10 ms·

Generation X Is Sick of Your Bullshit (2011)

60 points by throw0101a 5y ago

trqax 5y ago
"Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone." That is the problem. It should take over the reins now. Gen X has the problem that it was educated by ex-hippies with massive egos and personalities, who later sold out the West to China. Gen X has major confidence issues and should get rid of them. It is under a two-pronged attack from the last boomers and woke millenials. Well, fight!
- drumhead 5y ago
  The problem was that we grew up in a time when the dreams died and we were having to deal with the tailwind of the post war growth boom. The protest movements of the 60's and 70's delivered nothing, the state-ist, interventionist keynesian economics produced low growth, high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployement. The right wingers Thatcher and Reagan, cleaned up the mess. Making money was the only truth to us, education and career were all important. The university protestors that preceeded us did nothing achieved nothing, and sold out anyway. Ultimately ideology is a pile of shit, and we dont want to waste our time with them. Technology and money were our gods. Of the two I fear millenials more, they grew up in a stable world without high inflation and economic stagnation, they want to invite the socialist tiger into their house but they dont know what the consequences will be. Their attitude to freedom is unnerving. They're dragging the world back into the age of the victorians.
h2odragon 5y ago
Why aint anyone blaming the "Me Generation" for the current crap? The kids who were really invested in the difference between Disco and KISS and AC/DC; and have yet to forge any closer connection to reality even though they're the people in charge of shit now? The folks writing paeans to the Quaalude and taking full advantage of the modern pharmacopeia to make sure those pesky pains of reailty biting them dont actually affect their groove. Them bastards are to blame, yeah thats it.
- panzagl 5y ago
  The "Me Generation" are Boomers. GenX was playing with it's Micronauts and Star Wars figures when all of that happened.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    I wasn't updated on the terminology change, apparently. How unfair to "boomers" to be lumped in with the most coddled and swaddled and useless children to ever inherit the earth.
    - panzagl 5y ago
      It is kind of a weird half-generation- it seemed people my age were always running into the after-effect of the kids 5 years older. Things like 'the campus is dry now, but it wasn't 4 years ago' or 'there used to be this awesome event but it ended 2 years ago when a girl was drugged and raped'. They got sex drugs and rock 'n' roll, we got AIDS, 'no means no', 'Say no to drugs', MADD, and Rick Astley.
    - drumhead 5y ago
      Boomers are 1945 to 1965, X is 1965 - 1980.
      - mythrwy 5y ago
        We did't even get a full 20 years like the boomers but only 15! Stands to reason I guess.
        timbit42 5y ago
        Different people states different years. The following years are averages of about 30 sources I found online: Lost Generation: 1883 to 1900 Greatest Generation: 1901 to 1924 Silent Generation: 1924 to 1945 Me Generation (Baby Boomers): 1945 to 1965 Generation X (Thirteeners): 1965 to 1980 Generation Y (Millennials): 1980 to 1997 Generation Z (Centennials): 1997 to 20xx?
salawat 5y ago
There is a concept in/around civil engineering I've heard referred to as the 3 generation rule, though the only place search engines seem to turn it up is Ken Burnside's formulation on Atomic Rockets, which specifically applies it to space stations. >The Three Generation Rule of Space Colonies states that space colonies have an average life-span of three generations until the life-support and other technical system decay to a point where the colony cannot sustain life. As Rick Robinson puts it "the degree of social discipline needed for a space habitat to survive indefinitely is beyond the capability of "normal" human societies. The human tendency to favor short-term expediency. will, over time, make the habitat ecosystem more and more precarious." See the link for more details. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/glossary.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/glossary.php Here's the thing, that didn't come out of nowhere. There're actually earlier references I've stumbled across from various veins of engineer or policymaker with regards to how difficult it is to get funding for proper maintenance of civil engineering projects. The meme formulation of hard times, strong people, yada yada, is a glib restatement of a rule that to me seems to be at the very heart of information theory: If you ain't lived it, you don't get it. I can tell you stories til I am blue in the face, but until people [start dropping dead from cholera in the streets], [get trapped in elevators due to widespread power failure], [start suffocating in the mal-maintained subway tunnels], [having their homes blow up because of long deferred natural gas pipe maintenance], you will not give me the resources to get done what needs to get done. To generation n-1 it's theory, generation n-2, they paid for it in blood, to generation n, it's the crazy ramblings of old people and the world don't work that way anymore grampa. Except it do. And it will continue to. This the cycle continues. Even the creation of an ennui consumed generation is predicted in the sense that a generation sees the problems, but isn't in touch with history enough to figure out how far to roll back thinking to safely start retraversing a new path. You either get an extremely luck person who stumbled on it randomly, or you get hard times when the next demagogue wrecking ball's shit and everyone has to figure out how to pick up the pieces.
- notacoward 5y ago
