Gen Flex

This week on the Rich Spinster Podcast, the Rich Spinster is proudly claiming her place in Generation Flex, that sweet spot between younger Gen X and older Millennials, and making the case that we may have grown up during the best of both worlds. From life before social media took over everything to witnessing technology completely transform how we live, communicate, and connect…we really did have it good.

But nostalgia isn’t the only thing on the menu. RS gets into the importance of depth in relationships and why simply knowing someone for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean you truly know them. She also weighs in on her disappointment with Jasmine Crockett and a political reappearance nobody was prepared for: apparently, the dead has arisen, because Mitch McConnell has reemerged.

It’s nostalgia, relationships, politics, and a little resurrection, all in one episode. Just another week at Rich Spinster.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's just all about love and life and living and freedom. That's what that's what it's all about for me now. Welcome to the Rich Spencer Podcast. I took a little time off you all. I I took Labor Day off, and then my plan was to put out a podcast yesterday. It didn't work out that way. And you know what? I decided. I decided that it is perfectly okay to give myself grace. I'm just giving myself grace. There was nothing wrong. I the weather was beautiful. The weather is beautiful now in the Northeast. And I honestly felt too good. This is a labor of love. This does not feel like work to me. It doesn't feel like a burden. I'm always excited to record. But yesterday I just couldn't do it. And so I didn't do it. And that felt right. It was also really nice that a couple of people reached out to me and they said, wait a minute. Um I listened to your podcast on the way to work. What happened? Um, and I assured them, it is, it is coming, it is coming. So here is the Rich Spencer podcast. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend last week. And it was my birthday. My birthday was the day after Labor Day this year, and it felt uh I don't know, perfect. It was just perfect. You know, I actually woke up on my birthday and I was lying in bed and I started to cry. I cried off and on for a couple of hours that morning. Like I would just have memories that would flood me, and I got teary and I cried. And it wasn't sadness, it was all of this sort of unexpressed love that I have for myself, for my life, for the people in my life, for the people who have passed on. And I felt all this unexpressed love and it had nowhere to go except for through my eyes. And it just felt right. And then I I after that I continued with my mourning, and then I ended up just having the perfect birthday. It was perfect. Shh. I see dead people. Y'all, they have dug up the dead, they have rolled out Mitch McConnell after what three months? They rolled him out yesterday. Somebody please inform Mitch McConnell that he is dead. I don't think that he has been informed of this, but Mitch McConnell, you are in fact deceased. You have gone on to glory, you have crossed over to the other side. Mitch, you're dead. Okay? From ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We have already said the 23rd Psalm. And is he speaking? Is the dead man speaking? I have questions. When I saw Mitch McConnell yesterday, I didn't see much difference between Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. By the way, if Mitch McConnell is actually alive, meaning if there is actually a beating heart and a working brain in that wheelchair, I am quite sure that he is thinking, why the fuck am I still here? I'm absolutely confused as to why this is not a five alarm fire. So yeah, we got two dead men in like really powerful positions right now. I was also looking on the internet and I was seeing all this stuff about Generation X. So I'm a Generation Xer, but I consider myself Generation Flex. I feel like there's a big difference between Generation Xers and Generation Flexers. Generation Flexers are the younger generation Xers or the older millennials. Keep seeing all this stuff on the internet about all of this being boomers and the fault of boomers and generation Xers. It's not the fault of Generation Flexers. Not us. We had our shit together. Because you know what? We had to have our shit together. We had to have our shit together in the third grade. By the third grade, you were getting up by yourself from the alarm clock. And if you didn't get up, your ass was grass. Okay. You got up, you got dressed, you got to that damn bus stop, and you were in school prepared, on time, ready to go. If there was homework assignment due, you turned that shit in. If you did not turn it in, you got a zero. You couldn't make it up. There was pass or fail. That's it. There was no place in between. If you participated in something and you didn't win, guess what? You were a loser. You know, you just you lost, and that's okay because you can't win everything. We played