The final episode of Stranger Things only aired a few days ago when I am writing this. I can say I have never had a television show, and more specifically, one episode of a television show, affect me so deeply.
I have realized that, as much as it is my connection to the show, I mean, we watched most of the main cast go from children to adults, it’s also how the show put a mirror up to me and to my generation.
I am a proud GenXer. Born in 1977. Stranger Things was set in the mid-1980s. I lived it, so seeing so many products, hearing so many songs, and feeling the vibe of my childhood was comfort food for the soul I didn’t realize I needed so.
The problem with any television show is that it inevitably comes to an end. With the final episode came emotions that I don’t think I had felt in forever. I am not alone. On social media, I have come across literally hundreds of posts from people my age feeling the same way.
The youngest of GenX will be turning 45 this year. We were the last truly wild and free generation. The way the kids are portrayed on Stranger Things is reality. My friends and I would be all over the place on our bikes. We’d get into adventures and maybe a little trouble, but never anything too overly dangerous. Many younger people wonder how we dealt with the lack of convenience and technology. I feel bad for them as they will never know that type of freedom.
We were the generation that rolled with the punches. We became adults early and have felt like we’ve been so removed from our childhood innocence for so long. I began working at age 12. That means, as of writing this, I have held a job for 36 years. Still, I always had time for my friends and our growing up together.
GenX were the people who said ‘whatever.’ Like it was a badge of honor to never feel or care. Hell, they even created OK Soda in the early 1990s to try to appeal to our sense of nonconformity. There was one problem, though. We only kept our love and emotions below the surface. It feels to me like Stranger Things opened a door we had thought was long-since closed.
I will say now that I am going to share some spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the final episode, just beware.
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| My high school |
2026 marks the 30th anniversary of my high school graduation. I think my emotions were ready to explode; they just needed something to light the fuse.
Stranger Things fittingly ends with the main cast graduating high school in 1989. The way that Mike, Lucas, Will, Dustin, and Max all act and feel as their time draws near, I felt it because I had been there.
It’s a weird mix of peaceful emptiness and quiet desperation. When the final weeks were ticking down to graduation, it didn’t feel like anything was changing. We still had class, we still had homework. The difference was that many of my peers had college acceptance letters rolling in.
The peaceful emptiness comes from the sad reality that you cannot change what was coming. I couldn’t stop us from graduating. I couldn’t stop my friends from slowly being pulled from my orbit and into a new one. It was resignation.
The quiet desperation came after graduation. We didn’t all just vanish the day after we threw our caps into the air. There was a final summer. This is where I scratched and clawed, trying to get those last memories stuck under my fingernails. I still remember the days when my two best friends left. Barry left first, John left second. I can see those final moments of that chapter of our lives. I enjoyed them, yes, but I also desperately tried to memorize the last jokes, the last places we went. I knew it would never be the same again, and it wasn’t.
When the Stranger Things kids skip a party they are invited to so they can play Dungeons & Dragons, I felt that. I didn’t want new adventures with different people. I wanted final adventures with my ride or die brothers. Those tears they shed as they returned their D&D binders to the shelf were real, as that scene was the last ever shot for the show.
It was a symbolic leaving childhood behind and entering the unknown door of adulthood.
A confession. I didn’t apply to colleges in my senior year. I planned on skipping a semester and then going to the local community college. For someone who took his SATs when he was 13, it was a major step back. Why did I do it?
First, I had been going so hard trying to be the best student I could since I could remember. School got harder in my junior and senior years as I wanted less to do with difficult subjects like trigonometry, calculus, and chemistry. I wanted to craft funny (in my opinion) videos with my camcorder and my friends. That was my ultimate dream.
Second, I had a girlfriend who was still going to be in school. In my mind, I needed to stay behind since our relationship was obviously going to last forever. It didn’t. It lasted 2 ½ years. At the time, though, as I was losing my closest friends, I still had her. I hung on in quiet desperation to what was familiar.
Nobody told me that if you’re going hard for years and you take your foot off the gas, it can be tough, damn near impossible to get that momentum back. Once I went to college in the spring of 1997, it was like pulling teeth to get a 2-year degree. I resented my choice, I missed my friends, I felt like a child still, despite being told I was entering the real world.
As the years go by, you get bogged down with daily life. Job, bills, responsibilities, maybe a family, they all become your focus. As I draw closer to 50, there are days when 18 feels like yesterday. There are days when I think I turned 40 a thousand years ago. Time gets warped. I am sure that I am not the only one of my generation who feels like we packed away our childhoods like a bunch of torn garbage bags thrown into a garage. We never really went through everything to celebrate or grieve like we should have. But how could we have known that was necessary?
