A few Mondays ago, I noted some novelists that hail from my particular vintage, and it made me think of Gen X a bit more and what hijinks our most invisible of living generations has been up to.
On the one hand, separating people into neatly boxed “generations” based on a specific year range feels like trying to slice the river. Birthrates rise and fall across the globe, but people keep on being born day in and day out — and none of them are beholden to the labels. Still, there’s something to said for what me and my fellow Gen Xers have gone through. Is it the technology? Is it the mindset? Is it that many of us have died of dysentery multiple times?
I kid. Gen Y got to prove themselves on that trail as well, often before they got relabeled “Millennials,” a way more fun generational name while Gen X was majorly in the workforce dealing with Y2K (I still have some “Y2K OK” stickers we put on updated computers. It was a whole thing.)
I’m sure some of the mindset and the outlook has something to do with the invisibility that has been noted and joked about extensively on social media. We’re probably the smallest generation since “the Silent Generation,” again, because of not entirely-arbitrary-but-pretty-inconsistent year ranges. It’s like we’re Silent Generation 2: Electric Boogaloo — and many of you don’t get that reference! Whatever.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about how trapped or not we are in the matrix of our mindset (handy that the Wachowskis are also Gen X), and I came across this essay by Kara Post-Kennedy which really taps into the aspect that “Damn, life came at us in a thousand different ways and it’d be impossible for that not to affect our outlook on life, the universe, and everything.”
And, yeah, some of our cohort have proven to be more crazy since this article was published in October ’22, but just in case you encounter one of us behind the curtains of more-stuff-that-impacts-you-than-you’d-realize, articles like the one above might help.
