Every Gen Xer I've ever met are the most apathetic people in the world. They do not give a single shit about what happens outside of their immediate vicinity, no matter what it is. The youngest ones are all middle aged now so they do the "when you get older you'll get more conservative" shtick to millennials and zoomers too.
The only person I personally know who is way into Q nonsense was 36 when she got redpilled. It seems to me like the people who are really into the OG QAnon shit (like actually following the Q drops and believing that a massive uprising is imminent) tend to be at least in their mid-30s, while the people who get into it via #SaveTheChildren or new age type bullshit and are mostly concerned with Hollywood sickos and sex trafficking conspiracy theories are significantly younger.
"when you get older you'll get more conservative"
Younger gen Xer here, can confirm. After working a real job for a couple years, i went from AnCom to ML.
I think the “when you get older you’ll get more conservative” is actually kinda true in western countries, but mostly because most people thinking that they're leftists in their youths are just left liberals, so when and if they eventually accumulate capital, they become less supportive of measures that would reduce inequality and create a socialist society, because their class interests as labor aristocrats might get threathened.
For actual leftists though? We have been a very small minority since the golden age of social democracy in the Keynesian era and the capitalist hegemonic ideology is extremely strong, so disappointment and burnout is very common among us and thus some of us embrace that the arguments we are told all our life like "it's not going to work anyway" start to ring true. Also, the western left is usually composed of educated people that can assume high-paying jobs, thus starting the same process of boomerification that happened in the 1970s and 1980s.
Eventually though, a socialist revolution will succeed in a place that will be strong enough to repel coordinated resistance from Bourgeois class interests and imperialist states' interests and humanity will be able to progress to the next stage of development.
Gen-X focused media is terrible as well
Because nearly every single TV show, movie and everything acted like having a steady job and benefits was the worst thing you could ever do to yourself
And the message is never just "you don't need a corporate career to be happy." It's always "you can only be happy by following your extremely individualistic dream, which will be fulfilled in an explicitly self-serving manner."
Like how this logic blew up in their kids faces and suddenly they were like “actually just white knuckle your way through a STEM degree and get and IT job, you can do your artsy shit on the weekends”.
And now their kids are in their mid-20s and thinking "Wait, wasn't I supposed to get weekends off?"
Nuclear war really had a bad effect on their psyche's tbh. That and the end of history bs.
This. I used to sit in the living room and bawl my eyes out until my mom and dad came home because I was convinced that the Russians were going to initiate a first strike any moment. The Day After really messed us up.
Same with my Dad, except he was basically an anarchist punk to deal with that shit. Like that shit will fuck you up for life.
My parents are Gen X and I can confirm they suck. My mom is literally a doctor and she was saying that we need to reopen schools, in the middle of the worst wave, because "kids don't die of Covid". She just doesn't want to be the only one going into work - not that she considers the janitors, post workers, office clerks etc as working
The early 80s resurgence of the red scare poisoned millions of brains
The inward turn and navel gazing the boomers took in 70s was reinforced into Gen Xers.
Gen X had a week where they were a cool generation, but it didnt feel like their push to the left wasnt strong enough.
The growth of every subsequent generation leftward is important, but will be just a little incomplete.
I'll have you know my first organizing was on the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1988 (where we won my all white precinct on caucus night, albeit in Boulder) and my first donation was to Bernie Sanders for House of Representative was in 1990, after reading about his campaign in In These Times.
