Gen-X People Like Me Have Been Forgotten By Boomers And Ignored By Millennials — 'We're The Generation History Skipped Over'
Gen-X has been neglected, forgotten, disregarded, and, overall, given little to no say in how things are progressing.
Centre For Ageing Better | Unsplash My parents are the most stereotypical Baby Boomers that you could find. My father was born 13 days after the first atomic bomb was dropped, and exactly two weeks before the formal surrender was signed on the USS Missouri, officially ending World War II. My mother was born the following May.
They attended school in the 50s and early 60s, were in their senior years of high school when John Kennedy was killed, and were just reaching adulthood when the Vietnam War was getting started. My father served on a carrier off the coast of Vietnam. My mother protested the war in San Francisco.
I’m the last of their three. My brother and sister were both born in the 70s, while I was the unexpected child (literally — the doctor told my mom that she’d have no other kids after my sister), conceived and born in 1980.
Depending on the definition and specifications, I either belong to the Millennials, Xennialls, or Gen-X. I confess, due in a large part to growing up mostly on my own, and with a brother eight years older than me and thus his influence being a large part of my childhood, I’ve always identified with Gen-X.
Gen-X was the latchkey kid of Boomer parents. To be a part of Gen-X meant you grew up with both parents having to work, or else a product of the increased divorce rates following the greater liberation and personal incomes of females during the Boomer years (Don’t mistake me, I’m all about that; women finally not having to stay at home and be subservient to males has and will continue to lead to further progress in society).
All of this led to Gen-X being ignored: We learned to take care of ourselves more, fix our own after-school snacks, and, in some cases, most or all of our meals.
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While Boomers were the first generation to grow up with television, Gen-X was the first to grow up with home movie systems and, thus, movie rental establishments.
We were also the first to grow up with video games, and what a world-changer that was. Millennials got the internet and Gen-Z got streaming services, but these were merely extensions of the home entertainment systems that were launched on Gen0X.
We were also the first generation to be told that college was mandatory for progress and even for the barest survival. I remember being told by Boomers that, without college, we’d be flipping burgers for the rest of our lives. So Gen-X had a higher rate of kids attending college than any previous generation.
Too bad those Boomers were simultaneously raising tuition so that we’d get out of college owing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars of debt. But we listened to them and marched dutifully through universities that were all too glad to help us on our way toward lifelong incarceration by loans that would never go away, never be discharged.
But that was our fault, we were told. We took on those loans, it’s our responsibility to pay them off. (Never mind that, when we were kids, we got to witness the massive S&L crisis, which, for those unfamiliar, was a failure of nearly a third of the banks in America to keep up with themselves due to massive deregulation and the corruption that naturally comes with it. The 2007 subprime crisis was the same lesson to the later generations, which we’ve already seemed to have forgotten as well).
Depending on whose estimates you believe, the S&L crisis led to the federal government having to pay between $160 billion to nearly half a trillion dollars to resolve it; at least $130 billion of which was shunted onto the taxpayers. This was the result of corruption and malpractice on the part of people who’d been running banks for generations. But yeah, let’s tell kids barely out of high school that they should’ve thought more about debt before taking it on.
All this added up to Gen-X being ignored. Rent a movie and put the kid in front of the TV, or let the kid play a video game for hours at a time. Too tired from work? Just make a frozen pizza, or else tell the kids to fend for themselves.
Older children were drafted into babysitting duties while younger kids got to feel the lack of parental presence in their lives. Mom and Dad are too tired to put up with this stuff.
Boomers, who’d grown up during a time when one parent, without a college degree, could own a home and support a family, now found themselves in marriages where both parties worked and still sometimes struggled, and Gen-X kids suffered the initial trauma of that. By the time Millennials hit the scene, it had become so normal that society had adjusted the paradigm, so you might also call Gen-X the test case for that practice.
Gen-X continued to be ignored throughout the development of the digital age.
Oh, Gen-X was just coming into force when some of the biggest technological developments were getting started — the moon landing sort of signaled the beginning of X, but, of course, the Boomers made it all about themselves.
Fax machines, cell phones, home computers — these were all created during the rise of X, but, again, Boomers. As for the internet and most of the conveniences that we now depend on, you’re welcome — those were created by Gen-Xers, for the most part, but when you think of those things, most brains instantly transition to Millennials.
And, look at Congress! The 118th Congress (that’s the current one, inaugurated January 2023) is laughably under-represented by Gen-X. 8 Senators are from the Silent Generation (those are the pre-boomers, born during the Depression or the War), and 66 are Boomers! Three are Millennial, leaving 23 Senators from Gen-X.
No Gen-Z yet as they won’t be old enough to go for the Senate until 2026, but you can see what’s happening here. The House is a little more evenly distributed, but only a little: 21 Silents, 194 Boomers, 166 X, 52 Millennials, and one Gen-Z. I have severe doubts, given the current political climate, if we will ever see a majority of seats in either house held by Gen-X.
The media doesn’t even talk about Gen-X anymore.
All I’ve seen for the past few years has been a constant war between Boomers and Millennials. It’s like Gen-X is that forgotten kid on the TV show, the one who was there for a while then disappeared with no explanation; Judy Winslow, from Family Matters, is the first that comes to mind.
