Gen X here, we're labeled the invisible generation for a reason.
That said I don't really give enough fuks to be involved, the real fight is inequality, not age.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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Generation discourse honestly panders to the lowest common denominator intellect. People who constantly talk about boomers or millennials are usually pretty dumb.
The reason you don't hear much about Gen X is "we" didn't cause anything culturally significant in an enduring when "we" were in our 20s.
They're too small a cohort to matter, and seemed to follow boomers almost exactly with their ideology
A couple of factors: Back in olden times, before Douglas Coupland applied the Generation X moniker in 1991, they used to talk about the Baby Bust generation. The Baby Boom was when all of the GIs got back from the war and all started getting jiggy at the same time. Then, the birth rate dropped significantly. In my elementary school, we had combined grades 2/3, and grades 4/5, because there weren't enough kids enrolled for full classrooms otherwise.
Also, the Baby Boom generation is defined as 1946 to 1964, which is 19 years, compared to the 16 years of what we call Generation X now, from 1965 to 1980.
Granted, is not a huge difference—71 million Boomers and 73 million Millennials vs. 64 million Gen X—but there's fewer of us. But also, the name and the generational categories are pretty recent developments. When Coupland's book came out, I was too young to be Gen X, the people he was writing about were adults out into world. I wasn't part of the classic Gen X disaffected-slacker culture, and its touchstones don't really resonate with me. It wasn't until years later that the definition of Generation X definitively included me. That's why you'll often see a lot of younger Gen X identify with the Xennial label, because we have a lot more in common with "elder Millennials," which makes the whole cohort less cohesive.
It's almost like the generational cutoff years are arbitrary, and that society changes continuously, and not in discrete jumps. It's almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980, and the real division is between the people who came of age before they pulled up the ladders to prosperity behind themselves (Boomers and older Gen X) and the people who came of age after (Xennials, Millennials, and so on). Nevermind, sorry, that's just some anti-capitalist hogwash. /s
The breaks are subjective, irregular, determined by consensus. Generally they're determined by significant societal events and their impact on people based on where they are in life.
Indeed, and I realized in the process of writing that comment that the famous graphs showing the growth of productivity vs. the growth of real wages explain a whole lot more about people's experiences than the consensus generational divisions.
In the UK we’re more properly known as “Thatcher’s Children”, which gives a better idea of how disenfranchised we were growing up in the 80s.
I thought millennials started at '82?
I think I used to hear that, too, but I searched when writing the comment and found the consensus is now 1981. But then, people I know who were born in 1979 have so much more in common with elder Millennials than Generation X people born in the 1960's. That's why I'm skeptical of the whole generations concept. I mean, without looking up her birth date, is Kamala Harris a Boomer, or GenX?
Yeah I'm an older millennial and there are things I don't have in common with younger ones.
Kamala just slips in as a boomer technically, by like a year or something.
It's almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980
I really hope Reagan is burning in hell 🔥🔥
Reagan is in hell waiting for heaven to trickle down.
Gen x was busy voting trump to further fuck themselves 😂. Many of them did fine and own property. Millennials and Gen z are the ones that were fucked with a spiked dildo more so from the combined greed of Gen x and boomers. Many gen xers I know live by the philosophy that "my parents were that way and so am I" basically meaning they weren't brought up to think for themselves.
Gen X here.
LOL
Here is GenX
41% make up the US House of Representatives 28% make up the US Senate 42% of governors
Some GenXers: Elon Musk Jeff Bezos (squeaked in) Jack Dorsey (Formerly Twitter) Michael Dell (Dell CEO) Satya Nadella (MSFT CEO)
And in 2018, about 40% of F500/Inc500 CEOs were GenX.
So, not missing. We just don’t wear our generational name as a badge. What’s the point?
Remember the Silent Generation? Me neither
Being a "late" Boomer, I see gen x having a lot of similarities with me. Running loose in the neighborhood, doing stupid shit that probably should have killed us, absent parents who just wanted us independent and out of their hair.
We remember old shit (music, phones, computers) transitioning into new shit. I think it's a spectrum Boomer->Gen x. A lot of similarities.
Man, it's always weird hearing this, because as a millenial this sounds exactly like my experience growing up.
It's a spectrum. Lots of parents in millennial days were doing the same s***, but I think it was more in a rural setting.
Back in Gen x and Boomer days this was suburbia.