outside. We had to call our friends on the phone, and sometimes their parents have to answer the phones. And so you had to know how to talk to the parent when they answered the phone. Hi, Mrs. Johnson. May I please speak with Michelle? That's how you did it. Okay? And if Michelle was busy and Ms. Johnson said that she would have Michelle call you back, don't you call Ms. Johnson's house five or six times waiting on Michelle to call back. You wait patiently for Michelle to call you back. And Michelle called you back when she could. But when Ms. Johnson needed to use the phone, Michelle had to hop her ass off that phone. We were not our parents' equals. They told us what to do. We had to deal with our feelings. We had to deal with disappointment. We had to deal with the heartbreak of betrayal. We had to deal with all of those things. We drank from the water hose. We had bobos in our hair. Okay. We had bobos in our hair. We had beads in our hair. And when we went to sleep, yes, that shit hurt. But you know what? It made you tougher and you understood that beauty is pain. Generation Flex, we were different. We also had hope. That's why I think it's such a flex now to be a part of that generation. Because Generation Flex, we had hope. We had dreams. We thought of the future. And it there was no doom scrolling. There was no such thing as doom scrolling because we didn't have the world in our hands. We only had the world at the tip of our fingers. And we wanted to reach out and touch it. We didn't really want to look like everyone else. We wanted to have our own thing. We wanted to be unique. I remember I was voted most unique in high school for our senior superlatives. And I was like, that is the coolest thing because that's what we wanted to be. We wanted to be ourselves. Or sometimes it was modeled after, you know, a fashion trend, but we wanted to put our little twist on it. We wanted to airbrush our jeans. We wanted to write our best friend's name on t-shirt so everybody in school knew who we were really rapping. You have no idea what it took to survive. You have no idea about the 90s. You weren't there. Y'all can't fuck with us. Bitch, I write in cursive. You guys, there's so much internet. There's just there's so much internet. And someone sent me a video, and she said, You've got to watch this video. It's going to make you cry. Every time I see it, I just burst into tears. Y'all, I don't need help crying. They want to share the most depressing shit. Like, look at this. It is so sad. Bitch, I don't want to be sad. I want to laugh. You want to send me something? Send me a joke and some get money oil. I'm in touch with my humanity already. I don't need tragedy as entertainment to get me in touch with my humanity. And what I definitely don't want to do is trauma bond with other people. Trust me, there's enough real shit to cry about. I mentioned this to um a friend of mine recently. And you know what I don't understand? Diet Coke. Have y'all had a Diet Coke? Listen, I tasted a Diet Coke this summer, and it was just a taste. It was just a sip of a Diet Coke. And I I kid you not, it was the worst thing. It was the worst thing that I had experienced in so long. I don't understand why you all are drinking that. I don't understand how it tastes good to you. And then uh on Facebook, my a couple of my friends on Facebook were telling me, oh, you have to get it from McDonald's. And then they were like, Yeah, you can get a Diet Coke and a quarter pounder with cheap. I was about shocked. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. In 2026, y'all are still eating hamburgers from McDonald's. Oh, that's brave. You can do anything. Your gut can take anything. You don't give a damn about Cyclospora. No, you're fine. You're probably eating lettuce all summer just without a care in the world. Because your stomach can take anything. It can take a little virus. I was blown away, but apparently the only place to get a Diet Coke is from McDonald's. Diet Coke people, they're serious about their Diet Coke. You can get Diet Coke jewelry. Like it's a thing. And I had no idea. Diet Coke people, they're up there with, I mean, they're they're basically a cult like MAGA. They were very serious about it because when I posted that I didn't understand Diet Coke, people were like wanting to convince me. It was almost like they were proselytizing. Like Jehovah's Witnesses, like, knock, knock, knock, bitch, let me tell you about Diet Coke. Jasmine Crockett. Jasmine Crockett honored Chris Brown with some sort of congressional award for his artistry. Chris Brown is a phenomenal artist. No one can deny how talented he is. But this was such a misstep. This was when I saw the video, so I heard about it, but I didn't actually believe that it was true. And then I saw the video. And I saw Jasmine coming out cute with her crop top and all of that. Like I thought she was okay. Okay, Jasmine at the Chris Brown concert. What are we doing here on stage? And then she honored him with an award. That is certainly a choice. It