It seems that Gen-X is that little part of history that nobody wants to acknowledge. Like there were somehow no children born between 1964 and 1980. Elder Xers have been coopted into Boomers, while younger ones, like me, struggle with Millennial identification.
Gen-X has been, once again, fed a raw deal. But we’re not up in arms about it, because it’s what we’re used to.
Hell, we didn’t even really have a name until well after our generation was over. That’s one theorized reason for calling us Generation-X; nothing else was there. Oh, there were some attempts, the noteworthy ones including Post-Boomers, Baby Busters, New Lost Generation, latchkey kids, MTV Generation, and the 13th Generation, but none of them really stuck. Not til X.
As for the term Xennial, that’s something else, much more specific. It encompasses the very end of X to the beginning of Millennial, maybe 1977–83/4. And when I first heard this term, about eight years ago, I was excited.
Finally, a label that fits. Because we are the transition team; we started analog and ended up digital. We began life with a shitty economy and a world on the brink of war, then hit high school with the economic boom of the 90s, and we were in (or just starting) college when everything went badly, followed immediately by 9/11, followed by seven more years of Bush. We were just entering the job market when the so-called Great Recession set in, the subprime crisis was in full swing, and Boomers were already blaming anyone under the age of 40 for it all.
We sat by and watched as minimum wages were stagnant, even as corporate profits surged. “Where’s all that trickle-down garbage that they throw at us every twenty years or so? When’s that gonna come our way?” Meanwhile, tuition was already on the upswing; in my own experience, tuition went up nearly 50% from the day I started undergrad to when I graduated five years later.
I had things a little better, given my career in politics, but it soon set in on that boat as well. I was seeing job postings wanting people with five years’ experience yet paying what I’d made on my first job. Jobs in New York that didn’t even pay two grand a month (which is not even enough to pay rent in NYC.)
I was approached by more than one campaign that expected me to pay my way; that is, I would be paid solely based on how much I could bring into the campaign, while they still expected me to move across the country and set up with them. And I ran into plenty of bait-and-switch on my campaigns, the funniest of which was a candidate that got me all the way out to Eureka, CA, and then expected me to work for free.
So we were still getting screwed by the system, over and over; which makes us very Gen-X.
However, we were young enough to enjoy the marvels of Millennials. We were the first to see cell phones in action, computers in our schools.
We were old enough to be trusted to use the internet responsibly (which, let’s admit, very few of us did), young enough to be excited by it, and experienced enough to remember having to spend hours in libraries researching things that were now at our fingertips. Suddenly, the world was so much more intertwined, we could get in touch with friends around the country or even the globe, and nothing was holding us back.
Being a kid in the 80s and a teen in the 90s was almost like going from black and white to color. Some of the most vivid colors, at that. We were coming out of disaster after disaster, the final throes of the fear of war, to a new world, and one that was growing exponentially.
Take a look at the Dow, if you want an easy example: 1987 featured Black Monday, the largest one-day drop in history. The Dow closed at just over 1200 that day. Just over a decade later, March 1999, the Dow topped 10,000 for the first time. Comparably, at closing today, it was over 35,000; a larger change by numbers, but nowhere close to percentages.
We saw the world look at AIDS as a death sentence. We were around when that name was first applied, and we heard Republicans ignore it, preachers claim that it was a curse on gay people, all the rumors, the fear that spread like wildfire… and we also lived into a time when that stigma was greatly reduced, and the death sentence revoked to a lifelong chronic illness.
Of course, things didn’t keep getting better. The greater connectivity margin has led us to be more disconnected than ever. Consider — when was the last time you had a lengthy conversation on the phone (outside of anything related to work or other official capacities; I’m talking about being social?)
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Whereas the news used to be much slower in its spreading and thus the effects a bit more manageable, now we have instant information, which takes only minutes to be spun into misinformation, lies, deceptions, you name it. Which, in turn, creates a world wherein people can become more entrenched than ever for their beliefs.
This kind of information distribution has also led to internet lynch mobs; I’ve seen, more than once, people get worked up over a rumor or an online accusation to the point that drastic actions have been taken. I’ve seen businesses shut down based solely on claims made without anyone even asking for proof. I nearly lost a job because of a misunderstanding for one comment I posted; I would’ve, too, spared that one level-headed person who stepped in and said to wait a minute and give me my chance to defend my side.
But, for that and all, could you have seen this, back in the 80s, even the 90s? Some, sure — video calling was predicted by many authors, and shown in several movies. The internet, no, not so much; we seemed to be expecting more in the 3D entertainment arena, not to mention flying cars and space travel.
We’ve become an almost dystopian version of some of those dreams of the future, and there’s no telling what’s to come of it. My one prediction, however, is that, whatever comes of it, it’ll be done without thought of Generation X.
Gen-X has been neglected, forgotten, disregarded, and, overall, has been given little to no say in the way things are progressing.
Our Boomer predecessors ignored us for their own goals, and our Millennial successors have too many of their own battles to fight to spend much time with regard to us. So, here we sit, and here we’ll remain.
James Rigdon is an author, having been previously published in The Good Men Project and other sites. His career has included almost two decades of political activism, concentrating on improving life for people across the nation, and he now focuses his efforts in the fields of healthcare and education.
