Gen X: The Generation That Never Existed

Post in this thread every time a poll, infographic, or news story about generations mentions every generation *except* Gen X.

To wit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/18/more-bad-news-survival-republican-party/

“More than eight-in-ten members of the Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945) describe themselves as Christians (84%), as do three-quarters of Baby Boomers (76%). In stark contrast, only half of Millennials (49%) describe themselves as Christians; four-in-ten are religious ‘nones,’ and one-in-ten Millennials identify with non-Christian faiths.”

rip big gen, heaven needed millions of soul asylum fans

the real insult is when they work zoomers in there at the same time

Pssh. What do you even expect from the establishment, man? (returns to slacking)

There was some work-related training a while back about sensitivity wrt personality traits of coworkers, and there was a portion which attempted to paint the different generations in broad strokes and which I wanted to regard with sneering disdain but I have to say that their gen x description was pretty OTM re: me (snarky, skeptical, distrustful of authority, eats bowlfuls of cereal while watching terrible movies and wearing ripped flannels, etc.).

for real though, I feel like this happens a lot, like I'll see some poll about generational attitudes/party affiliation/income leveles etc. and Gen X won't even be on there

granted Rassmussen is generally shit but this gets at what I mean

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_ted_rall/the_disappearing_of_generation_x

differences between boomers and gen x so marginal that there's no point in putting both in?

Like hell!

that's like, so, you don't even know what you're talking about, man

whatever

I'll see some poll about generational attitudes/party affiliation/income leveles etc. and Gen X won't even be on there

dunno, Gen X being completely ignored by everyone seems very on brand

differences between boomers and gen x so marginal that there's no point in putting both in?

gtfo

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tr5EvZDjUFY/hqdefault.jpg

differences between boomers and gen x so marginal that there's no point in putting both in?

― Seany's too Dyche to mention (jim in vancouver), Friday, October 18, 2019 12:24 PM

lol yeah my parents and I have so much in common

lol jim

Respect to jim, that's how you lob a grenade into a discussion.

Generation Xers too consumed by their BBSes, their Crash Bandicoot, their Dishwalla

Boomers used to call us Gen Xers "lazy" "entitled" etc., but they seem to be labelling Millennials those things now.

I guess the old farts can only concentrate on unfairly criticising one generation at a time.

In my day, we couldn't just pick up a 'celled phone' and use the 'Tweeter' to insult the younger generation. We used to have a take a bus down to the Kinko's and print out another hundred copies of our zine to drop off at the anarchist bookstore.

They had to move on because:

Boomer: "When I was a kid I didn't have Facebook or cell phones"

Xer: "Bitch, neither did I."

Xpost Goddammit

xxp - damn, i remember when Kinko's was 24 hours ... actually, the coolest were the ppl that had shitty bullshit corporate temp office jobs that would just use their copiers for free.

though when I was in high school, my crush worked at Kinko's ...

a couple years back, I got to meet and hang with one of the people that started/wrote/edited Processed World magazine

Boomers used to call us Gen Xers "lazy" "entitled" etc., but they seem to be labelling Millennials those things now.

They also think Millennials are 15-20 years old.

haha there are more of us than u

that will be all, x'ers

haha there are more of us than u

― flappy bird, Friday, October 18, 2019 11:49 AM (fifty seconds ago)

And that's pretty awesome for us, we got into better colleges and got more scholarship money than u millenials because there were so few of us

Get off my lawn, you overly-confident whippersnappers.

Where my Oregon Trail Generation peeps at

they died of dysentery iirc?

the "x" is for xp, right? oh no, xp, xp, I can't keep up!

Zoomer/Millennial cuspers are going to be known as the Instagram Still Had A Linear Timeline Generation.

most discussion of generations is just simplistic bullshit, so i don't mind having mine left out

yeah I like lots of alt ish

afaict the most enduring feature of my gen x membership is my continued complete distrust/disgust at advertising and sales and being sold to and selling myself

other than that, my more positive attributes have been attributed to/absorbed by millennials so i no longer exist

considering that they've retconned Gen X to include people born in like 1978? ... yeah, it's bullshit

someone born in 1978 is definitely not a millennial tho

I thought it was the other way, I always knew X to end around '81-2 and then the millennials started creeping back and absorbing us.

gen xers = boomers with a smaller house and like 50% more likely to know how to access the contents of a zip file

Generations should last for ~5 years now, with the speed of technology and economic bubbles.

