All I hear about is “boomers” this, “Millennials” that, “Gen Z” that, etc.
Why no one talk about Gen X? What happened to them? They just vanished like in Infinity War? Or are we mistaken Gen Z by Boomers?
A lot of gen x got theirs. College was paid for and was cheap, lots of opportunities while they were young, got a house, a family and are just living. They will get a fair inheritance if their parents die on time, but they are also the first to see that huge nest egg disappear to the current healthcare system.
Their vote never counted. Too many boomers.
They were the first to figure out their parents had it incredibly easy, although it took them a long time. Sometimes they didn’t see it until their own kids struggled with costs and employment.
A lot are conservative but probably because they have assets and don’t like social welfare taking from them, even though their parents set it up for them to lose.
They aren’t as tech savvy as millennials.
I disagree that they aren’t as tech savvy as Millennials. I would say on average its younger GenX and older Millennials that have the highest tech skills, with GenX probably ahead. That’s referring to percentage, not total numbers.
Yes, “xennials” probably have their own generation because of this, but I have met a lot more millennials that can manage UI changes over genx.
Switch a genx from windows to Mac and they are lost. Switch a millennial and they seem to be fine. I’ve seen this with phones, TVs, websites, etc.
Genx were young during “dumb” tech. VCR, digital phones, etc. millennials were learning the internet as it was moving from a hobby to its own platform, cellphones as they were first widely available then as they went “smart”, and a lot of other examples.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of knowledge was lost along the way like manual categorical systems including tabulation machines, phone books, Thomas Guides, even cabinet filing systems/card catslogs. Genx handles these things a lot better than the more recent generations.
Genx were young during “dumb” tech. VCR, digital phones, etc. millennials were learning the internet as it was moving from a hobby to its own platform, cellphones as they were first widely available then as they went “smart”, and a lot of other examples.
What’s being missed here is that Gen-X were doing the same thing as Millennials at the same time, except in the workplace rather than school. But they also had the experience of what came before.
Gen Xers didn’t just stop at the “dumb” tech, they were the ones putting the smart tech into practice at work. While millennial students were learning about the Internet, Gen X were building it.
Switch a millennial to a CLI or ask them to understand underlying technologies or networking and watch the difference between them and xennials for example.
Digital native means they learned how to click next.
Younger millennial here, some of us grew up using Linux. There are literally dozens of us!
“Xennials” probably have the most critical problem solving skills applicable to tech. But 80’s/90’s kids were dealing with really new or bad tech while 60’s/70’s kids were dealing with VCRs and ATMs.
My older Gen X Mom (late 1960s) is one of the most tech illiterate people I know….
Its pretty much Gen X who grew up programming their own games on Amigas on things like that, Milleniums grew up with iPads and game consoles.
When Gen X dies off I’d say the world’s going to have a lot less being fixed all round unless AI gets a lot better.
There’s quite a span between older and younger millennials. Older millennials were already in college by the time the iPad was released.
And some of the younger ones were too poor to get one. 93 here and I remember growing up using 95/98/XP/Linux rather than iPads.
I, a millennial, was almost 30 when the iPad launched.
Wow, that a very insightful and concise description, really. Now I understand more. Thank you.
Gen X here, can confirm that’s a pretty accurate take
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They aren’t as tech savvy as millennials.
We built the tech. I was there, three decades ago.
I bought a 386 motherboard that needed a patch. Not software, but by soldering a wire between two pads. You just basically figure it out and went from there with a soldering iron.
Build the computer from parts? Sure. Soldered it like it came as discrete components? Also sure.
Tech savvy is often in context of when you were learning in your teens to early twenties and then what of that skill set is still applicable today.
Some of the genx built it, but the rest of them were too old (too busy) to learn it. The kids learned it.
X86 was not built by genx if you want to get pedantic.
I was talking about the dot-com technology of 30 years ago, not the 8-bit microchip technology of ~50 years ago.
Web “1” and web2.0 was awful. Kids of that time had to troubleshoot it on their own.
They aren’t as tech savvy as millennials.
Yeah, this is nonsense. Gen X were the generation that had to adapt to emerging technology in the workplace, when that technology itself wasn’t designed with user-friendliness at its core, and usually without an education that prioritised that. They worked with obscure hardware and obtuse software. They then continued to adapt as the Internet became prevalent and software within offices evolved. They saw the most change, and remain in the workforce.
As time has gone on, technology has simplified for the user. As such, Gen X are absolutely the generation that taught their parents how to solve their IT issues, and the ones that continue to teach their children, with Xennials being the peak of that curve.
Anecdotally, my teenage kids fly around an iPhone, but still think a computer is the fucking monitor.
Kids of today certainly lack a lot of “background” tech troubleshooting skills, but understand some of the more nuanced details of modern systems. It’s both interesting and frustrating to watch.
