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There it is, the Big Bang, the Generation X cliché from which all others were born. Like bell bottoms, aviator shades and Birkenstocks, we have been wearing the clichés imposed by other generations since Zima was cool (Zima was never cool).Īnd now, as our AARP cards begin to arrive in the mail, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to turn those clichés on our heads one by one? We were never slackers So it’s easy to decide that Gen X is culturally irrelevant - if you’re comfortable with the dangerous prospect of making sweeping conclusions about the identity, values and culture of millions of individuals from every imaginable background.ĭid the working-class class trans kid living in Tulsa, Okla., the Marine recruit from the South Bronx, the heiress in Rhode Island, and the surfing phenom in Huntington Beach, Calif., all groove on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in 1992? Would it matter if they did?īut to cede irrelevance, even after 25 years of reflection, would be to let the winners - the boomers, or maybe the millennials - write our history for us. Boomers never got over losing Jimi, Janis, and Jim during a ten-month span of 19, but consider the Generation X icons who were snuffed out at an early age: Tupac Shakur, Jeff Buckley, Brandon Lee, Elliott Smith, Biggie Smalls, River Phoenix, Shannon Hoon, Aaliyah and a certain beloved flannel-clad rocker from Aberdeen, Wash., who has gotten enough ink in Generation X articles. Our generation also showed a disturbing tendency to lose its leading lights due to untimely death. Read more about the tech, music, style, books, rules, films and pills that scream Gen X. (My wife was born in 1979 and has no idea who Fonzie is. Most people I know who ever copped to X-ness were born in the later ’60s or early ’70s, a window of maybe eight years. Only 41 percent of the people born during those years even consider themselves part of Generation X, according to one MetLife study. Sandwiched between the change-the-world boomers (around 75 million) and the we-won’t-wait-for-change millennials (approximately 83 million), we were doomed to suffer a shared case of middle-child syndrome, an eight-figure-strong army of Jan Bradys.Īnd our generation may be smaller than that. There is one thing people do get right about America’s Generation X: There aren’t that many of us - roughly 65 million, according to recent data from the Census Bureau. Here is another negative to chew on: What if everything we decided about Generation X turned out to be wrong? This generation is even smaller than it might appear Now it’s been a quarter century since the clichés ossified. To the extent that we were defined, we were defined in the negative - the first generation in American history to be written off before it had a chance to begin. No one really knew what we were.īut someone apparently knew what we weren’t: dreamers, revolutionaries, world-changers, like the baby boomers before us. At that point, the oldest members of Generation X were 25. Leave aside the fact that struggling 20-somethings of any era tend to sneer at luxury goods. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders.” They postpone marriage because they dread divorce.
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“They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. “They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own,” wrote Time magazine in a 1990 cover story called “20-something” that marked our debut, as a class, on the national stage. What is an X? An empty set, a place-holder, a nothing that fills a void until an actual something comes along.įor the members of Generation X, born between 19, that was never us.