Gluttons for Our Doom

5 min readAug 21, 2022

You will likely not be surprised to learn I was crazy for the Indigo Girls in my youth. When I learned to play guitar, it was Indigo Girls’ songs that I particularly focused on. I didn’t learn the entire Nomads, Indians and Saints songbook but I got pretty close. In those days, we bought songbooks. There were no chords on the internet since there wasn’t much internet.

Somehow in the last couple of decades, I’d lost track of what the Indigo Girls were making (along with almost every other band I used to be into — I don’t know what happened. I blame digital music and aging, I guess.) so I thought I should catch up. I added all of their albums from the last era to my “New Moment” playlist on Spotify, which is where I put all the music I want to make sure I listen to. Since there’s a live album in that mix, I’ve been hearing some old favorites in addition to new songs. Some of them I’m hearing differently now. “Prince of Darkness” popped up and I thought, “Damn if this song doesn’t sum up the Gen X experience!”

The Indigo Girls themselves are not (technically) Gen X. They’re both Gen Jones, the OG X-ers by a couple of years, but this all makes sense somehow. They’re who we looked up to growing up. The Indigo Girls first major label album came out when I was in high school and “Prince of Darkness” wasn’t on the radio but it was a favorite for me and many of my friends.

My place is of the sun and

This place is of the dark

And I do not feel the romance

I do not catch the spark.

And the real Gen X kicker:

Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room

No one can convince me

We aren’t gluttons for our doom.

This line was always meaningful to me. It was always THAT moment in the song — the one you’d wait for.

But it strikes me now that while this concern was meaningful to my peers, this idea was not ever present in EVERYONE’s youth. There was a lot of doom talk in those days. Movies, TV shows, TV movies. There was a very popular poster of the mushroom cloud over Japan that folks hung up everywhere. As a kind of memento mori, I guess?

War Games is a fun movie about possible nuclear annihilation and we were so convinced the Russians were going to come for us that Sting had to write a song about the Russians loving their children, too. The world seemed full of people who were greedy for doom. That’s how it felt in the late 80s — and damned if it hasn’t come back around. The nihilistic Supreme Court has rolled back Roe v Wade and gun restrictions and many other things that helped keep doom at bay — but here it comes.

For the first time, the generations behind us are worried about nuclear annihilation and Russia is a serious threat again.

Are we gluttons for our doom?

The thing of it is — and I think this is the thing other generations don’t understand about Gen X — that song is actually about finding ways to live in a dark world. We may be gluttons for our doom but we “try to make this place (our) place” and our “place is of the sun and this place is of the dark.”

But our place is still of the sun. I think that’s what people miss about us as a generation. We seem cynical and nihilistic but we’re actually weirdly hopeful. We know our place is of the sun, even as no one can convince us we aren’t gluttons for our doom. We will not be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness. We try real hard not to be a pawn for anyone, when it comes down to it.

I think most Gen X-ers can handle the contradiction of living in a world hungry for its doom and still seek grace and light wherever we can find it. We’re practiced at that double vision. Over on the Gen X subreddit a few months ago, a younger person asked us how we dealt with the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation in our youth. They were starting to panic about what Putin might do as the war in Ukraine heated up so they asked us, the generation who has some practice at threats like this, what we did to not go off the deep end. It was a weirdly hopeful thread. There was some snark, of course. But also lots of earnest words of advice for someone stuck in an anxiety that was new to them and old for us. We may be gluttons for our doom but we’ll help someone out of the darkness if we can.