  > to generation n, ... the world don't work that way anymore ...and that's where we get back to tech. Younger techies tend to act as though none of the hard-won knowledge about how to store/move/act on data, how to write robust software, etc. applies any more. The fact is that some does and some doesn't. Time after time after time, things that we once knew about (for example) network congestion or storage failure modes are ignored or forgotten because "the world don't work that way anymore" then come back to the fore very suddenly and painfully because yes it does. A large part of the reason I retired is that I got tired of over-promoted kids ignoring warnings about things I had lived through once and could see coming again. "I told you so" is no substitute for being allowed to contribute in the first place. P.S. I'm not a Boomer; I'm very early GenX, and way more attuned to those experiences/attitudes.
causi 5y ago
At first I was a little annoyed, but then I had to smile at just how emblematic of Generation X the article really is. Screwed over by their parents, depressed, substance-addicted, and hopeless, but not one single hint of any effort or plan to change things. Generation X is the generation of ennui at the ruination of the world. Millenials and Gen Z might just be pissed off enough to do something about it.
- BbzzbB 5y ago
  CC this theory : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    We're due for a Crisis. Was COVID it, or was that just the warm-up?
  - phone8675309 5y ago
    Strong people bring good times Good times breed weak people Weak people bring bad times Bad times breed strong people So it goes
    - jayd16 5y ago
      So are the greatest generation bad and the boomers good? This is a silly way to look at things I think. Without a solid definition of time, its just the tautology of the good times and bad times being the only states and then blaming the people of those times.
      - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
        That's literally the exact opposite of what that quote implies: 1. Hard times (e.g. the Depression and WWII) bred the strong people of the Greatest Generation. 2. These strong people brought the prosperity that let to the good times of the Baby Boomer generation. Leave it up to you to determine what kind of times Baby Boomers have brought.
genghisjahn 5y ago
Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.
- juancn 5y ago
  As if!
Steltek 5y ago
I'm reminded of an SNL gameshow sketch. Boomers vs Millenials with Generation X being the gameshow host. When the Boomers and Millenials were arguing, Gen X sat back going, "Meh. Not my problem." With Millenials having kids, being married, etc now, I don't think Boomers can continue being the boogeyman holding us down. It might be time to actually start fixing things.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Boomers have the bulk of wealth and political power. We (millenials) still have a a couple decades I think before things are our fault
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    You’ve gotta do something about the boomers sooner than that if you want to inherit a living planet. The thing that makes Gen X as a group ineffective is that it’s a much smaller cohort than boomers or millenials. Boomers didn’t have enough babies to replace themselves, narcissistic fucks. OTOH, maybe generations are just astrology for journalists.
  - nineplay 5y ago
    Millennials have the voting majority though. How long before they start to get the blame for the election results?
    - evv 5y ago
      My friend, a plurality is not a majority. And in a two party system, even a majority won't help. Biden got elected thanks to young voters, but look how little climate action the new administration has taken. Sad that you're looking to assign blame rather than problem-solve for future generations.
      - nineplay 5y ago
        I'm not assigning blame though I can see how it would look that way. Seeing how these discussions go today, however, and looking forward - I fully expect the millennials to be an easy target before long. Gen X isn't big enough to shoulder the blame after boomers die out. You're right of course, I should have said plurality. I'm currently reading a biography of Hitler so you'd think I'd be particularly sensitive to the difference.
phone8675309 5y ago
I’m a GenXer and this article is a whiney rant from Peter Pan Syndrome sufferers who never grew up.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  I've had a couple Gen X'er friends tell me the generation is collectively stuck in the past. Are there any plausible theories why that might be? Was it a lack of meaning in the general narrative that made growing old too painful for many to face or something?
  - p_j_w 5y ago
    >I've had a couple Gen X'er friends tell me the generation is collectively stuck in the past. Are there any plausible theories why that might be? Isn't this true of most generations? It seems like a pretty universal human attribute from what I can tell, at least to some degree. Is the idea that it's a stronger pull in Gen X?
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      I've never heard anyone who's not an X'er describe themselves that way. I don't think Zoomers really could be stuck in the past, given that they don't have much depth of memory yet (and the rapidity with which trends shift in that community). My own generation, the millennials, do remember the '90s, but we tend to remember them as a rather weird and embarassing, if simpler, time. I'd characterise us as pessimistically forward-looking, maybe that's a function of my friends group though. Which leaves the Boomers, and while there's certainly a lot of nostalgia in that community, I've known more that were looking forward to their retirement than would go on about the good old days. But of course, this is all anecdotal.
