Asklemmy

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.

"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.

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

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

Ronald Reagan happened to GenX.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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"?

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"

"The forgotten generation" strikes again!

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

Still playing Atari...

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

You could call them The Silent Generation.

...

No, wait...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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).