I vaguely identify with whichever generation is sandwiched between X and millennials.

afaict the most enduring feature of my gen x membership is my continued complete distrust/disgust at advertising and sales and being sold to and selling myself

lol my gen x signifiers are like: everything is just going to keep on decaying and getting stupider, I'm never going to become a "real adult" like my parents, and I still wear ironic t-shirts

boomers pay for winrar

I thought it was the other way, I always knew X to end around '81-2 and then the millennials started creeping back and absorbing us.

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Friday, October 18, 2019 11:59 AM (two minutes ago)

If you look at the Gen X generational studies books that came out in the 90s, the tail end of Gen X was 1976 (maybe 1977). 1978 on were "Gen Y"

Must be nice to be able to afford that on top of everything else.

xp

As a X/Y cusper, the experiences of friends 5-6 years older and people 5-6 years younger are wildly different from my direct peers in terms of how the Internet shaped us but we got out of young adulthood before digital cameras could document every stupid moment of your young life.

we watched the space shuttle explode in school, because Christa McAuliffe was gonna be the first teacher in space! ... later the "what color were Christa McAuliffe's eyes? ... Blue!" joke got repurposed for Kurt Cobain

someone write all this down

But acid house / rave was driven by people who also would have been old enough to pick up on punk to some extent, more so than people who were 12 in 1987.

Not saying it's simply causal. But also it seems like if your first pop era starts after 1983 that's quite different to the period before.

People who lived in places where punk and acid house never “kicked off” don’t belong to any demographic

I always site Gen X people as born between 1961 (Douglas Coupland’s birth year) and 1979/80 (Thatcher/Reagan administrations begin).

But acid house / rave was driven by people who also would have been old enough to pick up on punk to some extent, more so than people who were 12 in 1987.

― Noel Scott Emits (Noel Emits)

I mean I grew up in suburban New Jersey. No, I didn't hear any punk rock, my parents wouldn't let me stay up late enough to watch Quincy. When I was 12 I was listening to "License to Ill" and "Raising Hell", if you want to argue my generation's cultural experiences are different and "arguably less vital" than yours be my guest. Nobody will listen to you, but given that we're both Generation X we're well used to that by now, aren't we?

I think of 1965-1975 as Strong-X, 1961-1964 and 1976-1980 as Weak-X, or transitional gens if you prefer. As a Strong-Xer I do notice stereotypical Millennial traits creeping in with that '76-'80 cohort, and I don't relate to them as much as I do the pre-'76ers as a rule.

i'm the Judean People's Front version of Gen X

Take it easy. I could have made it clearer but it should be obvious that I'm talking about a UK context of 70s punk (and the 80s pop fallout) and acid house as a pop phenom.

Yeah I could argue that the pop charts are less interesting in 1985 than in 1981, it's hardly a new claim. Don't take it personally - I was partly wondering why the 1976 guy above would set himself apart.

Please don't "U mad bro?" me, thanks.

...and it's not like i knew anyone who had an amiga so i never even saw "Jesus on E's"

...Second Reality?

(I didn't see Jesus on Es but I did grab the mod from aminet and then steal the breakbeat sample from it)

anyway generations are all very confusing but I resent this Karen thing without really knowing what it is or what it's a reference to, which I fully expect to be told is a very Karen thing to do, idk

xposts but aren't generational cultural touchstones always driven by people who were old enough to have picked up on the last generation's touchstones? I mean that time delay is kind of built in

I’ve encountered some older Gen X armchair punks who are extremely fucking reactionary. There’s a notorious Atlanta zine run by one of them that I pray to god gets washed away in a righteous Gen Z internet uprising sometime soon

basically white dudes who think their misogyny, homophobia, and racism means they’re sticking it to the establishment and thinking independently

Gen n: we have cultural touchstones you don’t ~understand~
Gen n+ 1: FUCK U, WE GET THEM, O BOY DO WE THEY SUCK AND EVEN U DONT GET THEM.

aren't generational cultural touchstones always driven by people who were old enough to have picked up on the last generation's touchstones? I mean that time delay is kind of built in

Well, exactly.

The point was simply that there's *one* difference (in the UK) between growing up 65-73, and after that.

Not a definer of an entire geberation and the suggestion that one is "arguably" better than the other was a little gentle retort to Ashley Pomeroy above. i.e. a joke.

yesterday a friends 14 year old daughter was telling me about karens (had never heard the term before).
in her world they are basically pushy mums who get their kids involved in every after school club etc.