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    It could be that our pop culture has been frozen in time as "THE pop culture" for 50 years now. Rehashed, rebooted, remade, and reimagined over and over again to become your pop culture too. How am I supposed to NOT feel "stuck in the past", when the The Matrix is coming out next month? When there's a bunch of Star Wars and Star Trek and Indiana Jones (!) next year. We're on our third or fourth Spiderman franchise, and every other teenager that I walk past is wearing an Iron Maiden or Metallica t-shirt? The most exciting new video game on the horizon is Knights of the Old Republic. Geeze, Tom Brady is the defending Super Bowl MVP! Sure, somehow I went from "liberal" to "bigot" without actually changing my social views, and somehow we determined that comic book movies never exist before Robert Downey Jr. But otherwise, I look around... and this really DOESN'T look all that different from the 90's, you know?
mmstgshj 5y ago
I'm Gen X and I'm sick of this bullshit. Generations aren't a monolith and this schmuck doesn't speak for me.
- jeffwask 5y ago
  Ditto. I've learned much from Millennials and Zoomers.
- taneq 5y ago
  I don't even know what the fuck generation I am, when I was a kid they called me Gen X but then I got retconned to Gen Y and now who knows. When I started highschool mobile phones and the internet weren't a thing and when I started university they were ubiquitous, that should date me closely enough.
  - clajiness 5y ago
    You're a Xennial, just like me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
    - StevePerkins 5y ago
      They should just move the Gen X - Millennial cutoff back from 1980 to 1975 or so. Gen X is already so small, it won't matter if we make it a bit smaller still. Meanwhile, coining your own special term to feel extra special about yourselves is the most Millennial thing I can imagine!
      - taneq 5y ago
        I respectfully disagree. There is a huge shift in worldview and mindset between someone born in 1975 and someone born in 1980. The former essentially grew up before the interconnected world was a thing. The latter had it come in when they were in their formative early teens. My partner and I are on either side of this divide, and the the effects, while subtle, are significant.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nineplay 5y ago
I'm just happy to be sitting quietly on the sidelines while the Millennials and Boomers fight it out. We'll be boomers soon enough though, it's a label that's gotten completely detached from the year of your birth. I am feeling old enough to miss the "good old day". Even as I sit here typing message on a social forum, I can't help but feel that the internet has been a net negative. We weren't as unhappy as the current generation seems. Among other factors, I think its because we weren't constantly bombarded with the message that we should be unhappy.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  No I think that's unlikely. The boomer label isn't simply old, a large part of it is viewing the world from a life spent in times of extreme economic growth.
karmakaze 5y ago
Gotta admit this is funny as well as indicative: > only awarded for victories, not participation. I don't want to read another glamorous blog post about how well someone tried--without hearing about what could have been done differently and what will be done differently next time.
jmugan 5y ago
"Generation X has to be up really early tomorrow morning."
decremental 5y ago
Generation SSRI doesn't care what you think.
moomin 5y ago
Whilst funny, speaking as a GenXer myself, we got a raw deal, but not nearly as bad as the subsequent generations. Many of whom seem a lot more switched on than we ever were. We just kind of treated what was happening as inevitable. Millennials know that this was a policy enacted by people with names and addresses.
- panzagl 5y ago
  Maybe in an abstract post-GenX got a raw-er deal, but I've gone from being the kid no one will listen to the old no one will listen to pretty quickly. I work in a more traditional company and the 70 year olds want to leave things to the 30-40 year olds, not the bitter 40-50 year olds who never amounted to anything while the Boomers held on as long as possible.
john-doe 5y ago
Related: https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/01/30/why-generation-x-will-save-the-web/ https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/01/30/why-generation-x-will-save-t...
sparks1970 5y ago
We need more identity politics? Really?
joshmarinacci 5y ago
10 years later we still are. And yes. Very very tired.
asebold 5y ago
So much of this bullshit about beef between generations is really just beef with people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. Tired of people trying to pit us against each other because we're in different stages of life.
ziggus 5y ago
The difficult thing for "the kids nowadays" to understand about GenX is the fact that we grew up under the threat of nuclear annihilation. It seems a bit absurd now, but there were times in the 70s and early 80s where it seemed like the grown-ups were going to destroy us all. This led a lot of us to develop nihilistic attitudes to life - it's difficult to take things too seriously when you'll probably die in a nuclear holocaust anyway. But when the cold war suddenly ended, Gen X was left a bit adrift with its nihilism. You can still hear echoes of those fearful days in everything that Gen X does and says to this day.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > It seems a bit absurd now, Absurd? As if, did the ballistic missiles suddenly disappear? It's only absurd if you lack imagination.
juancn 5y ago
I always felt, generationally, that I'm in a weird spot, somewhere between a Millennial and a Gen Xer. I caught the end of Gen X, so I get some of the gripe, but I've always been a technology native, so in that regard I'm closer to a Millennial in life experience. Many people in tech are a bit like this, perhaps ahead of their time because they caught the wave earlier.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > […] somewhere between a Millennial and a Gen Xer. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
peanut_worm 5y ago
This reads like a bud light commercial

