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I belong to Generation X

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Even though I recognise it’s sometimes unhelpful to categorise and generalise, I’ve always loved this thing about putting western culture into Generations. You know, the Silent Generation, the Boomers, Generation X, Millennials… It ‘feels’ generally accurate.

I can definitely sense, for example, a generational shift with these Millennial upstarts. A keener social conscience bordering on political correctness, curtailed economic prospects, the ubiquity of technology and culture…

I’m firmly of the Generation X cohort. Born in 1973, I have an acute sense of disappointing my parents, I worship the pop culture of the 60s to 80s, I love Slackers and Fight Club and Star Wars. I’m cynical and nihilistic at heart. I’m insular and I get irony instinctively.

However, reading up on the supposed traits of my generation, I’m bemused to discover that Generation X are apparently happier and content in middle age, and have excelled as entrepreneurs to create a satisfying work-life balance. I sure missed the boat on that one.

Do you believe in these Generation categories? What Generation do you identify with? What do you think Millennials will be like as they reach middle life? And what do you think will come next?

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  1. The generation after millennials are starting to be referred to in some quarters as “Generation Z”. They’re basically the first true digital natives – born late 90s onwards.

    I had one of these kids in for work experience/reverse mentoring a couple of months back. He didn’t watch TV, barely watched movies. Played a lot of videogames. YouTube for entertainment. Instagram for wide transmission of what he was up to, Snapchat for smaller groups of mates, Twitter for private messaging. No Facebook, no Twitter beyond DMs. I have a mountain of DVDs in my office, and told him to take any he wanted. Not only did he not take any, he didn’t even look to see what was there. At his age (15), I’d have crawled over broken glass for free movies. C’est la vie.

      • Yeah my son, although a lot younger than 15, is very much a digital native. Everything is online- YouTube for music /gameplay videos, gaming, streaming films. He thinks people communicate by ‘tweets’ (I think he actually means DMs). Facebook is something Mummy uses. Even books are delivered digitally now, and is very keen on audiobooks. Google is his friend.

        No real interest or understanding of DVDs, or CDs. It’s very much a meme cliche but we walked past a cassette tape on the pavement the other day and he was bemused by my explanation. Yes, you really did need to turn it over to play the other side. (And the idea of ‘sides’, or indeed albums, seems strange to him.)

        But yes, classic Gen Xer here; loved the book when it came out (wonder if I still would; by definition, very much of its time.) I saw Coupland speak on a book tour and he was perceptive and entertaining- wish he would write something about the middle-aged Generation X (perhaps he has).

      • ‘Digital native’ has been doing the rounds for years in Higher Education circles. It’s certainly a catchy tag, but I’m increasingly convinced that it doesn’t necessarily translate into computer skills beyond keeping in touch with your mates in various ways. I work in an academic library and like most other institutions we’ve invested heavily in recent years in EBooks – and what’s the most common thing we hear? “I don’t want an EBook, I want a proper book to read.” Actually it quite warms my heart 🙂

    • My nephew was born in 2000. Which is well handy cos it means
      I can remember how old he is, while I’ve no idea how old his younger sister is. He came and stayed at mine this summer. I don’t know how typical of his generation he is. Some things were the same as when I was a teenager (untidy, lack of practical thinking, trying too hard to appear grown up etc) some things a bit different (a healthy lack of any ignorant prejudice/bigotry towards minorities, for example). He was very into exploring old music and has started collecting vinyl. In fact he showed little interest in modern music. He didn’t seem very interested in films, far more interested in social media (especially Instagram and Snapchat) and youtubers. He was constantly -and I mean constantly– looking at his phone. (Mind you, I know a few adults who do that, including his parents.)

  2. I’m Gen X too, born 1969. I think the way Gen X plays out in the Afterword is that Gen X Afterworders are more likely to listen to hip hop, or electronic music.

    I believe that 1987 was a big year for music in the same way that say, 1956 and 1965 were. This was when Hip Hop and House really broke through. If you were 14 or younger in 1987 you’ve grown up with these genres.

    I was jeeeeyust a bit old at 18 in 1987 to be a Hip Hop Native. I loved Public Enemy, the Beasties and Eric B & Rakim at the time, but although I’m sympathetic, I’m not really a hip hop fan.

  3. I like the recently-coined “Xennial” thing, for those of us born in the odd little window between about 77 and 83. Not digital natives, but we had an analogue childhood and an entirely digital adulthood. We were 16 or 17 when the internet hit, so we’re entirely fluent in it, but had the good fortune to not be born inside the Matrix.

    There’s a peculiar character to our little micro-generation: we don’t have the hell-in-a-handcart Palahniuk doominess that seems, stereotypically, to belong to X-ers. We’re much less culturally tribal, much less concerned with ideas like “selling out” than people a bit older than us, but also less interested in “edginess” than Millennials seem to be. We’re not angered, alienated and frustrated by our iPhones, but we’re also not quite as symbiotically linked with them as the average 23 year old. We’re fine with liking The Goonies just as much as The Godfather. Seriousness is fine; self-seriousness not so much. Generationally, it feels like self-seriousness is a defining Boomer trait which alienated the shit out of the X-ers, who responded with their own brand of it. And then us idiots came along with our liking Slayer and Wu-Tang and Carly Rae Jepsen and Ghostbusters and annoyed everyone. 😉

    Obviously I’m dealing in massive stereotypes here, but that’s sort of what generation talk is, right?