is certainly a choice to give an award to someone who has been accused of abuse many times. And I'm thinking about that choice and how that choice often speaks to how we as black women view black men and view ourselves. I look at dynamics in families, even. The women in the family will fall out, they will say horrible things about each other, they will gossip about each other, all of that. But no matter what the men in the family do, the women are always there to support. The women are always there to save them. This starts as babies, and they grow up with this level of protection. It protects them, but it doesn't protect other women. It doesn't protect other black women. And a lot of times, truth be told, a lot of black mothers make their black sons their husbands. They make their black sons the men of the house when they shouldn't be. Their role should be that of a child. Watch how how women, black women treat these black men. They don't raise them to be men, they raise them to be kings. And let me tell you about a king. Kings rule with absolute power. There's no room there for compassion, for humanity. It's absolute power, absolute control. Yield to my will. And when you see someone being raised as a king, you cannot be surprised when he treats everybody else like a pauper, including black women. So when I see somebody like Jasmine Crockett giving an award to a known abuser, I see this being played out on a larger scale. And it also prevents women from speaking up and telling the truth. How do you expect your daughter or your niece or whomever to tell the truth about something that has happened to her by a man she's not going to be believed and she's not going to be supported because he's a man, he's a black man. And she knows from a very young age where her place is. Where her place is in society and where her place is in the culture. And so I think what bothered me the most about Jasmine Crockett giving him that award on that stage, it was about all of the girls and women who are looking at that and who are saying or who will say, what happened to me does not matter. Look, he's still going to be successful, he's still going to be celebrated, and I am left here with these scars in silence. That's what happens when a culture, when a society centers men. So I personally was pissed the fuck off when I saw Jasmine Crockett do that. I actually really like Jasmine Crockett, and I think that her voice is really, was really necessary. But I don't know what we're turning into now. I really hope Jasmine Crockett doesn't go from being this powerful force in politics and in our community in a trusted voice. I hope she doesn't turn into someone who's just like doing red carpet at the BET Awards. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to see that. We have people who already do that and they do that well. But to have a strong political voice, to have a smart woman who knows the process, who can educate our people, who can be impactful, who should be talking about nothing but voting right now. And how do we get people to the polls and help helping them understand that this matters? Because if it didn't matter, they wouldn't be spending billions of dollars to prevent you from voting. To have her on stage presenting an award to Chris Brown, I felt was insulting. Y'all, I hate to fly, but what really puts fear in me when it comes to flying are people, are other human beings being next to them when they have no emotional regulation at all, or when they're just doing weird shit. I have seen so many videos in the past couple of weeks of people arguing on planes or fighting on planes. Then you have the guy from Wheel of Fortune. I guess he was the announcer from Wheel of Fortune, and he was in a whole pedo chat, chatting away on the plane. I don't even want to be near somebody like that. And then recently there was a guy on American Airlines who decided that he was gonna get butt booty ass naked on the plane and jerk off in front of everybody. Y'all, something's wrong with these motherfuckers. I think it comes from childhood. I just think a whole bunch of people were not raised right. We have adults acting like freaking toddlers when they don't get their way. And the rest of us are just looking and having to deal with these unregulated bitches. I miss the view I had of the world when I was like 15, 16. So when I was a kid, I went to the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice Peace Camp. And I was thrown into an environment with socially conscious kids and adults who were socially conscious and who were talking to us about our role in the world and how we could change the world and how we could fight for justice and how we could make changes in society by using our voice and not being afraid to stand up. It was it was life-changing for me. And I'm still in touch with some of the people from that camp. And when I think about that and I think about how I view the world, I really thought that my voice could make a difference. I thought that everybody had good inside of them. I