60 points by throw0101a 5y ago

"Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone." That is the problem. It should take over the reins now. Gen X has the problem that it was educated by ex-hippies with massive egos and personalities, who later sold out the West to China. Gen X has major confidence issues and should get rid of them. It is under a two-pronged attack from the last boomers and woke millenials. Well, fight!

drumhead 5y ago
The problem was that we grew up in a time when the dreams died and we were having to deal with the tailwind of the post war growth boom. The protest movements of the 60's and 70's delivered nothing, the state-ist, interventionist keynesian economics produced low growth, high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployement. The right wingers Thatcher and Reagan, cleaned up the mess. Making money was the only truth to us, education and career were all important. The university protestors that preceeded us did nothing achieved nothing, and sold out anyway. Ultimately ideology is a pile of shit, and we dont want to waste our time with them. Technology and money were our gods. Of the two I fear millenials more, they grew up in a stable world without high inflation and economic stagnation, they want to invite the socialist tiger into their house but they dont know what the consequences will be. Their attitude to freedom is unnerving. They're dragging the world back into the age of the victorians.

h2odragon 5y ago

Why aint anyone blaming the "Me Generation" for the current crap? The kids who were really invested in the difference between Disco and KISS and AC/DC; and have yet to forge any closer connection to reality even though they're the people in charge of shit now? The folks writing paeans to the Quaalude and taking full advantage of the modern pharmacopeia to make sure those pesky pains of reailty biting them dont actually affect their groove. Them bastards are to blame, yeah thats it.