I wonder if the context of ‘tech person’ vs average person is what they meant?
A genx tech person in their field is going to be on avg further along than millenial in the same field - because they’ve literally been doing it longer, more experience, learnt more, exposed to more fundamentals.
imo the distinction is the average (non-tech) genx probably will have less tech exposure than avg millenial, millenials were coming up during the shift of the average person thinking “computers are for geeks” to “tech is cool”.
disclaimer: generation names are kind of arbitrary divide and conquer bs anyway.
They aren’t as tech savvy as millennials.
I’m GenX. If you ask my group of friends “who here has built their own PC from components?” every hand is going to go up. Including the teacher, the administrator and the financier.
Ask a group of Millennials who knows what the command line is for and see what reaction you get.
GenX is the generation that does tech support for its parents and its children.
Isn’t that just cos: a) you had to build your own PC back then, and b) you have way more time and resources to do so
Exactly. I don’t know that it’s just that, but it is that. It’s not like the people are fundamentally different raw materials - a generation is defined by it’s circumstances. And those were the gen x circumstance.
(Edit: except resources. There were fuck all resources compared to today)
Kind of… It’s really that weird bridge period between the two generations. 1980 seems to be the sweet spot. The further your birth year is from it, in either direction, the less tech savvy they seem to be.
I can prove this scientifically in that I am employed in tech and a lot of my friends are too.
That’s simply selection bias.
Older millennials are firmly there with you in relation to tech.
Musk is Gen X. Ron DeSantis is Gen X. Josh Hawley is Gen X. Paul Ryan, Gen X, claimed Rage Against the Machine was a favorite band despite being a fucking Republican.
Sounds to me like they’re pretty loud and fucking shit up just as bad as the Boomers, no offense.
I don’t have good memories of Gen X, just memories as assholes older than me who judged everyone based on what music they listened to and were absolutely assholes if your music wasn’t cool enough.
Am I shocked most of them grew up to be conservative fuckholes? No, no I am not.
Anyway they mostly just get lumped in with Boomers, but Musk is Gen X and I think he’s sadly pretty representative of it.
Over half of men (52%) aged 45+ voted for Trump and 44 is the youngest Gen X.
He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
Knows not what it means, and I say
He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means, knows not what it means, and I say, “Yeah”
As most things in life, a huge disappointment
I do have to say that most of the bullies and assholes I have known have been gen X.
Just under half of men aged 18-29 voted for Trump, and who knows how bad that number would be if young people actually bothered to vote. The idea that conservatives are just old people who got theirs is just a skewed view from young progressives with conservative parents.
Gen X was the age of hippies, protesting the Vietnam war, anti nuclear protests, and so on. In many ways they were more progressive than the current young generations.
Millenials are growing up to be just as conservative as gen x. Gen z is already turning towards conservatism (probably because progressives really suck at social media which is shaping young minds to an extreme extent). The only difference between gen x/y/z/alpha is that x and y have had more time to accumulate wealth and therefore possess more power.
Don’t blame society’s issues on people because of something simple like their age or their race. No problem is as simple as that.
I don’t have good memories of Gen X, just memories as assholes older than me who judged everyone based on what music they listened to and were absolutely assholes if your music wasn’t cool enough.
And you base your opinion of an entire generation on that?
There are good people and bad people in all generations alike. One day you too will be older, and you’ll be at the receiving end of undeserved criticism for things you’ve never said or done because some young dude met someone else the same age as you they didn’t like.
and you’ll be at the receiving end of undeserved criticism for things you’ve never said or done because some young dude met someone else the same age as you they didn’t like.
You think that’s not already happening to millennials? Fuck me, get out more.
Fuck me, get out more.
Which would you prefer? As an X slacker, I only have enough spare “meh” to handle one or the other.
Wait… you’re a millennial? Doesn’t that mean you’re basically a kid? Does this count as grooming? Help, I need an adult!
realizes half the adults in his family are dead
Typical boomers.
were the hidden generation, hiding in plain sight between 2 larger messes.
In other words, you coasted off of the luxuries afforded you by the previous generation and enjoyed selfish, fully funded indulgences themed as rebellion (while understanding that that wealth funding you was always ill gotten and at the expense of exploited and abused minority groups) and then, because you took a generation off, left a fully unmanaged mess festering to inevitably implode the generation after you?
And then today, even with the wisdom of time, you live with the hubris to call that generation, that you passively destroyed, “a mess”. Respectfully, I’m not sure you realize it, you piece of shit, but you’re actually a piece of shit.
not that you understand the the subtlety of words, the implication is that all generations are messes, genx is just, in volume, less human beings.
but go on over-reacting. it really shows what kind of person you are.
