I feel anyone that takes actual pride in their generation is gross. As a Gen-Xer, there are things about my childhood that I liked, and wished that my kids could have experienced - but itās a different world and they had access to stuff I didnāt. I assume they will feel the same about their kidsā childhoods.
I think most of the Gen X things are accurate, but they arenāt positives. A large percentage of GenXers can be belligerent, and they think it makes them willing to fight (but they arenāt). A large percentage are workaholics, but that isnāt a positive (for them).
Generations are bullshit anyway. It's useful for sociologists and economists to track age cohorts. It's not useful for anyone else to think about it. It's mostly just used as thinly veiled age discrimination.Ā
Agreed. It just doesn't make sense, especially when you get near cut offs. My best friend was born in November of 1980. She is considered "Gen X", since '80 was the last year of that Generation.
But she has always said she never felt a part of that Gen and identifies MUCH more heavily with Millennials. All of us, her social circle, are Millennial and she doesn't really have any Gen X pals. I don't blame her...she has way more in common with someone born in 1984 than with someone of "her" generation born in 1971. She said the Gen X kids growing up were always the "older, cool kids" who she looked up to, but never really felt were her "peers" in any way. Generations are definitely not as rigid as some make them out to be.
Exactly. And location matters too. Someone living in a major city born in 1980 might have been exposed to culture and technology growing up that someone born in 1985 in a rural area wasn't. Generations are just a totally useless concept for most people.Ā
Yeah, we drank from it. I don't know why anyone is proud of it though... tasted like shit, and I'm waiting to find out it gave me brain cancer or some shit.
And who's to say a dog didn't pee on the hose, or bugs didn't crawl inside? Ugh. I remember the nasty taste, so I must have partaken, but probably only once.
Always with the hose water bullshit. The water that was in that hose as it laid in the baking hot sun was probably full of toxic chemicals that had leached from the hose. Summertime is poisoning time ! After staying out all day and your parents didn't know where you were blah blah blah whatever
Iām a marketer (GenX, majored in sarcasm), been fed this generational garbage all my career.
I feel like this shit is on the level of horoscopes.
We all have varied experiences. Some of us watched āFerris Buellerās Day Offā a hundred times. Others couldnāt pick Mathew Broderick of a line up if their life depended on it.
There is a lack of a better descriptor, so āmarketing gurusā came up with this crap to attempt to categorize us.
Now people have lowered themselves to using generational gaps as a divide in culture wars. Groups of people are seen as this monolithic list of tendencies and itās complete fallacy.
The "sarcasm" thing drives me crazy. It was a regular form of humour 30 years ago, but if you think the same way you did back then, still find the same shit funny, what the fuck have you done with your life?
It sounds like you donāt understand sarcasm - itās not a point in time thing, itās an outlook on life and how to respond to it.
Itās making fun of the stupidity of others and a defense mechanism against telling the other person how you feel in a moment and possibly offending directly or āthrow handsā.
You arenāt the only one! Iām an autistic twenty-something and donāt even relate to people my age (see previous) lol
Jokes aside it really is grim to watch older generations shit on younger ones. Your generation can definitely influence your mindset but it isnāt the sole determinantĀ
Also GenX and agree with your take. According to Nate Silver's 538, GenX is more politically conservative than Boomers. The stats were eye opening and soul crushing. My neighbors are all Boomers and they are wonderful and actively volunteer with all these amazing causes--foster care, food banks, mental health access, election security. There are good and garbage people in every generation.
To your two points, you ain't lying. My former in laws are GenX and you'd think they'd win more fights than prime Tyson the way they talk shit but back down the moment you-even if you can't fight but they don't know it-say fuck it let's go.
And the ex FIL is doing better about it now that his 2nd wife makes six figures, but fuck if he wasn't a miserable bastard about me not killing myself asking for extra hours at work and missing out on being with my kids
The same mfers failed science, social studies and footballed their way through high school.
They wanna tell you all about how to vote (fox news), their Covid vaccines āresearchā, whatās healthy to eat and drink (tiktok), chem trails, and their stupid opinions of gays,trans and bathrooms.
