All I hear about is “boomers” this, “Millennials” that, “Gen Z” that, etc.
Why no one talk about Gen X? What happened to them? They just vanished like in Infinity War? Or are we mistaken Gen Z by Boomers?
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.
You realize that that comic is a pretty strong indictment of gen X though, yes?
It’s not noble or otherwise admirable to sit down and eat that popcorn.
Here’s the funny thing with that. We watched things like Bill Nye and Captain Planet as kids. We’ve been aware of the evidence of science and the needs to change our society since a very young age. For many years we where told ‘use plastic so they don’t cut down trees’ only to realize later that was wrong. All through it we where telling the parent and the grandparents that things needed to change and the future wasn’t looking great.
Not one fuck was given.
So when it came time to be the parents and the mundane middle life drones many simply said hold onto what scraps you can and hope for the future, but in the meantime I just want to sit down for a bit. It’s draining as hell to spend decades of your life being ignored, it’s not a wonder we get called the forgotten generation.
1977 here, we had to be raised by the boomers alone - with no Internet, mobile phones, and left outside all summer until it was dark (which wasn’t that bad mostly).
What we were sold on growing up and what actually happened when we became adults was very different.
I think genX most keeps their mouth shut about the generation wars because they were least touched by propaganga about it. Boomers were primed from the start with bullshit about the specialness of their generation. And it wasn’t until genx was old enough to be over it, that the divisive cross-generation blaming got into full swing.
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”?
The last lawn generation
I’m gen X. I’m certainly at get off my lawn stage. Yet I have no lawn. Hmmmmmm
I have no mouth and i must scream.
This is my experience with them as well. I guess we all suck when we get old.
“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.
Boomers are generally tech illiterate, gen-x grew up with consoles, the commodore 64 and then the web and the mobile era then smartphones and withspread internet and so on and on. We were there when things started.
Elon Musk & Sergei Brin are Gen X, but Bezos, Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, and most of the people who built the technology GenX grew up with are Boomers. Zuck is a Millenial, but just barely. You could make a decent start of life as GenX knowing nothing about the technology, but they were still young enough to learn new developments easily.
Yeah that’s why I said “generally”.
Of course the tech built in the sixties-seventies-eighties was built by boomers.
Edit: fuck Gates btw, he didn’t build anything as much as steal and buy. Like elon.
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.
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.
At least according to Wikipedia, Generation X is the generation referred to as “the forgotten generation”.
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”
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.
And you base your opinion of an entire generation on that?
There are good people and bad people in all generations alike. One day you too will be older, and you’ll be at the receiving end of undeserved criticism for things you’ve never said or done because some young dude met someone else the same age as you they didn’t like.
and you’ll be at the receiving end of undeserved criticism for things you’ve never said or done because some young dude met someone else the same age as you they didn’t like.
You think that’s not already happening to millennials? Fuck me, get out more.
Fuck me, get out more.
Which would you prefer? As an X slacker, I only have enough spare “meh” to handle one or the other.
Wait… you’re a millennial? Doesn’t that mean you’re basically a kid? Does this count as grooming? Help, I need an adult!
realizes half the adults in his family are dead
Typical boomers.
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I do have to say that most of the bullies and assholes I have known have been gen X.
As most things in life, a huge disappointment
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 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.
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.
We’re just waiting. See you soon.
Someone has to write all these shitty articles how bad the other generations are.
were the hidden generation, hiding in plain sight between 2 larger messes.
the middle child generation.
I was about to take umbrage with that on behalf of millennials, but tbh we are a mess—not entirely through our own doing, of course—but definitely a mess.
Classic Gen X: “It’s not my problem.”
Cool, thanks for all the help guys. No wonder you get called fucking Boomers. You could have appended “other people aren’t my responsibility” and really nailed down why people stopped giving a fuck about a generation that never gave a fuck about themselves or others.
genx took learys ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ as literal instruction
Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity”.