That’s not the implication. It’s you forgiving yourself the burden of reality. You chilled the fuck out at MTV spring break, bud. You smelled the smoke, but you didn’t care, you got yours.
And now you have the audacity to call the millenials, who watched 9/11 on rolly CRT TVs in their classrooms as babies and then entered the workplace during the great recession and sub prime mortgage finance scams. Then, when they might finally be building some type of momentum back, you get trump into COVID into vaccine denial, RTO mandates, endless rounds of mass tech layoffs, false inflation/corporate price gouging into 2nd trump/end of American democracy and the chaos to come.
But go on being a selfish, disaffected tool (that also seems to equate the scale of boomers and millenials here?), it really affirms who you are
hahahahahah. hilarious. you really have some pent up emotions that need a serious outlet thats not lemmy. good luck, buddy!
I was about to take umbrage with that on behalf of millennials, but tbh we are a mess—not entirely through our own doing, of course—but definitely a mess.
the middle child generation.
Classic Gen X: It’s not my problem.
Cool, thanks for all the help guys. No wonder you get called fucking Boomers. You could have appended “other people aren’t my responsibility” and really nailed down why people stopped giving a fuck about a generation that never gave a fuck about themselves or others.
genx took learys ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ as literal instruction
Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity”.
I know a Gen Xer who really did literally make Dennis Leary a big part of his personality, without anybody (before me) explaining why a song about being an asshole wasn’t supposed to be singing about a hero you should emulate.
Wrong Leary. The devil’s talking about Timothy Leary, in this case.
X as a population is a birth low like the silent generation and since both are adjacent to the baby boom, which is one of the largest generations, their relative pull during their time is muted. basically the silent generation was sorta crowded out by the large incoming one and Xers were to small to effect the new crowd size much. Then also millenials are technically a boom but really just a drop in the bucket compared to the baby boom before. They are the little peak in the early 90’s in this graph where the orange is the boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom#/media/File:US_Birth_Rates.svg . Combined with this is that X was known as the slackers and they were not big joiners. Don’t get me wrong im in the gen and I know plenty of folks that do things in their lives like reduce, reuse, recycle but not many part of an org or something around it (not all good things btw of course but im giving the perspective of my crowd). It still sorta cracks me up as I live near my high school and they put all the accomplishments along the fence and it starts in like the 60’s. Newer ones are in the school but as new ones come in the old ones are hung on the outside fence. Well there is this big gap in the 80’s. literally stuff into the late 70’s and then suddenly stuff from the early 90’s. No club or sport or anything got any significant win or award or whatevr in the 80’s.
The rapture came and took them away
Nah we are here, just staying out of the drama I guess. Busy working. My guess is we aren’t enough of a market - not the desirable-to-marketers 18-30 age group, and not a huge group with money like the boomers. So we are not targeted as much.
That sounds very plausible
You could call them The Silent Generation.
…
No, wait…
A couple of factors: Back in olden times, before Douglas Coupland applied the Generation X moniker in 1991, they used to talk about the Baby Bust generation. The Baby Boom was when all of the GIs got back from the war and all started getting jiggy at the same time. Then, the birth rate dropped significantly. In my elementary school, we had combined grades 2/3, and grades 4/5, because there weren’t enough kids enrolled for full classrooms otherwise.
Also, the Baby Boom generation is defined as 1946 to 1964, which is 19 years, compared to the 16 years of what we call Generation X now, from 1965 to 1980.
Granted, is not a huge difference—71 million Boomers and 73 million Millennials vs. 64 million Gen X—but there’s fewer of us. But also, the name and the generational categories are pretty recent developments. When Coupland’s book came out, I was too young to be Gen X, the people he was writing about were adults out into world. I wasn’t part of the classic Gen X disaffected-slacker culture, and its touchstones don’t really resonate with me. It wasn’t until years later that the definition of Generation X definitively included me. That’s why you’ll often see a lot of younger Gen X identify with the Xennial label, because we have a lot more in common with “elder Millennials,” which makes the whole cohort less cohesive.
It’s almost like the generational cutoff years are arbitrary, and that society changes continuously, and not in discrete jumps. It’s almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980, and the real division is between the people who came of age before they pulled up the ladders to prosperity behind themselves (Boomers and older Gen X) and the people who came of age after (Xennials, Millennials, and so on). Nevermind, sorry, that’s just some anti-capitalist hogwash. /s
The breaks are subjective, irregular, determined by consensus. Generally they’re determined by significant societal events and their impact on people based on where they are in life.
Indeed, and I realized in the process of writing that comment that the famous graphs showing the growth of productivity vs. the growth of real wages explain a whole lot more about people’s experiences than the consensus generational divisions.