    FWIW, I feel terrible for Millennials. I’d hate to be 23 in 2017.

  4. Yeah, I’m definitely a Gen X-er: I remember the Douglas Coupland book of the same name. I have also heard us called the last analogue generation as we came of age culturally before the great digital divide, when discovering an obscure American indie record meant reading about it in a copy of Forced Exposure magazine.
    My own feeling lately, FWIW, is that with the fall of Cameron/ Osborne/ Milliband, we now have a political establishment divided into the baby boomers hanging on on the one hand, and the millennials coming up on the other. Makes us a kind of ‘lost generation’ without the glamour. ( NB not that I’m missing any of those guys too much; just saying)

    • Forget obscure indie records – even discovering and listening to the Beatles and Pink Floyd meant shelling out money in Our Price or borrowing from the local library!

      I still have an attachment to the “physicality” of music – I need a CD or record on my hand to truly feel I own it and have engaged with it.

  5. I was born in -67, so technically a part of Gen X (or the Ironic Generation, as we are called in Sweden), but I can’t say that I feel part of any specific generation, I identify with all of them and none. Perhaps because my parents were much older than my friends’ parents, and I had much older siblings, but mostly because I never felt like a child back when I was one. I always felt my older than my friends, until it shifted mid-life and I became much younger than my friends – so basically I think I’ve been the same mental age from birth until now (and presumably until I die).
    Sounds a bit trippy written down… 😀

  6. Some more of my features which I think are indicative of Gen X:

    – I cringe when I hear the word ‘vinyls’
    – I love and respect cinema-going and I don’t eat or talk at the cinema
    – I feel slightly guilty about owning a house and a car
    – I usually have an equal love and knowledge of a song sample and its source
    – In fact, I know and understand what sampling is and its validity as an art form
    – I very rarely wear a band t-shirt and ONLY when I am a die hard fan of that band
    – I worry that I have hard-wired slightly racist and sexist views, but I would never call out a member of the older generation if they said something casually non-PC
    – I know (with a little prompting and guiding) how to write HTML

    • I’m glad you posted this, because the rest of us have definitely noticed your hard wired racist and sexist views, and we weren’t really sure how best to raise the issue. Now we can (finally) let the healing begin…

      • And me

        Although I feel no guilt about owning stuff.
        Mrs D on the other hand has a constant feeling of “guilt” about owning a house that is bigger than her parents home

        • I’m a Boomer, born in ’51 and never had any great desire to own my own home, although it peeves me to be renting from a private landlord.
          I feel some guilt that my generation are being looked after by the welfare state at the expense of the later generations.
          I suffer from the laziness and complacency of my generation.
          I like physical product but I mostly play digitised music. I like the aesthetics of vinyl but also the convenience of CDs and digital. Haven’t set foot in a cinema in over 30 years. Haven’t watched a DVD in about 3 years, despite having a stack of unwatched ones.
          In some ways I’m still an optimistic hippy dreamer, looking for the best in everyone and everything. In other ways I’m a hardened cynic with over 66 years experience of a cruel world.

  7. I was born in 1964. Can someone please tell me what tribe I’m supposed to belong to and what characteristics I’m supposed to have?

    I’ve been busy enough trying to get on with being me but if there are characteristics I need to adopt I’d better start practising soon or it could be too late!

  8. ‘Digital Native Dance’ is a preset patch on the Roland D50 synthesizer which was released in 1987.

    This really adds little to the discussion but I thought I’d drop it off anyway.

  13. These demographic groupings are generally good indicators, but as with everything a little knowledge of them can sometimes be dangerous.
    Me, being an awkward, obtuse sod will sometimes go out of my way to disprove these identifiers and display and/or adopt traits from another.

    Or I could just pretend to be Richard Hell and state: I Belong To The Blank Generation
    (which I don’t becuase I don’t know what “the Blank Generation” is)

  14. What are you if you’re born in early 1966 again?

    I don’t feel particularly like a Gen X-er if enjoying Richard Linklater films, Kevin Smith, Pearl Jam or Classic Coke comes into play.

    Thought of this poem tonight. Starts halfway through.

  16. Tedious but inevitable historical note: the Generation X being talked about here isn’t the first one. There was a book called Generation X published in 1964, interviewing Boomers reaching adulthood.My late wife was interviewed for it.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26339959

    It never caught on, though. People were happy enough being Boomers and Mods or whatever.

    As you were.

    • And in between that book (I have a copy I picked up in the 90s somewhere) and Douglas Coupland’s book (when it finally stuck) there was Billy Idol’s old band. Maybe it was just too cool a label not to keep using until it caught on, or maybe being a Generation X-er, in the generally understood sense, born in 1967, I’m just minded to be narcissistic like that.

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