Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cause Everything Else That’s Great and Awful

The coverage of what us and what is not Gen X seems to have forgotten all the Black and Brown folks who also fall into this age grouping. Not a single qualifier, trans or observation takes us into consideration! This is most interesting because of the lasting and insanely relevant cultural impact of hip hop, which arguably came to mass attention through Gen X...

Re: the journalist who lived in 1994 for a week.... My college graduation gift from my parents in 1994 was an Apple Quadra that came with an AOL cd-rom. I got a modem to go with it, plugged in my landline phone cord, and I was hooked up to the World Wide Web. Email was certainly available in 1994, so why couldn’t it be used in the week living in that year?

We’re the reason tattoos are not just for bikers and sailors.

We millennials love Gen X, mysterious and brooding as they are. Let’s give them a round of applause already.

I was born in 1964 and always felt I arrived to the party just as everyone was leaving, was handed a broom and told to lock up and show myself out.

Well, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Transformers, and anything 80s kid pop culture, is a product of Generation X reliving their childhood. So there's that.

I had to look up Elliott Smith. Huh? Lost me on that one. Lost me on actually watching an Oscars telecast. Mostly I remember the freedom to ride around on my bike at all hours and make huge mistakes. My parents were never home, so it was me, the streets, and the TV. I learned a lot about myself and the world that my son can only hope to learn. If I let him do what I did, I would be arrested for negligence.

You forgot to mention that Gen-Xers are long-winded bloviators.

One other defining feature of Gen X— our relationship to war. I had relatives who had experienced WW2 and Vietnam, and grew up hearing those stories. We grew up very afraid of nuclear war and the Soviet Union. War was both something in the past, but also a very frightening possibility. So when the US broke a 20 year period of relative peacefulness to begin the nighttime “shock and awe” attack to begin the first Iraq War, I was extremely afraid— for the soldiers, for ourselves. War seemed extremely dangerous. Now here we are, 20 years in Afghanistan, two Iraq wars later, and though war has never stopped being awful, it must seem much more normal for Millennials, I would imagine. They have grown up with the US in constant war. It is just a constant background noise to domestic life here. And that is wrong— this should not be a new normal!

African-American Gen X-er (Class of 72). As someone was apart of the second (third?) wave of affirmation action, I was firmly raised and schooled in diversity. Reading this article I could see some of it seep thru but enough to recall how much my generation is really the daybreak, so to speak, of Dr. King’s dream. However, the article also limited AA Gen X contributions to just the entertainment field. . I do feel Gen X is a forgotten generation, not given it’s due, especially when I speak to the Millennials in the workplace. Gen X was well-fed on history, civility and independence. We didn't need "adulting" classes, we knew how to hold our tongues and speak up but we also had/have spunk. We don't have to wait for it to be safe to strike out. Adventure, risk taking and breaking the rules are what define us. We'll be the generation that will save America from itself, because many of us know that life still exists if the Internet ever ceases. After years of listening to our uncles/aunts/parents Boomers ramble on and on about their music, their events, their achievements, we did some and more just without all the fanfare.

Ahhh… a youth without cellphones and the internet. We rode bikes in the summer until dark. Our parents never really knew where we were. Our social life revolved around long, directionless talks on the telephone (yes, the kind attached to the wall) with our best friends. And when we had to write a paper for school, we had to go the library and use the card catalog to do research. Getting a driver's license was maybe the greatest right of passage. There was a freedom that simply does not exist in our world today. It makes me sad that my teenage child will never know how great and liberating it felt to grow up at this time.

Here are the facts: Generation X constitutes a LARGER demographic than baby boomers. There are 88.5 million Gen Xers against 65.6 million baby boomers. That's a fact. Each generation has at least three (3) waves, a first wave, second, then the third, which are called 'post' whatever generation they are a part of. According to strict astrological generations, the baby boomer generation was born 1939 to 1953, with post-boomers (Gen Jones) born 1954-1960. Generation X, born 1961-1975 with post-Xers born 1976-1981, constitute a larger demographic. What happened was that the boomers in government fudged the numbers, actually extending their generation to the year 1966 (look on the Internet for that) then they cut it back two years to 1964, where the fallacy continued to be spread to people who don't really want to think anyway and read the ACTUAL BIRTH RATES. There were NO baby boomers born in the 1960s. Not a single one. Those who fudged those numbers did so to make the baby boomer generation 'appear' larger than it actually is and they stole money from Generation X too. There were no boomers born in the 1960s. It was all made up to steal resources from Generation X (about 48% to date) and Generation X intends to get it back and will too. Here are the latest demographic numbers on generations done by Neil Howe, see for yourself ->> http://www.thegenxfiles.com/2012/01/06/latest-numbers-for-generation-x/