Most millennials were born in the 1980s, smart phones didn't come about until 2006+
Most of our lives were outside as kids. I got my first cell phone at 18, 2 years after I had already been working 40 hour weeks while going to school and my parents finally got sick of not having a way to get a hold of me. Comically their cell phone bill went down because the company I worked for gave them 25% of their bill when they added my phone so they didn't want me to have a separate plan.
I still remember my mother calling me sometime that year and asking if I'd come to dinner and I had to tell her I was over 1,000 miles away because I flew to Boston.
I think I was 22 when I started staying indoors more. Took a desk job and got overweight and lazy.
I think it would be great for understanding if each generation did a little bio like this just to give a sense of where they're coming from. Too many people assuming shit they don't know.
We’re still being forgotten.
The boomers held on to power for such a long time that X never really got a generational chance to change things or sit in the driver’s seat. They were left waiting in the wings for their turn. The millennials were pretty pissed off for a lot of reasons and made a lot of noise, so they overshadowed X, and they’ve been maneuvering for their opportunities in the driver’s seat.
So basically X got mostly left out. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t fuck things up, though. We were the biggest trump voters by generation.
Nothing happened. The generational war another facet of culture war. It doesn't make sense because you have to ask what the fuck happened to Gen X? Why don't they fit into the picture? Why doesn't the data add up? That should tell you something. Your experiment is flawed. The culture war doesn't make sense.
It's the working class vs the 1%, not generation vs generation
yeah, the generation blame game is getting kinda old
Totally agree, comrade ✊
Someone has to write all these shitty articles how bad the other generations are.
You could call them The Silent Generation.
...
No, wait...
Boomer is honestly just used as a generic term for older people who are out of touch in one way or another. Millennial was a generic term for young people the speaker didn't like, but it's finally been replaced by zoomer which is more age appropriate, but it took a long time. It's not that people are ignoring Gen X, it's that most of the time when people use the term they just mean older/younger people in general.
TLDR, Gen X is probably lumped in with the term "boomer" (obviously the context matters, but this is the TLDR).
Don't lump me in with them!
I'm not lumping you into with anyone. I'm just explaining how people use the term boomer.
Don Lumo is in with them!
There is another theory I've heard that I like:
- The parents of the millenials were the boomers. The parents of gen z was gen X. Millenials and boomers are fairly equally disliked, and gen alpha seems to be shaping up to follow that trend.
- If you have been paying attention to legitimate complaints about each generation, you'll notice similarities between the kids and their parents. Both millenials and boomers get hate for being terrible parents and workaholics, and the hate gen z is currently getting for having no work ethic sounds very similar to the hate gen X got back when they were in their 20s for being supposedly lazy and stupid becuase of MTV.
- This implies that we are seeing not one pendulum of overractions to generational trauma, but two. The Millenials and the Baby Boomers, if you trace it back, descended from the humbly named Greatest Generation which fought in WWII and set the wheels of modern American culture into their current tracks. Gen Z and Gen X descend from the Silent Generation, who were best known for being conformist and pretty much nothing else.
Here's the conjecture part of the theory: the Boomer lineage has been taught that what matters is what you do and if you don't achieve you have no value, whereas the Silent Generation lineage has been taught that good people are good to their family and community and being a workaholic is bad for that. The poop-throwing you're seeing online is simply an expression of a conflict between opposing values.
Both millenials and boomers get hate for being terrible parents and workaholics, and the hate gen z is currently getting for having no work ethic sounds very similar to the hate gen X got back when they were in their 20s for being supposedly lazy and stupid becuase of MTV.
Millennials were definitely called entitled and lazy.
Millenials definitely were called enitled and lazy when they were in their 20s. Theyre in their 40s now, now the supposedly lazy generation is Gen Z. Every generation has called kids in their 20s entitled and lazy. In about 15 years Gen Alpha will be the lazy and entitled generation.
That said, it is a big hole in this theory. Gen X and the Silent Generation seem to only be remembered by how they behaved in their youth, and Gen Z seems to be following that trend.
Millennials are not in their 40s. The oldest of them are, sure, but a ton are still in their 30s.
Very generous outlook on Gen X, who are mostly seen as boomer lite in my experience.
Did some digging, and Gen Xers were best known for being helicopter parents. This was in reaction to how their parents barely paid attention to them. They are the only generation that gets hate for being helicopter parents, as far as I can tell. They seem to be the Soccer Mom generation.
They behave about how you would expect a boomer to act. It is their turn to extract value, well at least those who are in any position to do so, which are obviously a minority but not are they working hard at it right now.
Just parasitic bahvior serving the owner class to get their mcmansions and 401ks loaded aka boomerism
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