To this, the year of the 25th anniversary of the debut of "Friends"

—So for those of us who were white and Generation X, or the cohort of us who went to college, oh, let's say between the years of 1985 and 1995; we who were raised in the 1970s and the 1980s on a heady mix of Marlo Thomas and Ronald Reagan, "Free to be you and me" and "Morning in America," this heady mix of leftover hippie self-actualization and Baby Boomer amoral greed; and the world hadn;t ended and the economy was surprisingly good for just a little bit somewhere in there, and at some point in the middle of it the Wall came down and suddenly the Cold War had ended and the truth was everybody'd seen it coming yet nobody'd expected it, the damnedest thing, that; and we went to college on our parents' dime or the government's; and all our friends were there in a little nexus of student housing and conveniently cheap apartments; and we were all getting our meaningless degrees, the humanities degrees we couldn't use and the business degrees that didn't really matter (and don't get too smug, o ye scientists—or haven't you notice no one in America likes you or listens to you), not even noticing our parents would suffer the double whammy curse of relative immortality and a perverse late-stage Friedmanian capitalism where no one can retire or quit their jobs, bringing value to their corporations day after day until they're all eighty or a hundred or whatever the actuarial tables and the best medical system the insurance companies are willing to pay for can afford; and we all went to school mostly to hang out in bars and cafes and to have ill-advised hookups with people we were too immature to not sleep with—

—And this is the core fantasy and appeal of Friends, NBC must-watch TV, September 22, 1994, to May 6, 2004, Requiescat in pace; the fantasy that college might not ever really end even after we stopped going to classes and writing papers and taking exams; this self-effacing narcissism of being the most important centers of a universe that didn't exist, didn't matter, no one asked for it anyway, irony isn't a pose it's a coping mechanism; the generation whose parents went to Woodstock and voted for Reagan (basically; I mean, mine did neither, but you get the gist); latchkey kids who formed their own families at Thanksgivings where no one had the dough to go home ruining turkeys we were never taught how to cook (this was before the Internet and Google searches like "alton brown turkey" or whatev); this fantasy that even though we're not sponging off our parents and/or Unkie Sam (not even asking how we'll pay that back), we're still all going to live in the same (dorm) building or within reasonable walking distance and hang out and sleep with each other and drink coffee and will never grow apart will never have kids will never have mortgages oh for the sake of all the gods in heaven and hell won't ever be our parents who started out so young and strong only to surrender (thanks JB, kinda cool for a Boomer when you weren't beating up the sexy mermaid from Splash); we'd all hang out together having coffee and fucking (beer and coke for the Bennington crowd, I guess, or whisky and weed; they were a little ahead of me tbh) and it would all be okay; no, not quite right; I guess more apt would be, we aren't dead and it's not like anything really matters anymore—

—All that, and jokes.  They also had jokes on the show—