thought that everybody at the core was good and decent, and all we had to do was to tap into that. I thought people genuinely cared about other people. I thought that we could get past divides in this country. I thought we could get past those. I truly was a dreamer. In fact, I had a shirt that said, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I was a dreamer in that way. I attended my first protests at 15 years old. I attended so many protests in Washington, DC, calling for peace and justice. And I thought all of those things would matter. I miss looking at other people and seeing innocence in them. When I look at other people now, it's like, motherfucker, who did you vote for? Hmm? I miss that kind of innocence that I fear that kids today are not growing up with. And yeah, it was innocence, but I think you need it. I think there has to be a sort of innocence in order to have hope. We had a better life experience. I'm glad that I'm the age that I am now on this planet. I am so glad to not be 20 now. No. And it has nothing to do with the fate of the earth or anything like that. It has to do with humanity and seeing humanity in other people. And I don't know where the fuck it has gone. So something interesting happened this week with my sorority sisters that I'm going to talk about briefly. We did this little thing in our chat where we listed 10 things about ourselves that the others didn't know. And it was so interesting getting those answers back and reading about these women that I am connected to but don't know very well. And then I thought about it as I was reading some of those things and sharing some of my things. Is like, how do we have relationships with people that we don't actually know? How does that, how is that created and how is that maintained? And I was looking at the answers that were coming back from some of them. Uh, and they were all pretty surface level things, like, oh, I can't swim, or you know, stuff like that. It wasn't very deep. But I wondered how is it that you can talk to people all of the time and never connect with them? And I feel like we have created a society where that happens. We talk to people all of the time, whether via text or internet. And there is no depth there, there is no sharing there, there is no growth there. If you know someone for let's say 15, 20 years, and you talk to them regularly for 15 or 20 years, why don't you know they have a brother? That's weird to me. Is it is it me? That's weird to me. But as I was thinking more about it, I was thinking that it has everything to do with trust and how women are not taught to trust each other. We're not we're we're taught maybe to be there for each other, and that's a that's a care, and that's important. We're taught many things about each other, but we are not taught to trust each other at all. And I have found by observation, looking at some relationships that are extremely close, how they are just empty, surface level, sort of close. And I've wondered what that says about me. I'm a person who I don't care about breadth, I care about depth. Meaning, I don't care how many people I have in my life, I only care about the depth of those relationships. Depth is the only thing that really matters to me. And being that way, I have found it hard to connect with people who are not that way. And I have to tell myself that every conversation has to be deep. You don't have to go deep with everyone, and I don't try to go deep with everyone, but I am just a person of depth, and that is what I respond to. And I was just looking at this conversation between me and some of my sorority sisters, and I'm thinking there is absolutely no depth here. And so then I had to ask myself, does it matter? There was a time in my life where I felt as though nothing but depth mattered in relationships. And if it didn't have depth, I didn't have time for it. But now I'm a little different. Now I feel like it's okay to connect with people as they are where they are, and to know that it doesn't have to mean anything. You can actually have that and then sit that down and be okay. But I just want to speak to the people out there who are like me, who need depth. Don't let the rest of the world prevent you from having that. And because we have a world that seems to celebrate trivial things and trivial conversations, it makes it seem like everything is trivial. And that can actually create a sense of loneliness for some people who are in search of depth. There are other people out there who are in search of the same thing. So don't let the lack of it prevent you from opening up your heart and experiencing all of the things that you need and want to experience. Depth matters. It feels good to go deep. That's all I'm saying. Thank you for listening to the Rich Spenster Podcast. You can listen to the podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts. And also watch the podcast in its entirety at Rich Spenster on YouTube. And please follow me on social media at rich spenster. I will talk to you next Monday. Be well.