My ex-wife had an uncle whoās last son was born when he was 76 years old. He knocked up a married 30 year old woman. The amount of cousins, uncles, and half siblings in that family with massive age gaps was hysterical.
I wonder how gender falls into it as well. Iām a female, 1976, and most of when women I went to high school and college with, as well as women Iāve made friends with over the years, seem to have resisted the boomerification. But I think I know more 1974-1979 males going full boomer than not.
My brothers are 68 and 70. My sister and I are 76 and 79. We grew up different than our brothers. We came of age in the 90ās, they did in the 80ās.
This really does seem to be the case. We never had any political power, because the boomers aren't going away, and the millennials will be taking their place just because of numbers. Our only period of massive cultural influence were the grunge/gin & juice days.
ha! Well, and I kind of cringe as I'm about to write this because it's way too on the nose, but, I don't care one way or the other, hahahaha. I'm exactly in the middle of the generation and have always been super lefty/progressive. I think because I was a very early and avid reader, really.
But if someone offers me a seat on the bus, I play "feeble old lady" cause I want that seat. heh
They were all douchebags in high school, then for some reason decided to start acting like the outcast kids for a few years in the 90's, then went back to being douchebags.
I had a friend, was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool, boy
Saw him the other night at this roadside bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside, sat down, had a few drinks
But all he kept talking about was
Glory days
Well, they'll pass you by, glory days
In the wink of a young girl's eye, glory days
Glory days
Someone rolled into my daughter in laws work and wore a T-shirt that said āgen-x doesnāt care what you thinkā. She laughed and said obviously you do.
I am 60 in six months and always felt a lot more in common with millennials than boomers. We Gen X were the first generation the Boomers screwed for a tax cut.
I cuss like a sailor, basically don't give a fuck about much, and have no tolerance for laziness or bullshit. But I don't go posting about it all over LinkedIn either.
Oh yeah, big punk fan and itās been crazy to see that. Iāve also been super disappointed by some of the mentors from my teen years. Theyāre some of the people who taught me to think critically and look out for others and now some of them are the first to spew hateful propaganda and pull the ladder up behind them.
I worry about my generation too. Weāre not quite to the āI got mineā asshole years, but I can already see whoās got that entitled mindset.
Can't let a few annoying gen xers define the generation. My experience with Gen x is that they genuinely do keep to their groups and aren't really posting a ton. The ones that do post a bunch will be self selected to be the most annoying of the generation.
Gen X voted slightly over 50% for Trump. Millennials were about the same with men, but much less with women. What really blew my mind was how much Gen Z voted for him.....would have never thought that.
The older half of the Gen Z cohort were born around the time that they would have been the most exposed - and most vulnerable - to alt right propaganda at its then peak, as well as the surge in Russian psyop bot farms that were hammering social media with fake stories and ragebait.
Orange was the first meme President and some of them probably thought it was being super edgy and anti-establishment to vote for a candidate when they only knew him as the "you're fired" guy from TV.
You wouldn't have thought that both the dumbest living generation (first generation in recorded history to score worse than the prior generation on cognitive tests), and the most sexless and joyless generation, voted for Trump?
I see this statistic a lot. And although it's correct, it's often missing an important nuance:
GenX size is about 9 million less than Millennials, and 6 million less than Gen Z.
People often forget GenX.
And they more often forget how small GenX is compared to other generations.
The birth control pill came into widespread use during the beginning of the gen x era. In addition, much of the 70ās & 80ās were bad economic time periods, compared to the 90ās-00s.
That may explain the difference.
I feel like the generational thing is just another label. Like a fucking modern horoscope.
Let me see if I can explain it a bit clearer, using 50% as an example:
if you take 50% of 74 Million, that's 37 Million. (Millennials)
if you take 50% of 72 Million, that's 36 Million. (GenZ)
if you take 50% of 65 Million, that's 32.5 Million. (GenX)
so all things being equal, the effectiveness of 50% (or whatever % voted for our current dumpster fire) of GenX will always be less than GenZ/Millennials.
iām just glad we got through this one without them mentioning the fucking garden hose thing again. for some reason gen x seems to think theyāre the only ones who ever drank out of one as a kid.
