Well, I’m back from a bit of a side quest. I made the trip to the Wasteland Jamboree in Flatwoods, West Virginia, and I can say one thing for certain: it is genuinely good to be among your people.

There is something deeply comforting about finding yourself surrounded by a large group of people who share the same interests, the same weird sense of humor, and the same hope for community. Especially for someone like me, who admittedly doesn’t see much of that in everyday life anymore. It felt less like attending an event and more like stepping into a place where everyone already understood each other.

Beyond the good people of the Fallout community, we were introduced to the genuinely good people of Flatwoods itself. To a single business, the town embraced the spirit of Fallout in a way that honestly impressed me. Businesses had collectible bottle caps available for purchase, with proceeds going toward local organizations, sports groups, food banks, and community causes. It was one of the best real-world examples I’ve ever seen of what Fallout is actually about beneath all the radiation, mutants, and dark humor.

At its core, Fallout has always been about community.

It’s about people trying to rebuild something decent after everything falls apart. Sure, we all joke about bottle caps and power armor, but underneath the satire there’s always been this idea that survival works best when people help each other. Flatwoods understood that perfectly.

Experiences like this make me want to return both to the Wasteland Jamboree and to Mojave Madness this fall. I’ve now officially attended both events, and both were an unbelievably good time.

But, of course, you know me well enough by now to know that eventually I’m going to wander off into a philosophical side quest.

During my travels I came across an article discussing why Generation X is often viewed as unusually independent compared to other generations. The article argued that children who grew up in the 1970s without constant scheduled activities, structured playdates, or nonstop parental supervision didn’t miss out on childhood at all. Instead, they may have experienced the last childhood that truly belonged to children themselves.

Honestly? I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

Back then, parents largely believed the day would sort itself out. Children were not abandoned. They were not ignored. They were simply allowed to figure things out on their own with the understanding that parental backup existed if things genuinely went sideways.

If we needed our parents, they were there.

But they did not hover in the background trying to orchestrate every moment of our existence.

They expected us to provide our own structure.

Looking back on it now, I think that mattered more than people realize. Through that freedom we learned how to make decisions early in life. At first they were small decisions — what game to play, where to ride our bikes, which friend’s house to invade for the afternoon — but eventually those small decisions became larger ones involving priorities, responsibilities, and consequences.

That autonomy becomes important.

Children who are allowed to make choices begin developing their own internal compass instead of constantly waiting for external instructions. It teaches them how to navigate uncertainty, how to solve problems, and perhaps most importantly, how to deal with the consequences of their own decisions.

I remember one of the best examples of this came from a maternal-child health professor early in my nursing career. She talked about intentionally allowing her son to make harmless decisions for himself from an early age. One example she used always stuck with me: if he wanted to wear a purple shirt with bright orange pants to school, she let him do it.

Now, obviously, the kid probably looked like a traffic cone that had lost a bet.

But that was the point.

It was a harmless decision. He was allowed to make it, and then experience whatever reaction came from it. Maybe his classmates laughed. Maybe he realized it looked ridiculous. Maybe he decided he didn’t care. But the important thing was that he learned how to own a choice and process the outcome.

That’s a skill.

Growing up, I never experienced “playdates,” and my parents certainly weren’t helicopter parents. Both worked. That meant when you came home from school, you had chores, homework, responsibilities, and expectations. You figured out how to prioritize those things because if they weren’t done by the time Mom or Dad got home, your evening was going to become significantly less enjoyable.

That environment developed autonomy.

You were given boundaries, expectations, and consequences — but you were not constantly reminded every fifteen minutes by an app notification and a parent hovering nearby like an Apache helicopter waiting for enemy movement.

You simply learned to handle your business.

The article also discussed how constant micromanagement can unintentionally rob children of opportunities to develop decision-making skills. Obviously, nobody is suggesting that children should be allowed to run completely feral into catastrophic decisions involving handcuffs, fireworks, or felony charges.

Well… not too feral.

But healthy independence matters.

If children are never allowed to make choices, they never fully develop confidence in their own judgment. Eventually you end up with adults who struggle to navigate life without constant reassurance, guidance, or approval from someone else.

And maybe that’s why so many of the old Gen X jokes about being “feral children” actually carry some positive truth behind them.

We learned independence because we had to.

We learned to entertain ourselves because nobody else was going to do it for us.

We learned problem-solving because half the time there wasn’t anybody immediately available to solve the problem for us.

And yes, as much as Gen X enjoys complaining about Boomers, the reality is that Gen X was largely raised by Boomers. That upbringing shaped a generation that values independence, decisiveness, and self-reliance — sometimes to a fault.

It’s also probably why Gen X tends to mercilessly tease adults who seem incapable of making even minor decisions without forming a committee and scheduling three therapy sessions about it first.

Even my dog makes his own decisions without my constant input.

Although, to be fair, some of his decisions involve eating things he absolutely should not eat.

Still, my mother taught me a great deal about making good decisions. More importantly, she also taught me how to recognize when I had made a bad one and why it was a bad decision in the first place.

And honestly, that may have been the most important lesson of all.