What ‘Dawson’s Creek’ Meant to a Generation Now Confronting Time

We didn’t want to wait for our lives to be over.

James Van Der Beek as Dawson Leery in Dawson's Creek.

The forest that raised us is getting thinner. The faces we once watched from bedroom televisions are beginning to disappear. Each loss feels less like celebrity news and more like another tree falling in the landscape of our adolescence. As teenagers, the lyric “I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over” registered as impatience. We couldn’t wait for our lives to begin, not realizing how quickly time would pass.

James Van Der Beek was 48 when he died of colorectal cancer this year. For those of us who came of age alongside him, that number feels uncomfortably close.

“Dawson’s Creek” premiered on The WB Television Network on January 20, 1998, drawing more than six million viewers to its pilot. It became one of the network’s defining series and ran for six seasons. It arrived at the height of appointment television, when you had to be home at a certain hour to watch it. If you missed an episode, you waited for a rerun or relied on a friend to recount it for you. VCRs existed. You could record it, of course, and watch it later, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to watch it when it aired. If you waited, you missed the conversation the next day.

The show centered on friendship and ambition, on a young aspiring filmmaker who idolized Spielberg and believed that passion could become a profession. Dawson Leery didn’t temper his dreams to make them sound realistic. He talked about them plainly, as if becoming a director was simply a matter of time and effort. That confidence shaped how many of us understood our own aspirations. The world felt open because the characters treated it that way.

The late 1990s were a particular cultural window. The series arrived before social media reshaped adolescence and before smartphones placed an audience in every pocket. News didn’t follow us throughout the day, and our private lives weren’t staged for strangers. The conflicts on the show felt close to home. Their heartbreaks and insecurity made our youthful angst feel seen, and adulthood became something to look toward. The world of the show operated at a recognizably human scale. It assumed there would be room to become whoever we dreamed of being.

The generation that once debated Team Dawson or Team Pacey has crossed into midlife. When we first watched Van Der Beek, 48 belonged to our parents. It signified authority. Now it belongs to us. That recalibration alters how the lyric sounds.

48 isn’t old. According to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer-related death for men under 50 and the second for women in that same age group. Screening guidelines have been lowered to 45 as diagnoses rise among younger adults. The assumption that serious illness belongs to old age doesn’t hold the way it once did.

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2023. I was 38. Van Der Beek was diagnosed that same year, though he didn’t speak publicly about it until 2024. After that, numbers felt personal.

When you’re young and you go in for tests, you don’t expect anything to be wrong. I didn’t. In 2023, when my doctor called and asked, “Can you talk?” I said yes casually, almost distracted. I assumed the conversation would be routine. I had no reason to think otherwise.

Then she broke the news.

I remember sitting in a chair for five hours after that call, frozen. I didn’t cry. I’m not even sure I was shocked. I was in disbelief. I kept thinking, how could this have happened to me? People often described me as the healthiest person they knew. I exercised, I ate well, I did everything right. The room around me looked the same. Nothing had changed. But my future had.

At that point, I didn’t know what surgery I would need or what treatment would follow. I didn’t even know who my oncologist would be. I had never imagined I would have an oncologist, especially at 38. The only thing I understood was that my life had just reorganized itself around survival. My health would come first. At 38, everything else would have to come second.

I called my best friends. We’ve known each other since we were kids. We went to school together. We used to sit at lunch and talk about television, our teen idols, and what we thought our lives would become. The same friends I used to debate “Dawson’s Creek” with were now the first people I called to say the word cancer out loud.

They cried. I didn’t expect that. I thought I would be the one holding it together for everyone. But they cried. And then I had to figure out how to tell my mother, because the last thing you ever want to do when you’re sick and in pain is burden the people you know love you the most.

James Van Der Beek was not an actor from another era. He was ours. We grew up alongside him. As he moved from adolescence into adulthood on screen, we were doing the same in real time. When someone from your own generation dies at 48, you stop assuming there’s more time. It overlaps with your own life.

Growing older doesn’t invalidate what we believed when we were young. It makes the cost of time visible. The future no longer stretches endlessly forward. Life expectancy in the United States hovers in the mid-to-late 70s, and somewhere along the way you realize you’re no longer at the beginning of that number.

Rewatching “Dawson’s Creek” now doesn’t diminish its optimism. If anything, it reveals what it gave us: permission to articulate ambition without embarrassment and to take our own dreams seriously before we had proof they would work out. That optimism once felt abundant, almost assumed. Today it feels fragile, like something worth protecting.

The forest that raised us is thinning, but we are no longer children walking through it. We are part of it now. The trees fall closer. What we believed when we were young was true. We just didn’t understand how fast time moves.