Twenty-somethings I speak to all say that big Karen energy is wanting to speak to a manager, having highlights on a Rachel from Friends hairstyle variant they haven’t abandoned since the show was on broadcast, and calling other women ‘hunni’ on FB.

That, and she's an anti-vaxxer.

xp crut:
https://www.chunklet.com/
?

And in ref to the Gen-X subdivision -- this thread could serve as a demarcation line:

Here we post radio-slick, ultracompressed Modern Rock singles 1987-1990 w/ huge gated drums & lots of chorus! (youtube thread)

A few weeks ago I was arguing on fb w/a friend born in the mid-60s about when the Cure stopped being good in response to another friend who was born in the mid-60s earnestly trying to feel the love for the Disintegration album. Anyway, the latter friend just died a couple days ago.

xp not speaking for crut but I assumed he meant https://stompandstammer.com/

is there a non-US version of this generational warfare or

"...Second Reality?

(I didn't see Jesus on Es but I did grab the mod from aminet and then steal the breakbeat sample from it)

― a passing spacecadet"

of course, second reality rocked my world, fucking purple motion d00d

"basically white dudes who think their misogyny, homophobia, and racism means they’re sticking it to the establishment and thinking independently

― esempio (crüt)"

look i grew up on, like, fucking answer me! and bill hicks, i'm not going to say gen x is blameless. some of us have grown and learned since that time and some of us, well, still listen to whatever the fuck jim goad is saying these days.

"is there a non-US version of this generational warfare or

― deems of internment (darraghmac)"

it probably involves acid house deems?

sarahell - I know the band chunklet but am not familiar with the zine - I’m talking about st0mp and st4mm3r

chunklet is generally better known in gen-x circles tbh

Wow, I'd never even heard of that site (stomp etc.) before today. I read three articles (Charlie's Angels movie review, Taylor Swift album review, Orwells album review) quickly and will never be back.

ive never heard of it either and went to it after unpersons ref to see how anything current could sound so boring. I landed on a scots and beck splash page and the anachronistic whiplash severed my head from my body

Josefa at 10:41 16 Nov 19

I think of 1965-1975 as Strong-X, 1961-1964 and 1976-1980 as Weak-X, or transitional gens if you prefer. As a Strong-Xer I do notice stereotypical Millennial traits creeping in with that '76-'80 cohort, and I don't relate to them as much as I do the pre-'76ers as a rule.

eh I mean this just points out the silliness of this, I was born in 74 and definitely relate a hell of a lot more to my friends from HS and my own sister who were born in 76 than I do someone born in 65

I think there are mini generations, basically ppl that were like 2/3 years older than you in HS and to ppl that were 2/3 years younger

Is there any way to avoid repeating arguments about what years generations start and stop?

not that I know of

No

ILX is pretty much repeat the same argument over and over again on most topics.

I mean everybody in the world does that

even truthbombs are long forgotten when the Thread that gave them birth comes again

aw nice gonna go read wheel of time again now

anyway

strong gen x 76 urban wite guy has more or less in common with a weak gen x 78 urban black guy than a strong gen x 76 rural wite chick?

i just need to know before i finalise this card game im developing, thx

misread that as "unban"

if we are gonna just repeat the same arguments over and over again, we could always go back to who should be unbanned or why not

Do we ban Strong X or Weak X?

Generation X began on the day Malcolm X was assassinated and ended on the day Los Angekes by X was released.

every gen xer remembers where they were when they heard about the film jfk

I am my own generation and it is better than yours ✌︎('ω'✌︎ )

i always thought stomp and stammer guy was a youngish boomer but i guess he could be gen x? when i was like 13 or 14 i had an under-the-table part time job at the b00k n00k on buf0rd h1ghw4y, where he was like the music section guy....but my sense of how old "old" people were was probably pretty distorted

sheesh you really dont want them hunting u down for that back tax eh

xp i actually don't know for sure whether he's an old gen xer or a young boomer but i'm guessing he was born sometime in the 60s

xpost hahahahahaha

how gen x is this? i saw the chunklet guy front an mc5 cover band halloween night. i wore earplugs.

idk how "gen x" that is, but it does remind me of when we repeatedly argued about "what and who is a hipster"

RIP Carles

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoH8wx7VQAAwZZ5?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoH8x7wVQAEDDUv?format=jpg&name=large

Better than Girls of Grunge I guess

eXcite, eXpose and eXhilerate!