panzagl 5y ago
The "Me Generation" are Boomers. GenX was playing with it's Micronauts and Star Wars figures when all of that happened.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  I wasn't updated on the terminology change, apparently. How unfair to "boomers" to be lumped in with the most coddled and swaddled and useless children to ever inherit the earth.
  - panzagl 5y ago
    It is kind of a weird half-generation- it seemed people my age were always running into the after-effect of the kids 5 years older. Things like 'the campus is dry now, but it wasn't 4 years ago' or 'there used to be this awesome event but it ended 2 years ago when a girl was drugged and raped'. They got sex drugs and rock 'n' roll, we got AIDS, 'no means no', 'Say no to drugs', MADD, and Rick Astley.
  - drumhead 5y ago
    Boomers are 1945 to 1965, X is 1965 - 1980.
    - mythrwy 5y ago
      We did't even get a full 20 years like the boomers but only 15! Stands to reason I guess.
      - timbit42 5y ago
        Different people states different years. The following years are averages of about 30 sources I found online: Lost Generation: 1883 to 1900 Greatest Generation: 1901 to 1924 Silent Generation: 1924 to 1945 Me Generation (Baby Boomers): 1945 to 1965 Generation X (Thirteeners): 1965 to 1980 Generation Y (Millennials): 1980 to 1997 Generation Z (Centennials): 1997 to 20xx?

salawat 5y ago

There is a concept in/around civil engineering I've heard referred to as the 3 generation rule, though the only place search engines seem to turn it up is Ken Burnside's formulation on Atomic Rockets, which specifically applies it to space stations. >The Three Generation Rule of Space Colonies states that space colonies have an average life-span of three generations until the life-support and other technical system decay to a point where the colony cannot sustain life. As Rick Robinson puts it "the degree of social discipline needed for a space habitat to survive indefinitely is beyond the capability of "normal" human societies. The human tendency to favor short-term expediency. will, over time, make the habitat ecosystem more and more precarious." See the link for more details. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/glossary.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/glossary.php Here's the thing, that didn't come out of nowhere. There're actually earlier references I've stumbled across from various veins of engineer or policymaker with regards to how difficult it is to get funding for proper maintenance of civil engineering projects. The meme formulation of hard times, strong people, yada yada, is a glib restatement of a rule that to me seems to be at the very heart of information theory: If you ain't lived it, you don't get it. I can tell you stories til I am blue in the face, but until people [start dropping dead from cholera in the streets], [get trapped in elevators due to widespread power failure], [start suffocating in the mal-maintained subway tunnels], [having their homes blow up because of long deferred natural gas pipe maintenance], you will not give me the resources to get done what needs to get done. To generation n-1 it's theory, generation n-2, they paid for it in blood, to generation n, it's the crazy ramblings of old people and the world don't work that way anymore grampa. Except it do. And it will continue to. This the cycle continues. Even the creation of an ennui consumed generation is predicted in the sense that a generation sees the problems, but isn't in touch with history enough to figure out how far to roll back thinking to safely start retraversing a new path. You either get an extremely luck person who stumbled on it randomly, or you get hard times when the next demagogue wrecking ball's shit and everyone has to figure out how to pick up the pieces.

notacoward 5y ago
> to generation n, ... the world don't work that way anymore ...and that's where we get back to tech. Younger techies tend to act as though none of the hard-won knowledge about how to store/move/act on data, how to write robust software, etc. applies any more. The fact is that some does and some doesn't. Time after time after time, things that we once knew about (for example) network congestion or storage failure modes are ignored or forgotten because "the world don't work that way anymore" then come back to the fore very suddenly and painfully because yes it does. A large part of the reason I retired is that I got tired of over-promoted kids ignoring warnings about things I had lived through once and could see coming again. "I told you so" is no substitute for being allowed to contribute in the first place. P.S. I'm not a Boomer; I'm very early GenX, and way more attuned to those experiences/attitudes.

causi 5y ago

At first I was a little annoyed, but then I had to smile at just how emblematic of Generation X the article really is. Screwed over by their parents, depressed, substance-addicted, and hopeless, but not one single hint of any effort or plan to change things. Generation X is the generation of ennui at the ruination of the world. Millenials and Gen Z might just be pissed off enough to do something about it.

