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?
Maybe they’re just lying low so nobody will blame everything on them.
A wise move
Gen X here, we’re labeled the invisible generation for a reason.
That said I don’t really give enough fuks to be involved, the real fight is inequality, not age.
Remember the Silent Generation? Me neither
We’re still here.
Generation discourse honestly panders to the lowest common denominator intellect. People who constantly talk about boomers or millennials are usually pretty dumb.
The reason you don’t hear much about Gen X is “we” didn’t cause anything culturally significant in an enduring when “we” were in our 20s.
“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.
Yeah that’s why I said “generally”.
Of course the tech built in the sixties-seventies-eighties was built by boomers.
Edit: fuck Gates btw, he didn’t build anything as much as steal and buy. Like elon.
Being a “late” Boomer, I see gen x having a lot of similarities with me. Running loose in the neighborhood, doing stupid shit that probably should have killed us, absent parents who just wanted us independent and out of their hair.
We remember old shit (music, phones, computers) transitioning into new shit. I think it’s a spectrum Boomer->Gen x. A lot of similarities.
Man, it’s always weird hearing this, because as a millenial this sounds exactly like my experience growing up.
It’s a spectrum. Lots of parents in millennial days were doing the same s***, but I think it was more in a rural setting.
Back in Gen x and Boomer days this was suburbia.
Most millennials were born in the 1980s, smart phones didn’t come about until 2006+
Most of our lives were outside as kids. I got my first cell phone at 18, 2 years after I had already been working 40 hour weeks while going to school and my parents finally got sick of me not having a way to get a hold of me. Comically their cell phone bill went down because the company I worked for gave them 25% of their bill when they added my phone so they didn’t want me to have a separate plan.
I still remember my mother calling me sometime that year and asking if I’d come to dinner and I had to tell her I was over 1,000 miles away because I flew to Boston.
I think I was 22 when I started staying indoors more. Took a desk job and got overweight and lazy.
I think it would be great for understanding if each generation did a little bio like this just to give a sense of where they’re coming from. Too many people assuming shit they don’t know.
Here is GenX
41% make up the US House of Representatives 28% make up the US Senate 42% of governors
Some GenXers: Elon Musk Jeff Bezos (squeaked in) Jack Dorsey (Formerly Twitter) Michael Dell (Dell CEO) Satya Nadella (MSFT CEO)
And in 2018, about 40% of F500/Inc500 CEOs were GenX.
So, not missing. We just don’t wear our generational name as a badge. What’s the point?
We’re still being forgotten.
The boomers held on to power for such a long time that X never really got a generational chance to change things or sit in the driver’s seat. They were left waiting in the wings for their turn. The millennials were pretty pissed off for a lot of reasons and made a lot of noise, so they overshadowed X, and they’ve been maneuvering for their opportunities in the driver’s seat.
So basically X got mostly left out. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t fuck things up, though. We were the biggest trump voters by generation.
Nothing happened. The generational war another facet of culture war. It doesn’t make sense because you have to ask what the fuck happened to Gen X? Why don’t they fit into the picture? Why doesn’t the data add up? That should tell you something. Your experiment is flawed. The culture war doesn’t make sense.
It’s the working class vs the 1%, not generation vs generation
Totally agree, comrade ✊
yeah, the generation blame game is getting kinda old
Someone has to write all these shitty articles how bad the other generations are.
Boomer is honestly just used as a generic term for older people who are out of touch in one way or another. Millennial was a generic term for young people the speaker didn’t like, but it’s finally been replaced by zoomer which is more age appropriate, but it took a long time. It’s not that people are ignoring Gen X, it’s that most of the time when people use the term they just mean older/younger people in general.
TLDR, Gen X is probably lumped in with the term “boomer” (obviously the context matters, but this is the TLDR).
Don’t lumo me in with them!
I’m not lumping you into with anyone. I’m just explaining how people use the term boomer.
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.
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.
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
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 far 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.
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.
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.
My older Gen X Mom (late 1960s) is one of the most tech illiterate people I know….
“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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
Older millennials are firmly there with you in relation to tech.
That’s simply selection bias.
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.
Gen X here, can confirm that’s a pretty accurate take
Wow, that a very insightful and concise description, really. Now I understand more. Thank you.
I think I’m technically gen-x but I definitely feel more kindred with millennials, but goddamn, you nailed it. Describes exactly how I see my slightly older peers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone who is “old” is a boomer now.
And “millennial” just means “child.” People born in 1990 have sneered the word at 12-year-olds with zero self-recognition.