In the UK we’re more properly known as “Thatcher’s Children”, which gives a better idea of how disenfranchised we were growing up in the 80s.
It’s almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980
I really hope Reagan is burning in hell 🔥🔥
Reagan is in hell waiting for heaven to trickle down.
I thought millennials started at '82?
I think I used to hear that, too, but I searched when writing the comment and found the consensus is now 1981. But then, people I know who were born in 1979 have so much more in common with elder Millennials than Generation X people born in the 1960’s. That’s why I’m skeptical of the whole generations concept. I mean, without looking up her birth date, is Kamala Harris a Boomer, or GenX?
Yeah I’m an older millennial and there are things I don’t have in common with younger ones.
Kamala just slips in as a boomer technically, by like a year or something.
Generational Theory refers to them as a “Nomad” generation, analagous to the more literally named “Lost Generation” one sacculum prior.
Generational theory is not scientific, but the patterns it identifies are certainly interesting. It’s held up over the last 30 years, and seems to be continuing.
At least according to Wikipedia, Generation X is the generation referred to as “the forgotten generation”.
We are just living our lives. We don’t care about you or your opinions so we usually dont speak to you. You want to waste your lives complaining and whining them good luck with that. No one cares.
There’s no need to be rude, fella. Hope life keeps treating you well though.
I’m not trying to be rude only honest. I hope everyone the best.
Love y’all, but on bluesky gen X has been behaving like boomers more and more often. Maybe it has to do with hitting a certain age and becoming “get of my lawn”?
The last lawn generation
I’m gen X. I’m certainly at get off my lawn stage. Yet I have no lawn. Hmmmmmm
I have no mouth and i must scream.
This is my experience with them as well. I guess we all suck when we get old.
It’s the working class vs the 1%, not generation vs generation
Totally agree, comrade ✊
yeah, the generation blame game is getting kinda old
We’re here, frantically paddling to keep up.
but you fuckers still got a boat though, even if it is leaking a little…
Yes we got a sinking boat and were forced to keep on rowing. We were never old enough to say that the holes should be patched. We were given the dream that our time will come. We were told that our job was to keep our head down and row, so we kept on rowing. Till the boat sank.
We are the first generation to work but have nothing to show for it, as compared to boomers.
Ronald Reagan happened to GenX.
Worse than an H Bomb
There is another theory I’ve heard that I like:
- The parents of the millenials were the boomers. The parents of gen z was gen X. Millenials and boomers are fairly equally disliked, and gen alpha seems to be shaping up to follow that trend.
- If you have been paying attention to legitimate complaints about each generation, you’ll notice similarities between the kids and their parents. Both millenials and boomers get hate for being terrible parents and workaholics, and the hate gen z is currently getting for having no work ethic sounds very similar to the hate gen X got back when they were in their 20s for being supposedly lazy and stupid becuase of MTV.
- This implies that we are seeing not one pendulum of overractions to generational trauma, but two. The Millenials and the Baby Boomers, if you trace it back, descended from the humbly named Greatest Generation which fought in WWII and set the wheels of modern American culture into their current tracks. Gen Z and Gen X descend from the Silent Generation, who were best known for being conformist and pretty much nothing else.
Here’s the conjecture part of the theory: the Boomer lineage has been taught that what matters is what you do and if you don’t achieve you have no value, whereas the Silent Generation lineage has been taught that good people are good to their family and community and being a workaholic is bad for that. The poop-throwing you’re seeing online is simply an expression of a conflict between opposing values.
Very generous outlook on Gen X, who are mostly seen as boomer lite in my experience.
They behave about how you would expect a boomer to act. It is their turn to extract value, well at least those who are in any position to do so, which are obviously a minority but not are they working hard at it right now.
Just parasitic bahvior serving the owner class to get their mcmansions and 401ks loaded aka boomerism
Did some digging, and Gen Xers were best known for being helicopter parents. This was in reaction to how their parents barely paid attention to them. They are the only generation that gets hate for being helicopter parents, as far as I can tell. They seem to be the Soccer Mom generation.
Both millenials and boomers get hate for being terrible parents and workaholics, and the hate gen z is currently getting for having no work ethic sounds very similar to the hate gen X got back when they were in their 20s for being supposedly lazy and stupid becuase of MTV.
Millennials were definitely called entitled and lazy.
Millenials definitely were called enitled and lazy when they were in their 20s. Theyre in their 40s now, now the supposedly lazy generation is Gen Z. Every generation has called kids in their 20s entitled and lazy. In about 15 years Gen Alpha will be the lazy and entitled generation.
That said, it is a big hole in this theory. Gen X and the Silent Generation seem to only be remembered by how they behaved in their youth, and Gen Z seems to be following that trend.
Millennials are not in their 40s. The oldest of them are, sure, but a ton are still in their 30s.