BbzzbB 5y ago
CC this theory : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  We're due for a Crisis. Was COVID it, or was that just the warm-up?
- phone8675309 5y ago
  Strong people bring good times Good times breed weak people Weak people bring bad times Bad times breed strong people So it goes
  - jayd16 5y ago
    So are the greatest generation bad and the boomers good? This is a silly way to look at things I think. Without a solid definition of time, its just the tautology of the good times and bad times being the only states and then blaming the people of those times.
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      That's literally the exact opposite of what that quote implies: 1. Hard times (e.g. the Depression and WWII) bred the strong people of the Greatest Generation. 2. These strong people brought the prosperity that let to the good times of the Baby Boomer generation. Leave it up to you to determine what kind of times Baby Boomers have brought.

genghisjahn 5y ago

Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.

juancn 5y ago
As if!

Steltek 5y ago

I'm reminded of an SNL gameshow sketch. Boomers vs Millenials with Generation X being the gameshow host. When the Boomers and Millenials were arguing, Gen X sat back going, "Meh. Not my problem." With Millenials having kids, being married, etc now, I don't think Boomers can continue being the boogeyman holding us down. It might be time to actually start fixing things.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
Boomers have the bulk of wealth and political power. We (millenials) still have a a couple decades I think before things are our fault
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  You’ve gotta do something about the boomers sooner than that if you want to inherit a living planet. The thing that makes Gen X as a group ineffective is that it’s a much smaller cohort than boomers or millenials. Boomers didn’t have enough babies to replace themselves, narcissistic fucks. OTOH, maybe generations are just astrology for journalists.
- nineplay 5y ago
  Millennials have the voting majority though. How long before they start to get the blame for the election results?
  - evv 5y ago
    My friend, a plurality is not a majority. And in a two party system, even a majority won't help. Biden got elected thanks to young voters, but look how little climate action the new administration has taken. Sad that you're looking to assign blame rather than problem-solve for future generations.
    - nineplay 5y ago
      I'm not assigning blame though I can see how it would look that way. Seeing how these discussions go today, however, and looking forward - I fully expect the millennials to be an easy target before long. Gen X isn't big enough to shoulder the blame after boomers die out. You're right of course, I should have said plurality. I'm currently reading a biography of Hitler so you'd think I'd be particularly sensitive to the difference.

phone8675309 5y ago

I’m a GenXer and this article is a whiney rant from Peter Pan Syndrome sufferers who never grew up.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
I've had a couple Gen X'er friends tell me the generation is collectively stuck in the past. Are there any plausible theories why that might be? Was it a lack of meaning in the general narrative that made growing old too painful for many to face or something?
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >I've had a couple Gen X'er friends tell me the generation is collectively stuck in the past. Are there any plausible theories why that might be? Isn't this true of most generations? It seems like a pretty universal human attribute from what I can tell, at least to some degree. Is the idea that it's a stronger pull in Gen X?
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    I've never heard anyone who's not an X'er describe themselves that way. I don't think Zoomers really could be stuck in the past, given that they don't have much depth of memory yet (and the rapidity with which trends shift in that community). My own generation, the millennials, do remember the '90s, but we tend to remember them as a rather weird and embarassing, if simpler, time. I'd characterise us as pessimistically forward-looking, maybe that's a function of my friends group though. Which leaves the Boomers, and while there's certainly a lot of nostalgia in that community, I've known more that were looking forward to their retirement than would go on about the good old days. But of course, this is all anecdotal.
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  It could be that our pop culture has been frozen in time as "THE pop culture" for 50 years now. Rehashed, rebooted, remade, and reimagined over and over again to become your pop culture too. How am I supposed to NOT feel "stuck in the past", when the The Matrix is coming out next month? When there's a bunch of Star Wars and Star Trek and Indiana Jones (!) next year. We're on our third or fourth Spiderman franchise, and every other teenager that I walk past is wearing an Iron Maiden or Metallica t-shirt? The most exciting new video game on the horizon is Knights of the Old Republic. Geeze, Tom Brady is the defending Super Bowl MVP! Sure, somehow I went from "liberal" to "bigot" without actually changing my social views, and somehow we determined that comic book movies never exist before Robert Downey Jr. But otherwise, I look around... and this really DOESN'T look all that different from the 90's, you know?

mmstgshj 5y ago

I'm Gen X and I'm sick of this bullshit. Generations aren't a monolith and this schmuck doesn't speak for me.

