I grew up in the 1970s.
Which means, by current parenting standards, I was apparently participating in some sort of unsupervised wilderness survival program.
Nobody knew where we were half the time.
We got on our bikes and disappeared. We wandered through woods. We climbed things we probably shouldn't have climbed. We drank from garden hoses. We solved arguments ourselves. We found our friends by physically going to their houses and knocking on the door.
And if something went wrong?
Well.
We figured it out.
There was no cell phone in our pocket. There was no GPS. There was no group text with twelve adults coordinating our whereabouts. There was certainly no Life360.
Our parents had a vague idea of where we might be.
Probably.
And somehow, an entire generation of us survived.
More importantly, we learned something.
We learned that we could handle things.
We Were Raised Before the Answer Was Always Available
I'm part of that strange generational territory often called Generation Jones—too young to identify with the classic Baby Boomer experience, a little too old to feel completely Gen X.
The official labels have never mattered much to me anyway.
I know the people I'm talking about.
We grew up before the internet.
Before cell phones.
Before social media.
Before Google could answer a question before we'd finished asking it.
When we wanted to know something, we looked it up in a book. We went to the library. We asked someone who knew more than we did. Sometimes we tried something, completely screwed it up, and figured out why.
That last part turned out to be important.
We learned through experimentation.
We learned through failure.
We learned to improvise.
We learned how to be bored—which sounds ridiculous until you realize boredom is where an enormous amount of imagination comes from.
There wasn't an endless algorithm waiting to entertain us.
So we made our own entertainment.
We built things.
We invented games.
We read books.
We wandered.
We argued.
We listened to music.
And yes, we had spectacular music.
I will accept reasonable debate on many subjects.
This is not one of them.
We Learned to Make Our Own Worlds
Then something extraordinary happened.
Somewhere in the 1970s, kids started gathering around tables with pencils, paper and very strange dice.
And suddenly we weren't just reading stories.
We were making them.
For some of us, tabletop role-playing became part of our lives before most people even understood what it was.
There were no online character builders. No virtual tabletops. No Discord server. No beautifully produced actual-play show teaching you how the game worked.
There were books, graph paper, dice and people sitting around a table saying:
Okay. What do you do?
And we figured it out.
Maybe that's part of why tabletop gaming still resonates with so many of us decades later.
The entire premise is basically the way we were raised.
Here is a problem.
You don't have enough information.
Your plan will probably fail.
Your friends are depending on you.
What do you do?
Roll for initiative.
Some of us are still sitting around those tables in our 50s, 60s and beyond.
We didn't grow out of imagination.
We got better at it.
Which is why something like our Party Wipe Survivor — Still Rolling RPG cap makes me laugh. If you've been playing long enough, you've experienced the campaign equivalent of disaster more than once.
Party wiped?
Fine.
Make another character.
Still rolling.
There's probably a life philosophy buried in there.
We Have Seen Some Shit
Our generation didn't remain in that analog childhood.
That's another thing people sometimes overlook about us.
We didn't simply experience technological change.
We repeatedly rebuilt our lives around it.
Many of us began working before computers were sitting on every desk.
Then came personal computers.
Email.
The internet.
Cell phones.
Smartphones.
Social media.
Cloud computing.
Streaming.
Artificial intelligence.
We've gone from three television networks and a landline attached to the kitchen wall to carrying more computing power in our pocket than seemed imaginable when we were children.
And we adapted.
Again.
And again.
And again.
We've lived through recessions, inflation, political upheaval, wars, terrorism, economic crashes, pandemics, technological disruption and enough predictions of imminent catastrophe to fill several seasons of a badly written science-fiction series.
That doesn't mean those events weren't frightening.
They were.
It means we've developed a certain relationship with catastrophe.
Something happens and our first thought usually isn't:
Everything is over.
It's more like:
Well, this is some bullshit. What do we do now?
Which is pretty much how I Have Survived Every Apocalypse ended up making sense as a shirt.
Because after you've lived long enough, apocalypse starts feeling suspiciously episodic.
The Zombie Apocalypse Is Mostly a Joke.
Mostly.
People our age joke constantly about being ready for the zombie apocalypse.
But I'm not entirely sure we're joking.
Give us a flashlight, a roll of duct tape, three questionable tools from the garage and a problem nobody anticipated.
We'll come up with something.
Will it be OSHA approved?
Probably not.
Will it work?
Surprisingly often.
That's the spirit behind our Training for the Zombie Apocalypse tee.
The zombies are optional.
The preparedness is not.
We grew up being expected to solve problems before asking for help.
There were advantages to that.
It developed self-reliance.
Resourcefulness.
Confidence.
A certain willingness to jump into unfamiliar territory and figure things out while moving.
That's a powerful thing to carry into adulthood.
When you've solved problems your entire life, a new problem doesn't automatically look like a threat.
Sometimes it looks like a puzzle.
Sometimes it looks like a challenge.
And sometimes it looks like:
Oh, cool. Nobody knows how to do this yet.
Those are my favorite ones.
To Be Fair, We Also Have Some Callouses
This is where I have to admit something about my generation.
Our resilience can make us impatient.
We sometimes hear younger people talk about anxiety, boundaries, trauma, overwhelm or mental health and our instinct is:
You're upset about THAT?
Because many of us were raised on some version of:
Walk it off.
You'll live.
Figure it out.
Stop complaining.
And we did.
But that doesn't necessarily mean every part of that approach was healthy.
Younger generations have language for things we frequently weren't allowed to talk about at all.
So yes, sometimes we should probably be more sympathetic.
We're working on it.
Maybe.
The point isn't that younger generations are weak.
They've inherited problems we never had to face at their age, just as we faced problems our parents didn't understand.
