We're just chilling watching the show...
I sit at the tail end of it, or as I've seen it described 'xenials', wishing things would start to make sense again one day.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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You realize that that comic is a pretty strong indictment of gen X though, yes?
It's not noble or otherwise admirable to sit down and eat that popcorn.
Here's the funny thing with that. We watched things like Bill Nye and Captain Planet as kids. We've been aware of the evidence of science and the needs to change our society since a very young age. For many years we where told 'use plastic so they don't cut down trees' only to realize later that was wrong. All through it we where telling the parent and the grandparents that things needed to change and the future wasn't looking great.
Not one fuck was given.
So when it came time to be the parents and the mundane middle life drones many simply said hold onto what scraps you can and hope for the future, but in the meantime I just want to sit down for a bit. It's draining as hell to spend decades of your life being ignored, it's not a wonder we get called the forgotten generation.
1977 here, we had to be raised by the boomers alone - with no Internet, mobile phones, and left outside all summer until it was dark (which wasn't that bad mostly).
What we were sold on growing up and what actually happened when we became adults was very different.
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"The forgotten generation" strikes again!
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.
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Very generous outlook on Gen X, who are mostly seen as boomer lite in my experience.
Did some digging, and Gen Xers were best known for being helicopter parents. This was in reaction to how their parents barely paid attention to them. They are the only generation that gets hate for being helicopter parents, as far as I can tell. They seem to be the Soccer Mom generation.
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Generational Theory refers to them as a "Nomad" generation, analagous to the more literally named "Lost Generation" one sacculum prior.
Generational theory is not scientific, but the patterns it identifies are certainly interesting. It's held up over the last 30 years, and seems to be continuing.
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They're too small a cohort to matter, and seemed to follow boomers almost exactly with their ideology
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.
We all went for a bike-ride, and when we got home just played some Atari.
Still playing Atari...
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Musk is Gen X. Ron DeSantis is Gen X. Josh Hawley is Gen X. Paul Ryan, Gen X, claimed Rage Against the Machine was a favorite band despite being a fucking Republican.
Sounds to me like they're pretty loud and fucking shit up just as bad as the Boomers, no offense.
I don't have good memories of Gen X, just memories as assholes older than me who judged everyone based on what music they listened to and were absolutely assholes if your music wasn't cool enough.
Am I shocked most of them grew up to be conservative fuckholes? No, no I am not.
Anyway they mostly just get lumped in with Boomers, but Musk is Gen X and I think he's sadly pretty representative of it.
Over half of men (52%) aged 45+ voted for Trump and 44 is the youngest Gen X.
He's the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
Knows not what it means, and I say
He's the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means, knows not what it means, and I say, "Yeah"
I donβt have good memories of Gen X, just memories as assholes older than me who judged everyone based on what music they listened to and were absolutely assholes if your music wasnβt cool enough.
And you base your opinion of an entire generation on that?
There are good people and bad people in all generations alike. One day you too will be older, and you'll be at the receiving end of undeserved criticism for things you've never said or done because some young dude met someone else the same age as you they didn't like.
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X as a population is a birth low like the silent generation and since both are adjacent to the baby boom, which is one of the largest generations, their relative pull during their time is muted. basically the silent generation was sorta crowded out by the large incoming one and Xers were to small to effect the new crowd size much. Then also millenials are technically a boom but really just a drop in the bucket compared to the baby boom before. They are the little peak in the early 90's in this graph where the orange is the boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom#/media/File:US_Birth_Rates.svg . Combined with this is that X was known as the slackers and they were not big joiners. Don't get me wrong im in the gen and I know plenty of folks that do things in their lives like reduce, reuse, recycle but not many part of an org or something around it (not all good things btw of course but im giving the perspective of my crowd). It still sorta cracks me up as I live near my high school and they put all the accomplishments along the fence and it starts in like the 60's. Newer ones are in the school but as new ones come in the old ones are hung on the outside fence. Well there is this big gap in the 80's. literally stuff into the late 70's and then suddenly stuff from the early 90's. No club or sport or anything got any significant win or award or whatevr in the 80's.
