea that this happened over 4,000 years in one place. And what an amazing place it would be if that was real. And here it really is just felt like worthwhile process.

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The Midlife Mentors: I love that. It's a great book, listeners. But we'll put the link for it in the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we will. I just want to ask one other question. Sorry? Sorry, because I know that. Obviously, Steven, you said about, I do want to just speak about this.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yes.

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The Midlife Mentors: You mentioned before we started recording, actually, that you focus on like Gen. X men. And I just wanted to speak about that, because obviously, that's what James does with his book, with andropause and speaking about men's midlife, men's mental health and stuff. And I just want to know what your thoughts are really around midlife men, and some of the

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The Midlife Mentors: I don't know, like some of the stuff that's come up for you and some of the insights you might have found around Gen. X. Men, because they're quite a funny breed, I think, is the term that you used before we came and recorded.

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Stephen Armstrong: We are. I mean, I think

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Stephen Armstrong: I think that we okay, I'll illustrate what I mean through a story which is the story of the 7. Actually, the story of the 7 men that I was speaking about earlier, which is why it's perhaps front of mind

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Stephen Armstrong: is that a very eccentric friend of mine called Paul, died recently. He died of a heart attack. He had health concerns which he ignored because he was that kind of guy because Gen. X. Men. We don't go to the doctor, and he was the guy, in fact, had gone to the Isle of Wight to be with his daughter when his daughter's mother didn't really want him to be involved. But he stayed involved, and he worked hard, worked hard to stay involved.

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Stephen Armstrong: and we all admired him for that. But when we got there and we were at the funeral his sister started talking to us, and she started talking to us about how lonely Paul was on that island, and how isolated he felt, and how he was looking forward to a plan that we were going to have to get together once a year we would get together for a drink, and I think that we

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Stephen Armstrong: don't. We tend to when we talk about people being lonely, men being lonely and stuff it tends. We tend to think of perhaps pensioners or but but I think there's a great well of

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Stephen Armstrong: loneliness and mental health concerns that Gen. X. Men have. The one thing that I fear we inherited from our fathers

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Stephen Armstrong: was an inability to

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Stephen Armstrong: still an inability to talk about that, and an inability to be open about that. And I think that wrecks us. I think that we are. We've always been a generation that think we're experiencing this for the 1st time, and no one else has ever felt it like this before. And that's sometimes true, and it sometimes isn't. And I think that we

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Stephen Armstrong: find connecting as men with other men. We connect over guitar solos and you know, whatever it is, whether it's your team or your or your car, or your weather, or whatever. But we. We talk a lot. Probably we talk more than our fathers talked, but we don't really hit the stuff, and so when we are facing

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Stephen Armstrong: my friend. Ed once did a beautiful thing for me, but it was all he could do, which is, when my heart was broken by someone leaving me, and it was Valentine's day, and he sent me a handmade card which said to Steve, Love from all the girls, it was a beautiful thing to do.

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Stephen Armstrong: but we never had a conversation about me being heartbroken. What he did is, he knew I was heartbroken, and he reached out as hard as he could.

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Stephen Armstrong: but we just couldn't get over that hump of mate. I'm really fucked about this. I just want to talk about this, and then I want to talk about it again tomorrow, and you know what I want to talk about it, probably for the next 6 months. Is that okay? And I would never do that. I would still never do that. And I think that's that's that's something that we've

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Stephen Armstrong: we're stuck with. Perhaps.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I'd agree with that. Thanks, thanks for sharing that.

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Stephen Armstrong: No, I mean, I'm I'm an exception on that. And my mum was a psychologist. So I've been. I'm if anything, over sharing so. But.

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The Midlife Mentors: No, I love that. I love that. I think it's a really, you know, a great answer to my question, something that you see a lot. I see it a lot. Men, men just growing increasingly isolated as they age. You know. Their social networks get smaller and smaller and smaller. It starts to feel like more and more of an effort to go out. So they stop. And then suddenly they feel very, very lonely, and because.

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Stephen Armstrong: We're not particularly digitally comfortable.

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Stephen Armstrong: We don't see online as a place to live. We live.

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The Midlife Mentors: Time.

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Stephen Armstrong: Real world in the, you know.

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Stephen Armstrong: and if you, if you, if your networks fall apart, but often with you 2 are still together, but I mean, you'd like if couples split quite often, you suddenly find your wife was the person who organizes the social life, and so we and we find it quite hard to reach out, and I think that's.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: But that's what will get us in the end. I think Gen. X. Meant is going to be heart attacks and loneliness.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, I think you're right. It's really yeah. And I think I wanted to speak to that because it's just nice to hear, not nice, obviously, because of what we're actually discussing. But it's good, I think, to

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The Midlife Mentors: to keep talking about stuff like that with midlife men, because I see I see it with a lot of my female clients. You know. I have them say they've isolated themselves. They, their social networks are getting smaller. They yeah, they're just closing down, and they're not able to. And so the more that James and I, I suppose, can talk about it from that male and female perspective

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The Midlife Mentors: the better, because you've obviously got your book out, and I sometimes think it's for us women to, I suppose, also have those conversations with with their partners I don't know. And and sometimes I think that the woman in the relationship can play a part, and maybe giving the guy a slight, subtle nudge.

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Stephen Armstrong: I think so. I think.

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The Midlife Mentors: There you go see your friends won't give.

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: Give Steve a call, you know.

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Stephen Armstrong: I read a survey that men of our generation when we hit our, I think, 35, 40. We talk about our partner as our best friend, and I think there's something about this group of men that rely on women in a way.

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Stephen Armstrong: in a way that it's not. I mean, I don't want to place this. We place enough burdens on women in our time, but it's that thing that we do have a very. I think I think we have a better relationship than women with women than my father.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: And I think there is an equality to the discussion of those things. I think that, trusting the women in your life, whether they're your partners or your friends. Often I'm surprised to find that a lot of my male friends and I do as well actually have possibly more honest relationships or more honest conversations with the women we know, but actually, what.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, you were like, yeah, James, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Stephen Armstrong: Organisation called Men's Sheds, which does.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, they're amazing, aren't they?

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Stephen Armstrong: Yeah, but I think they are pitched slightly older. And I also think they're pitched at people who do woodworking and stuff like that. And for kind of the, you know, insolent punk, you know, like, we want to join a band, or we want to be in the Happy Mondays, or we want to go off and do a magazine like men's isn't quite right for us, and also we're not really joining people, so I don't quite know how that jump is made, how you how we build our gang again. I'm not sure.

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The Midlife Mentors: I know. I think that's the problem we need to. We need to solve, because something I see is like that men are crying out for community, but they're also scared to take the step to go into community. So it is a bit of a riddle, and I don't have the answer.

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Stephen Armstrong: Can solve it. I'm up for it. I mean just.

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The Midlife Mentors: You know.

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Stephen Armstrong: This is, this is where you will become the savior of our generation. So thank you.

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The Midlife Mentors: Well, thank you, Steven. This has been such such a.

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Stephen Armstrong: It's been great, but.

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The Midlife Mentors: For for ages.

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Stephen Armstrong: Good. I love it. Thank you.

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The Midlife Mentors: Thank you. Thank you. It's been really, really wonderful to talk to you about all that. And we have so many insights. And yeah, thank you, and we'll put all the details. We'll actually put a link to the article so you guys can read it as well. And any more details that Stephen wants us to share. But yeah, thank you so much.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah. And just be proud of Gen. X. We were the best. And we yay, what a great ending.