I didn't know, so I looked it up. Now I know. Thought you might like to know too, if you don't already. 🙂
There's are cultural difference between those born between 1965-1970 and the rest of Gen-X. I liked a comment posted on Reddit that said that the border between one side of Gen-X and the other was marked by bicycle seats. Banana on one side and BMX on the other.
The boundaries are all rather arbitrary, but there is a grain of truth to some of the analysis.
You can certainly look at broad generalizations regarding material circumstances unique to a generational cohort
Maybe so. Am not saying I agree with or endorse this terminology.
Just that I want to know what people are meant when these terms are used. And they are used a lot.
Not really. People's formative experiences do have a big impact on their world view. The generations are broken up into groups that experienced very different things as they were coming of age.
Famous gen xers: Elon Musk (born 1971), Larry Page (born 1973), Jack Dorsey (born 1976).
They couldn't think of some better people to represent Gen X? None of those people exemplify what Gen X stands for, and we revoked their cards. How about Kurt Cobain, Tupac, and RDJ?
Edit: Page was cool until around 2011, and then he joined the shit club Musk is in.
Elon Musk probably is more representative these days though, sadly. I'm an older Xennial (born 1980) and I can tell you Gen X mostly sucks. At least Gen X Burgers suck. The good ones seemed to have all died. So many chuds now. I mean, they are different from boomer chuds in that they aren't quite as high on American Exceptionalism. They also made weed legal most places. That's about it though.
They have that famous morose cynicism, but it all got conveniently steered into reactionary rugged individualism. They have that "I am a lone wolf, I go my own way" attitude, but because they can't think outside the current atomized box, they focus their skepticism and distrust on "government". Covid completely melted their brain too. The anti-mask shit was very Gen X driven. They like the idea of "being a rebel" but because their thinking is so individualistic, it is impossible for them to even consider the kind of collective rebellion needed to threaten the actual levers of power in our society. Instead they protest stupid shit like mask mandates. The Capitalist Realism runs so deep and fits right in with their cynicism and apathy.
So yea, fuck Gen X. People born before 1980 are mostly a lost cause. So they supposedly had a hard childhood, but its the people born after 1980 that suffered more economically because they didn't have time to get their careers established before the dot com crash of 2000 and the 2008 housing/financial crash.
You just rambled off a list of character traits you don't like and inaccurately attributed all of them to an entire generation of people. Lame.
It isn’t really the character traits I’m criticizing though. I share some of them. For context I’ve been getting a lot of “you know you’re gen x” memes in my social media feed and couldn’t help but notice quite a lot of chuddy comments with no push back at all. So, yea, the commenter sample is biased to people who identify with the term “gen x” rather than all people in that age bracket. It just got me bummed. Like how can you watch things get worse and worse in terms of inequality as you age and become MORE conservative. It was the exact opposite for me so I just don’t get it.
I am Gen X, so I know a lot of Gen X people, and maybe 2% of them are conservative. Of course my own social circle isn't indicative of an entire generation either, but I don't know anyone my age who acts like you described. Although, apathy is kind of our superpower, born of necessity, so I can see how that bothers an emotional generation. We've been outnumbered by the Boomers our entire lives, and then by the millennials later, so we've never been able to enact much societal change. It's not that we never cared, it's that our concern was always ineffectual due to being constantly outnumbered, and thus was born our motto, "whatever". We did help build the internet though, as well as the machines that run it.
The thing is a lot of these generations only make sense in the US. Things happened differently elsewhere. There were other defining events in other countries that the US definitions don't account for, technology lagged a few decades sometimes and that also caused some differences. This makes these generational definitions kind of useless in the global context.
I'd say what defines the latest generation really isn't about social media but AI.