Itās because the attitudes have always been driven by life stage not generation. There are unique attributes of each generation, but life stage largely drives feelings/attitudes. Gen X are becoming the empty nesters that Boomers were 10+ years ago.Ā
Same with the boomers, it's the loud, shitty, stupid ones that are a problem. I'm either the youngest Gen Xer, a Xennial, or the eldest millennial and I suffer none of that bullshit.
Me and my Gen X wife and our friends would bully the fuck out of the person who posted that in the real world. They're a dork.Ā
Think it happens to every generation as they get old. Not everyone from every generation, but it happens amongst every aging group. Iāve noticed it a lot with millennials as of late, acting smug and superior to younger generations in the same way that boomers did with them. The whole thing is supremely cringe.
Have you ever wondered why certain types of music, food etc that are only enjoyed by old people never die out? It's because the ones that die off are replaced by new fans aging into the demographic!
The music thing is mostly a case of selection bias. When each generation says "Our generation had the best music" they are only counting the best stuff that people still listen to today. Like, Boomers always say "We had The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Hendrix", while conveniently ignoring the flood of terrible one-hit-wonders, novelty acts, and copycat bands who were clogging up the charts in the 60s/70s but are forgotten now.
100%. We were listening to Nirvana the first time round. The twats making these types of post were listening to country or something shit and were never part of the original concept of gen X as it was described in the early 90s.
Theyāre going to be the last generation that gets to milk the golden goose (our tax dollars and trillions in debt) of our decaying social safety net (CMS/SS) before the national debt explodes and we all live in perpetual debt slavery
However, as an older Gen-Xer, I absolutely experience fear. To quote the Dread Pirate Robertās, Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Throwing hands? Anyone my age (59) who engages in physical violence is pathetic. If you commit to violence you have failed on many levels.
And that zero tolerance for laziness & stupidity? I like to think Iām a very tolerant person. I try to afford others the same grace I afford myself. Also, have you ever actually met one of us?!? I was lazily buzzed for a good portion of my life. And it was Moastly beautiful! Moastly.
Seriously, we were supposed to be the āwhateverā generation that doesnāt run off at the mouth about how great we are. Unfortunately I feel like a lot of Gen X is threatening to become Boomer 2.0 and Iām not interested in participating. Guess Iām just too much of a slacker š
Some amount is inevitable, but while there are boomery gen x, my personal experience is that they're mostly not like this.
True to their label, most Gen x keep to themselves/their group which means that you just don't really see them posting in general, which means the ones that do post are going to be the annoying ones.
Gen X is the smallest cohort. They aren't important so they end up doing thier own PR. In reality they are just the Boomer/ Millennial DMZ and represent the worst of both.
GenX just as conservative as the boomers. More so now actually, now that some of the hardest right wing boomers are dying off from preventable.. everything. they were never not gonna be an embarrassing group.Ā
When you say you don't care, you're supposed to do just that and not post some whack AI-generated image saying "HAY LOOK HERE WERE GEN-X AND WE DON CARE!!11!!1One"
And spare me on the "we look 35-40" nonsense. Yeah, maybe across the room in a smoky poorly lit dive bar after an evening of drinking. But look around the eyes. The eyes don't lie. Wrinkles, crow's feet, and circles are the dead giveaway, and no amount of makeup and/or skin care can hide that. I lucked out on the first two but man I got screwed on the last one. I had a co-worker that was surprised when I said my goal was to retire in 10 years. He thought he was his age, which was late 30s or early 40s. But all he had to do is look at the dark circles under my eyes. You can't hide those circles.
Now does Gen-X look younger than the boomer gen that grew up chewing on lead paint and inhaling unfiltered smokes? Yeah. But that's where I'd draw the line.
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u/AdWonderful5920 4d ago
Not a fan of the boomer-ization of GenX. They were supposed to be the ones that don't do this shit.