Gen Xers are sick and tired of hearing about Millennials. Could you have left them out of the title of this article? We did not invent them and we do not care one iota how they are faring in the workplace. But you did apologize, so we'll forgive you. Back to the rest of the article, which hopefully will be a revelation to the world that Gen X is alive and kicking, well done. (Anthem pun intended. Seriously, has Time Magazine never heard of Simple Minds?) The 80s and early 90s was a tremendously interesting time to be young and to experience a worldwide engagement in worthy causes (nuclear disarmament, ending apartheid, celebrating the last of the Cold War). Thank you, Alex Williams, for shining a light on Gen X.

Someone born in the 60s can be considered Gen X? Who knew? There's obviously a lot I don't know. However, after reading this pop culture montage on a generation bemoaning their own generational neglect, I'm actually inclined to suggest James Merendino's "SLC Punk!" is a much better summation than anything presented here. The soundtrack does in fact include Generation X. I don't mean to be offensive. However, the general arch of the story is about a disgruntled overachiever "rebelling" against institutional sovereignty but ultimately selling out when rebelling against the institution becomes less convenient than conformity. In the end he's not selling out, he's buying-in and "rebellion" was always someone else's idea anyway. No one really cares regardless. That summarizes Gen X pretty well for me.

I wrote a piece that was published as an Op-Ed in this newspaper on October 1, 1994 called "Generation Hex," and I think it holds up pretty well. Check it out by clicking on the magnifying glass on this New York Times page.

The hippies sold out to become yuppies. So Generation X came along and people rolled their eyes at us. The real generation x is still out there. The posers are the sellouts. There is a difference. We were given the hippies as our example. So who was the original sellout?

Fun article, and well written, thank you! As an addition, I agree with those who mentioned The Day After (and there was another tv-film—does anyone remember the name?) and the Clintons as very influential. The former, that there was no way it would be desirable to survive a nuclear war, and the latter...well, as the latter.

When I look around I feel like I was one of the last people to enjoy a really great ride. A ride that has been getting harder and harder for people after me to duplicate. To be a kid without a schedule, to not be connected, to get a great education without taking on life-crushing debt, to watch Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan. I don't know how I would have handled being born in the 90s. Probably not well.

Another gen x talent lost was Bradley Nowell of Sublime...surprised he wasn't included in your list.

Oh please. It's the Baby Boomers that are to blame. They're the worst generation ever. Gen X was skipped over. The Millennials are second worse generation.

We grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons and Brady Bunch reruns. We had MTV when the M stood for "music." We were told to "just say no" to drugs (ha). We lost sleep after watching "The Day After". We believed Bill Cosby was a great role model. We were scared of AIDS. We thought Bill Clinton would take us out of the Reagan/Bush era forever. We thought the Boomers would make room for us in the workplace (some did, most didn't). We loved anything David Letterman and Arsenio did. We did pretty darn well in a world before smartphones. And we're going to do pretty darn well in middle age, even if that means keeping just the right amount of cynicism and sarcasm to get through the next few decades.

Wonderful social analysis and top-notch writing. I'm surprised there was not one mention of "The Breakfast Club" or Molly Ringwald.

‘Some demographers like argue that the generation began in 1960. To put it in scientific terms, this is hogwash. Most people born in 1960 graduated from high school in 1978. The white suburban high school students I remember in 1978 wore feathered hair, thought Camaros were cool, and considered “Lucky Man,” by Emerson Lake and Palmer, to be the height of synth-pop. Case closed.” Uh....no! I was born in late 1960 and do not fit your narrow minded stereotype, based obviously on your suburban middle class upbringing. I am a Gen-Xer. My friends and I ushered in Post Punk, New Wave, skinny ties and, later, the early internet. We are NOT Boomers. We didn’t dance at Discos or love Emerson Lake & Palmer. We thought hippies and yuppies were equally ridiculous. We rebelled and created our own unique culture. And it began when we were born....starting in 1960!