I know a Gen Xer who really did literally make Dennis Leary a big part of his personality, without anybody (before me) explaining why a song about being an asshole wasn’t supposed to be singing about a hero you should emulate.
Wrong Leary. The devil’s talking about Timothy Leary, in this case.
In other words, you coasted off of the luxuries afforded you by the previous generation and enjoyed selfish, fully funded indulgences themed as rebellion (while understanding that that wealth funding you was always ill gotten and at the expense of exploited and abused minority groups) and then, because you took a generation off, left a fully unmanaged mess festering to inevitably implode the generation after you?
And then today, even with the wisdom of time, you live with the hubris to call that generation, that you passively destroyed, “a mess”. Respectfully, I’m not sure you realize it, you piece of shit, but you’re actually a piece of shit.
not that you understand the the subtlety of words, the implication is that all generations are messes, genx is just, in volume, less human beings.
but go on over-reacting. it really shows what kind of person you are.
That’s not the implication. It’s you forgiving yourself the burden of reality. You chilled the fuck out at MTV spring break, bud. You smelled the smoke, but you didn’t care, you got yours.
And now you have the audacity to call the millenials, who watched 9/11 on rolly CRT TVs in their classrooms as babies and then entered the workplace during the great recession and sub prime mortgage finance scams. Then, when they might finally be building some type of momentum back, you get trump into COVID into vaccine denial, RTO mandates, endless rounds of mass tech layoffs, false inflation/corporate price gouging into 2nd trump/end of American democracy and the chaos to come.
But go on being a selfish, disaffected tool (that also seems to equate the scale of boomers and millenials here?), it really affirms who you are
hahahahahah. hilarious. you really have some pent up emotions that need a serious outlet thats not lemmy. good luck, buddy!
We took the brunt of everything the Boomers could throw at us. You’re welcome. Its your turn now, we’re tired.
What the hell are Boomers? Some kind of Dark souls boss? We are the Third generation they fuck up!
They got a college education for about $1000 in today money, bought property and homes for $20k today money, and are clinging to power rather than letting anyone younger have a seat at the table. They were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Every other generation is too “lazy” to do what they did, so it must be correct that they hold onto power because we’d just fuck it all up.
The world got handed to them in post-WWII USA while Europe and Asia were rebuilding and they fail to recognize that they were born into an unprecedented situation that is unlikely to repeat. That’s why they’re selfish assholes.
I agree with everything you said but I think one thing that is often overlooked is how the boomers are virtually all lead poisoned. Gen-X and some Millennials as well but the Boomers took the brunt of it. They grew up with lead gas poisoning the air, lead pipes (well, a bigger percentage anyways) poisoning the water, lead tools poisoning the workers, lead bullets poisoning game, and so forth. Lead poisoning does some fucked up stuff to people’s cognitive abilities. The lead problem still exists but the scale of the problem back when the boomers were growing up was on a whole different level.
Exposure to lead can result in a variety of effects upon cognitive functions including deficits in general intellectual functioning, ability to sustain attention on tasks, organization of thinking and behavior, speech articulation, language comprehension and production, learning and memory efficiency, fine motor skills, high activity level, reduced problem solving flexibility and poor behavioral self-control.
https://www.mwph.org/health-services/lead-treatment/poisoning-effects
Also not saying they have an excuse, just saying I think lead poisoning of > 1 sequential generation affected a lot of decisions. Most probably small but all of them adding up to set the stage for our current situation.
They also have a reputation for having dropped all the 60s counterculture idealism as soon as they got a buck, and have been driving the capitalist market for shitty overseas products like it’s a drug addiction. Sorry, is that just my dad? Signed, a Middle Millennial
We all went for a bike-ride, and when we got home just played some Atari.
Still playing Atari…
Ngl That’s kinda Badass
“The forgotten generation” strikes again!
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.
Worse than an H Bomb