The finale of Stranger Things flung the garage door open and launched our bags of emotions out onto the lawn for us to go through, whether ready or not. I was definitely not.
That moment when the first chord of Prince’s legendary Purple Rain hit, as Mike and Eleven stood together, I shattered. I knew what was coming. There was no happy ending for them. Yes, I know, it’s a fictional show, but it hit me because I related to Mike the most.
In the final scene, he is regaling his friends with the stories of their futures, but in the guise of their D&D characters. Mike was the storyteller. I was the storyteller of my group of friends. I spent my savings on a camcorder so I could create stories with my friends.
As he shared their stories, I saw bits of my high school friends in them. Then it hit me, hard, I am Mike. The other characters all get happy endings. Maybe Mike does, but it’s not in the obvious way. He loses his love and falls into the hole of grief. Later, he uses that grief and the love he lost to formulate stories of his friends' adventures.
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| Mike is the character I related to most. |
I am writing this blog as we speak because of my own lost love. Back in June 2025, I wrote a very detailed post about this lost love named Wendy. I called it peaceful emptiness, much like I described my feelings after Stranger Things ended, and after graduating high school. I’ll link to that post at the bottom, but of course will give you the Cliffs Notes.
I met a girl at my lowest. I was battling severe depression, and she dragged me out of it by being who she was. She rebuilt me and made me feel like a full human years after my graduation. Then, almost as suddenly as she arrived, she was gone. The time, and our lives, just didn’t match up. She was a supernova of love that made me feel a way nobody else has before or since. I went hard into my writing career as a way to cope with losing her. In a way, I continue on that path because it makes me feel connected to her still.
In Stranger Things, we see that very likely Eleven did survive but had to fake her death and travel far away without anybody knowing. For close to 20 years, I was where Mike ended the show. I had no idea where Wendy was. She was basically off the grid. All I had were memories. Then the timing lined up, and I found her last June.
It was that peaceful emptiness because I found her and got that closure, but in doing so, I saw that she was where she needed to be. She was living an important and fulfilling life. There was no chance of my swooping in as a white knight. There was also no point in reaching out, as there was no good that could come of it. So I got my closure and just had to be happy with that.
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| Wondering how high school ended 30 years ago. |
Stranger Things ending held a mirror up to me, and probably to many other GenXers. It’s forced us to reconcile with the fact that our childhoods were so long ago and that maybe adulthood hasn’t been anything close to what we felt we were going to get. Ironically, the finale threw me harder into a midlife crisis than anything in my own life has.
I look in the mirror at my gray hair winning the war on my head, and I think to myself, Is it too late? I never found a love to replace Wendy. I never found a job that gave me the satisfaction that creating my skits in high school did. I see so many friends who are married, with kids, and houses, and living lives they deserve. What do I deserve?
Do I deserve to be the de facto storyteller of my friends? Do I deserve to be Mike, sitting and writing said stories and dreaming of the love he had but knowing he likely will never see her again?
Even close to 50, I feel like I’m walking the halls at Dennis-Yarmouth High School, looking at the different students and wishing I were them, or wishing I were with them. I am deep in that pit of emotion. It's both a good and a bad thing.
I wanted so badly for all of the characters on Stranger Things to get their happy endings. The fact that it was Mike, the one I connected with most, who didn’t, hit me hard. The show might be officially over, but that doesn’t mean the story is. Remember that years after Rick was presumed dead on The Walking Dead, he was reunited with Michonne, Judith, and RJ. Maybe years down the road, it happens for Mike and Eleven.
It comes back to my life. Certain chapters have ended, but books can be reopened. I firmly believe that I am where I am in my life for a reason. Unmarried, no children, the freedom that if I wanted to, I could go virtually anywhere. There has to be a reason for that, right? I go into each day thinking that it could be the day that the next amazing adventure in my life begins.
Circling back to where we started. Stranger Things made me, and a lot of my generation, feel things we hadn’t in a long time. It perfectly encapsulated our 1980s childhoods so much so that when the show ended, it felt like our childhoods did again. It shows the power of a well-crafted television show. It also shows that the peaceful emptiness and quiet desperation we have felt is the telltale sign that what we had was something unique and beautiful.
To my fellow GenXers, we had a good thing. I’m glad we got to experience it. Maybe we can never go back to our childhoods, but there are always photos, videos, and, of course, a Stranger Things rewatch.
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