We were never slackers. We did sell out, as every generation does, eventually. But we are cynical and disaffected, just like those before us became as they grew older. The difference is that we were ambivalent. Gen Xers are the original Millennials in many ways Older Gen Xers will know this better, because our future seemed very different before the Reagan coalition changed everything. Younger Gen Xers probably won't understand this, because they were too young when our generation was sold out to corporate America, who would then decide everything for us. Like many, I had to look up many of the pop references here and they're certainly not anything that I'd associate with Gen X. Instead, they seem more like products of corporate America, as does everything since around 1982 or shortly after Reagan was settled in the White House. The Reagan coalition effectively delayed Gen X views until Millennials could reignite the torch over 2 decades later. In some ways, Millennials are living the lives that Gen Xers once believed we were carving out for ourselves, until we were forcibly sidetracked.

I think this piece misses the politics of GenX. Yes, there was some Kevin Powell. But more defining than Kevin Powell was Alex P. Keaton. The article doesn’t mention Ronald Reagan or the end of the Cold War, which I’d argue (and I’m born 1971) defines the generation politically as much as anything.

Gen X does not strike me as a mess, but this article certainly does. I was born in '72 and had to open up a Wikipedia tab as I read this piece just to understand half the references. Some interesting factoids in here (and "Pellegrino rich" is remarkably accurate), but the pop culture references were way too numerous and cute, and belied the actual nature of Gen X-ers as hard-working and unself-conscious.

As a Gen Xer I see us as this: -committed to social causes devoting time or careers to non profits and respect for one another -the sandwich gen raising our little gen Alphas while supporting aging boomer parents. -Loving family values but realistic and aware it can all come apart. -Many is us are children of immigrants, aware of their sacrifices and defining the good life on our own terms.

As I recall, in Coupland's novel (Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which popularized but did not coin the term), the demographic cohort of the main characters was not Gen X but Generation Jones, born before 1965. Their angst was derived from being at the tail end of the Baby Boom; their older fellow Boomers had consciously enjoyed the best part of the postwar period (the 50s and 60s), and now occupied all the best jobs and real estate, and were generally in charge of the culture, which they gently turned from Hippie liberalism towards Orange County-style Republicanism. Still numerous, Gen X felt frozen out of their demographic due, with McJobs instead of careers, and rootlessness and jet travel their only solace. Those born after 1965 (the Baby Bust) were seen as having secure futures due to their scarcity. I might be remembering all this wrong; time to reread the novel, I guess.

Generation X was the first generation of kids that could be aborted, and after Roe v. Wade in 1973, they were aborted with gusto. That's why there are fewer.

Millennials were born in 1982 or later. The actual social scientists that coined the phrase defined it as such. It had to do with graduating high school in the new millennium. Those born in 1981 graduated in 1999. Those born in 1982 graduated in 2000, thus they were “millennials”. It’s a pretty clear line that somehow changed in recent years to saying millennials were born in 1980 or 1981, which doesn’t make any sense.

I mean Gen X looks pretty good coming after what is clearly the worst generation in history.

I'll grant the Gen Xers that their rap is largely undeserved (as are most generationally-applied generalizations), but you're not helping your case by writing (and re-writing) this same piece every month or so.

As a late Gen Xer (born 1978), I grew up in the prosperous 80s and 90s, even though I lived in a trailer park with my parents at work before and after school. We were probably the last generation allowed to be kids on our own without helicopter parents. We watched in awe as the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War eventually came to a close. There was a sense in my teenage years that we could make a difference just like previous generations. 9/11 shattered that and changed our world forever as our world changed and we are still trying to fugue out meaning from it. Culturally, we were amazed when we first got cable and had a whopping channels. There were so many things in this article that I remember, but many that were beyond my grasp. Our culture was diverse and tolerant as you could literally listen to Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Garth Brooks, and the Beatles in one drive (as long as you had a CD disc changer). We were spoon-fed Baby Boomer's culture on top of our own and we were labeled slackers or "losers" because of Beck's song. I really think we are still a generation in search of identity because we had such a wide-variety to choose from and the fact that we don't totally identify with either Baby Boomers or Millennials. We truly are the middle child generation who just wants to be noticed and make a difference.

Generation X was so small, school districts were forced to close elementary schools and consolidate junior high and high schools during the early 80's due to lack of enrollment. The culture described in this article plays as a relevance tie-in to today as opposed to the actual Generation X culture which was heavily influenced by TV (the big 3 networks), radio and movies. It was a monoculture with smaller pockets of creativity. There was a reverence for the Greatest Generation, their work ethic, their competence and their belief in family that has not abated.