Asklemmy

We all went for a bike-ride, and when we got home just played some Atari.

Still playing Atari...

Musk is Gen X. Ron DeSantis is Gen X. Josh Hawley is Gen X. Paul Ryan, Gen X, claimed Rage Against the Machine was a favorite band despite being a fucking Republican.

Sounds to me like they're pretty loud and fucking shit up just as bad as the Boomers, no offense.

I don't have good memories of Gen X, just memories as assholes older than me who judged everyone based on what music they listened to and were absolutely assholes if your music wasn't cool enough.

Am I shocked most of them grew up to be conservative fuckholes? No, no I am not.

Anyway they mostly just get lumped in with Boomers, but Musk is Gen X and I think he's sadly pretty representative of it.

Over half of men (52%) aged 45+ voted for Trump and 44 is the youngest Gen X.

He's the one who likes all our pretty songs

And he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun

But he knows not what it means

Knows not what it means, and I say

He's the one who likes all our pretty songs

And he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun

But he knows not what it means, knows not what it means, and I say, "Yeah"

X as a population is a birth low like the silent generation and since both are adjacent to the baby boom, which is one of the largest generations, their relative pull during their time is muted. basically the silent generation was sorta crowded out by the large incoming one and Xers were to small to effect the new crowd size much. Then also millenials are technically a boom but really just a drop in the bucket compared to the baby boom before. They are the little peak in the early 90's in this graph where the orange is the boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom#/media/File:US_Birth_Rates.svg . Combined with this is that X was known as the slackers and they were not big joiners. Don't get me wrong im in the gen and I know plenty of folks that do things in their lives like reduce, reuse, recycle but not many part of an org or something around it (not all good things btw of course but im giving the perspective of my crowd). It still sorta cracks me up as I live near my high school and they put all the accomplishments along the fence and it starts in like the 60's. Newer ones are in the school but as new ones come in the old ones are hung on the outside fence. Well there is this big gap in the 80's. literally stuff into the late 70's and then suddenly stuff from the early 90's. No club or sport or anything got any significant win or award or whatevr in the 80's.

There is another theory I've heard that I like:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

hear about

Something is only talked about if talking about it accomplishes something. Gen X doesn't raise any strong feelings with anyone, so they're not talked about. They're still there obviously.

The reason why is complex, and I'm no expert myself. However, from what I gathered about recent history, what seems most likely to me is that the time gen x'ers grew up in was very stable in the sense that economy was good, no major wars were happening, the cold war was "ending". So the only thing gen x'ers had to worry about was themselves. So they did. And you don't really need to talk about someone that just keeps to themself. They cause you no issues.

Another theory of mine is very simple: humanity changes over time. The larger the time, the larger the change. Differences between humans breeds conflict as their interests collide. Since boomers are the current oldest larger impactful generation, and gen z are the youngest, the difference between them are greatest. Thus the conflict between them is highest, thus there are a lot of people talking about those problems. I've been hearing less about millennials as well.

Remember the Silent Generation? Me neither

We're here, frantically paddling to keep up.

Probably still outside drinking water from the garden hose.