jeffwask 5y ago
Ditto. I've learned much from Millennials and Zoomers.
taneq 5y ago
I don't even know what the fuck generation I am, when I was a kid they called me Gen X but then I got retconned to Gen Y and now who knows. When I started highschool mobile phones and the internet weren't a thing and when I started university they were ubiquitous, that should date me closely enough.
- clajiness 5y ago
  You're a Xennial, just like me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    They should just move the Gen X - Millennial cutoff back from 1980 to 1975 or so. Gen X is already so small, it won't matter if we make it a bit smaller still. Meanwhile, coining your own special term to feel extra special about yourselves is the most Millennial thing I can imagine!
    - taneq 5y ago
      I respectfully disagree. There is a huge shift in worldview and mindset between someone born in 1975 and someone born in 1980. The former essentially grew up before the interconnected world was a thing. The latter had it come in when they were in their formative early teens. My partner and I are on either side of this divide, and the the effects, while subtle, are significant.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nineplay 5y ago

I'm just happy to be sitting quietly on the sidelines while the Millennials and Boomers fight it out. We'll be boomers soon enough though, it's a label that's gotten completely detached from the year of your birth. I am feeling old enough to miss the "good old day". Even as I sit here typing message on a social forum, I can't help but feel that the internet has been a net negative. We weren't as unhappy as the current generation seems. Among other factors, I think its because we weren't constantly bombarded with the message that we should be unhappy.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
No I think that's unlikely. The boomer label isn't simply old, a large part of it is viewing the world from a life spent in times of extreme economic growth.

karmakaze 5y ago

Gotta admit this is funny as well as indicative: > only awarded for victories, not participation. I don't want to read another glamorous blog post about how well someone tried--without hearing about what could have been done differently and what will be done differently next time.

jmugan 5y ago

"Generation X has to be up really early tomorrow morning."

decremental 5y ago

Generation SSRI doesn't care what you think.

moomin 5y ago

Whilst funny, speaking as a GenXer myself, we got a raw deal, but not nearly as bad as the subsequent generations. Many of whom seem a lot more switched on than we ever were. We just kind of treated what was happening as inevitable. Millennials know that this was a policy enacted by people with names and addresses.

panzagl 5y ago
Maybe in an abstract post-GenX got a raw-er deal, but I've gone from being the kid no one will listen to the old no one will listen to pretty quickly. I work in a more traditional company and the 70 year olds want to leave things to the 30-40 year olds, not the bitter 40-50 year olds who never amounted to anything while the Boomers held on as long as possible.

john-doe 5y ago

Related: https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/01/30/why-generation-x-will-save-the-web/ https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/01/30/why-generation-x-will-save-t...

sparks1970 5y ago

We need more identity politics? Really?

joshmarinacci 5y ago

10 years later we still are. And yes. Very very tired.

asebold 5y ago

So much of this bullshit about beef between generations is really just beef with people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. Tired of people trying to pit us against each other because we're in different stages of life.

ziggus 5y ago

The difficult thing for "the kids nowadays" to understand about GenX is the fact that we grew up under the threat of nuclear annihilation. It seems a bit absurd now, but there were times in the 70s and early 80s where it seemed like the grown-ups were going to destroy us all. This led a lot of us to develop nihilistic attitudes to life - it's difficult to take things too seriously when you'll probably die in a nuclear holocaust anyway. But when the cold war suddenly ended, Gen X was left a bit adrift with its nihilism. You can still hear echoes of those fearful days in everything that Gen X does and says to this day.

ekianjo 5y ago
> It seems a bit absurd now, Absurd? As if, did the ballistic missiles suddenly disappear? It's only absurd if you lack imagination.

juancn 5y ago

I always felt, generationally, that I'm in a weird spot, somewhere between a Millennial and a Gen Xer. I caught the end of Gen X, so I get some of the gripe, but I've always been a technology native, so in that regard I'm closer to a Millennial in life experience. Many people in tech are a bit like this, perhaps ahead of their time because they caught the wave earlier.

throw0101a 5y ago
> […] somewhere between a Millennial and a Gen Xer. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

peanut_worm 5y ago

This reads like a bud light commercial