were the hidden generation, hiding in plain sight between 2 larger messes.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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the middle child generation.
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.
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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".
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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.
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're just chilling watching the show...
I sit at the tail end of it, or as I've seen it described 'xenials', wishing things would start to make sense again one day.
You realize that that comic is a pretty strong indictment of gen X though, yes?
It's not noble or otherwise admirable to sit down and eat that popcorn.
Here's the funny thing with that. We watched things like Bill Nye and Captain Planet as kids. We've been aware of the evidence of science and the needs to change our society since a very young age. For many years we where told 'use plastic so they don't cut down trees' only to realize later that was wrong. All through it we where telling the parent and the grandparents that things needed to change and the future wasn't looking great.
Not one fuck was given.
So when it came time to be the parents and the mundane middle life drones many simply said hold onto what scraps you can and hope for the future, but in the meantime I just want to sit down for a bit. It's draining as hell to spend decades of your life being ignored, it's not a wonder we get called the forgotten generation.
1977 here, we had to be raised by the boomers alone - with no Internet, mobile phones, and left outside all summer until it was dark (which wasn't that bad mostly).
What we were sold on growing up and what actually happened when we became adults was very different.
"Boomers" has been misappropriated by younger generations to mean anything from older people they disagree with, older people they feel have undue privileges they don't have, or older people who were born before the internet became widespread.
The scapegoating mostly points at gen-X'ers though, not true boomers. The boomers are hitting the retirement homes at this point.
Boomers are generally tech illiterate, gen-x grew up with consoles, the commodore 64 and then the web and the mobile era then smartphones and withspread internet and so on and on. We were there when things started.
Elon Musk & Sergei Brin are Gen X, but Bezos, Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, and most of the people who built the technology GenX grew up with are Boomers. Zuck is a Millenial, but just barely. You could make a decent start of life as GenX knowing nothing about the technology, but they were still young enough to learn new developments easily.
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The younger people call them boomers. Hell, gen Z and gen alpha call millenials boomers. Everyone who is "old" is a boomer now.
The older people only seem to be talking about millenials and younger, usually in the form of rage bait internet articles.
The concept of generations is completely arbitrary. They used to be named after important changes in the age distribution of western populations, but after the boomers they just became "the next one" because nothing really happened. Older gen X behaves the same as younger boomers, and millenials range from "owns a house, has four kids, are starting to plan their retirement" to "just finished their education", and I haven't yet found a reason why gen alpha and gen z differ at all (at least the millenials could be tied to 9/11?).
Now, nobody worth our time will take any of it seriously.
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We all went for a bike-ride, and when we got home just played some Atari.
Still playing Atari...
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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.
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"
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.
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