The young are forever in conflict with the old—just listen to Socrates bewailing Athenian youth: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” Them and the Millennials. And our already gaping intergenerational divisions have been deepened by the mix of a pandemic that threatened the old, and a lockdown that did special damage to the jobs of the young. But in the clamour to apportion blame for everything, from looming environmental calamity (the fault of those greedy Baby Boomers) to allegedly killing sex (thank you, risk-averse, porn-guzzling Millennials), one group is all but invisible: Gen X.
Where, you might ask, are the memes, the skits, the thinkpieces about us Xers? Yes, I am one, but I had to think about what exactly those of us born between 1965 and 1980 are supposed to represent. Stereotypes about the Brexit-voting ways of go-getting Boomers are rife, and we’re well versed in how their retirements will drain the state, even as their rapacious buy-to-lets keep first-time buyers off the property ladder. So say the Millennials, but we know all about them: needy, narcissistic snowflakes who spend their time posting about avocado toast on social media. Even the cold-brew-slurping Gen Zs (born from 1997) are getting in on the act, sniping at the Millennials’ fondness for skinny jeans and side-partings, and, by pushing up from the bottom, threatening X’s monopoly of what until now has been one of the few clear elements of its generational identity: the status of overlooked middle child.
Gen X came by its name in the early 1990s, when Canadian writer Douglas Coupland published his debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Until then, we were the Baby Busters, and that sense of being defined by what came before—and now after—persists. You can buy a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “respect Gen X—we survived the boomers and tolerate Millennials.”
The letter “X” once suggested watch-this-space potential. Yet in the pop cultural narrative, we’ve gone directly from underachieving adolescence to obscure middle age, never mind that we made ironic nihilism hip (then popped Prozac), invented grunge (raves, too), and embraced androgyny long before gender-neutral pronouns went mainstream (is that CK One I smell?). We may not be digital natives, but we did the heavy lifting—literally, with those brick-like early mobile phones. We listened to dial-up’s eerie techno whale song and glimpsed the web’s potential.
Not that I’ve ever felt particularly rooted in my generation. I was more likely to be found listening to my mum’s old vinyl than Nirvana, and never did see the appeal of pulsing beats in a neon-strobed warehouse. It’s a bit galling, then, that two of those clickbaity “which generation are you?” quizzes correctly identified me as belonging to Gen X. Perhaps my ambivalence towards the whole idea gave me away— after all, apathy is supposedly a Gen-X trait.
But maybe there’s another reason why you don’t see us on the battlefield of generational warfare—because we’re the ones choreographing it. Ever considered who’s com- missioning all these features and listicles about the mighty Boomer-Millennial bust-up? There’s a strong chance it’s a Gen-Xer. Yes, Gen X has slouched its way up to the execu- tive floor. We may not yet have produced a US president, but Elon Musk, JK Rowling, Jay-Z, Jennifer Aniston and Tiger Woods are all Xers.
Societal generations are a modern, 20th-century invention. Do they serve any greater purpose than confirming prejudices? Rigid cohorts ignore the way we all (yes, even the Millennials) end up mellowing into cantankerous reactionaries and become less self-absorbed on the way. They also tend to disempower, evoking indissoluble divisions while obscuring those that we could work to change—the financial inequality, for instance, that means some Millennials are indeed homeowners, thanks to the Bank of Mum and Dad.
Generations are said to be about as accurate as star signs for predicting outcomes. A new book by Bobby Duffy, Gen Xer and professor at King’s College London, underscores our shared humanity—showing that generations play a limited role in shaping outlook, too. Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are? also conjures up another timely role to which we in the sandwich generation are perfectly suited, besides that of fomenting feuds: mediator.
Illustration by Hannah Berry