The point is that our particular childhood trained us for uncertainty in a particular way.
Our confidence often came from being left alone long enough to discover:
I can solve this.
That's worth preserving.
We Saw the Rebels Win
And then, for a certain group of us, there was Star Wars.
We saw it in theaters.
Not restored.
Not remastered.
Not streaming.
The first time.
And imagine being a kid sitting in a movie theater in 1977 watching an enormous Imperial Star Destroyer crawl across that screen.
Then the story tells you something very simple.
There is a giant, powerful system.
It says it is in control.
It expects obedience.
And the heroes?
They're the people resisting it.
The rebels.
I sometimes wonder how deeply that lodged itself into our brains.
Because a lot of us grew up inherently suspicious of people who tell us:
This is how things have always been done.
That's just the way it is.
You can't change that.
You shouldn't question it.
Wrong audience.
We will absolutely question it.
We may question it just because you told us not to.
Rebellion doesn't always mean standing on a barricade.
Sometimes rebellion is refusing to become the person the world expected you to become.
Sometimes it's starting something new at 60.
Sometimes it's learning a technology everyone assumes you're too old to understand.
Sometimes it's reading fantasy novels, playing D&D, going to conventions, building businesses, lifting weights, traveling, creating things and refusing to shrink your life because somebody thinks you've reached the age when you're supposed to quietly fade into the background.
No.
Sixty Doesn't Look Like It Used To
There's another strange thing happening to our generation.
We look at photographs of our grandparents at our current age and think:
Wait. They were HOW OLD?
Sixty looked old.
Retirement meant something very different.
People seemed to enter a completely different stage of life.
I don't feel that way.
Part of that difference is real. Medicine improved. Preventive care improved. Smoking became dramatically less common. Exercise and strength training became normal parts of adulthood. We understand much more about nutrition, cardiovascular health and staying physically active.
And yes, many of us smoked when we were younger.
It was the 1970s.
People smoked approximately everywhere.
Restaurants. Offices. Airplanes. Houses. Cars.
Apparently oxygen was considered optional.
But many of us eventually quit and changed how we lived.
Today, reaching your 60s doesn't automatically mean entering some final quiet chapter. Americans who reach 65 can, on average, expect many more years of life ahead, and smoking rates are dramatically lower than they were when we were young.
But I think the difference is psychological too.
We don't necessarily see ourselves the way our grandparents saw themselves at this age.
We still have things we want to do.
Things we want to learn.
Places we want to go.
Things we want to build.
Problems we want to solve.
Stories we want to tell.
Characters we haven't rolled yet.
I made a shirt called My Inner Child Has a Sword Now, and frankly, that may summarize the whole situation.
The kid is still here.
She just has better equipment.
We Aren't Trying to Be Young
This is important.
I'm not interested in pretending I'm 30.
Been there.
It was fine.
I like knowing things.
I like experience.
I like having enough history behind me to recognize patterns.
I like being much less concerned about whether everybody approves of me.
That's one of the great gifts of getting older.
You eventually realize how much energy you wasted worrying about opinions belonging to people who weren't even paying attention.
So this isn't about refusing to age.
It's about refusing the old definition of what aging is supposed to mean.
Those are completely different things.
I don't want to be younger.
I want to keep becoming more myself.
Optimism With Hit Points
After everything we've lived through, you might expect us to be cynical.
Some of us are.
I certainly understand the temptation.
But here's where I land.
I've seen enough change to know that terrible situations can change too.
I've watched impossible technology become ordinary.
I've watched ideas move from fringe to mainstream.
I've watched entire industries appear.
I've watched the world reinvent itself repeatedly.
That makes optimism different when you're older.
It's not naïveté.
It isn't pretending everything is wonderful.
It is looking directly at the mess and saying:
Yeah. I see it.
I'm still not surrendering the future to it.
That's why Multiclass: Optimist might be one of the most Mutantur things we've ever made.
Optimism isn't my only character class.
I've multiclassed.
Sarcasm.
Resilience.
Curiosity.
Rebellion.
Probably caffeine.
And optimism.
Because after everything else, I'm still here.
Still interested.
Still learning.
Still making things.
Still imagining what comes next.
We're Not Done Yet
That's the heart of Mutantur Labs.
I didn't start this because the world desperately needed another T-shirt.
I started making things because I wanted things that felt like us.
People who grew up with science fiction and fantasy before they conquered popular culture.
People who discovered tabletop games when nobody knew what the hell we were talking about.
Readers.
Gamers.
Problem solvers.
People who are a little weird and have long since stopped apologizing for it.
People who have watched the world change over and over and somehow remain fascinated by what might happen next.
We've accumulated scars.
We've accumulated stories.
We've accumulated extremely strong opinions about music.
And some of us have accumulated enough dice to create a genuine structural concern for our shelving.
But we haven't lost the thing that mattered.
Imagination.
We were raised to make our own entertainment.
We learned to solve our own problems.
We discovered strange worlds in books, theaters and around kitchen tables.
We learned that sometimes the established system is wrong.
We learned that impossible things have a funny habit of becoming ordinary.
And maybe that's why we're still here asking:
Okay. What happens next?
I don't know.
Nobody does.
That's never stopped us before.
New problem?
Great.
New challenge?
Fantastic.
World gone completely off the rails again?
Figures.
Pick up the dice.
Find your people.
Make a plan.
Change the plan when it inevitably fails.
And when the next ridiculous thing comes charging around the corner?
You already know what to do.
Roll for initiative.
We were raised feral.
We're still rolling.
And we're nowhere near done yet.
— Ginger Snap
Founder, Mutantur Labs
Chaotic good. Mostly.
Explore the Gamers & RPG Fans collection or come see what the rest of the family has been making at Mutantur Labs.