Asklemmy

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.

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

It's the working class vs the 1%, not generation vs generation

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.

We're still here.

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.

were the hidden generation, hiding in plain sight between 2 larger messes.

A lot of gen x got theirs. College was paid for and was cheap, lots of opportunities while they were young, got a house, a family and are just living. They will get a fair inheritance if their parents die on time, but they are also the first to see that huge nest egg disappear to the current healthcare system.

Their vote never counted. Too many boomers.

They were the first to figure out their parents had it incredibly easy, although it took them a long time. Sometimes they didn’t see it until their own kids struggled with costs and employment.

A lot are conservative but probably because they have assets and don’t like social welfare taking from them, even though their parents set it up for them to lose.

They aren’t as tech savvy as millennials.

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?

Ronald Reagan happened to GenX.

We took the brunt of everything the Boomers could throw at us. You're welcome. Its your turn now, we're tired.

"Boomers" has been misappropriated by younger generations to mean anything from older people they disagree with, older people they feel have undue privileges they don't have, or older people who were born before the internet became widespread.

The scapegoating mostly points at gen-X'ers though, not true boomers. The boomers are hitting the retirement homes at this point.

You could call them The Silent Generation.

...

No, wait...

Nah we are here, just staying out of the drama I guess. Busy working. My guess is we aren't enough of a market - not the desirable-to-marketers 18-30 age group, and not a huge group with money like the boomers. So we are not targeted as much.

We're just chilling watching the show...

I sit at the tail end of it, or as I've seen it described 'xenials', wishing things would start to make sense again one day.

Someone has to write all these shitty articles how bad the other generations are.

Maybe they're just lying low so nobody will blame everything on them.

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).

Love y'all, but on bluesky gen X has been behaving like boomers more and more often. Maybe it has to do with hitting a certain age and becoming "get of my lawn"?

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.

"The forgotten generation" strikes again!

Gen X is a conspiracy. None of them actually exist.

My Canadian girlfriend (well, now wife) is from Gen X - I swear.

For some reason, the internet has mistaken gen X for boomers with the "ok boomer" meme. Anyone over 40 is a boomer to the young. Completely unbeknownst to the fact that real baby boomers are literal senior home elderly people

The younger people call them boomers. Hell, gen Z and gen alpha call millenials boomers. Everyone who is "old" is a boomer now.

The older people only seem to be talking about millenials and younger, usually in the form of rage bait internet articles.

The concept of generations is completely arbitrary. They used to be named after important changes in the age distribution of western populations, but after the boomers they just became "the next one" because nothing really happened. Older gen X behaves the same as younger boomers, and millenials range from "owns a house, has four kids, are starting to plan their retirement" to "just finished their education", and I haven't yet found a reason why gen alpha and gen z differ at all (at least the millenials could be tied to 9/11?).

Now, nobody worth our time will take any of it seriously.

Generational Theory refers to them as a "Nomad" generation, analagous to the more literally named "Lost Generation" one sacculum prior.

Generational theory is not scientific, but the patterns it identifies are certainly interesting. It's held up over the last 30 years, and seems to be continuing.

We're just waiting. See you soon.

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.