GEN XCTASY

Nestled between Boomers and Millennials is a target market without a bullseye. If you like clean math, Generation X includes anyone born in the years 1965 through 1980. If you’re Douglas Coupland, author of the novel that named the species (Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture, 1991), it begins more loosely with anyone who was born in the 1960s, but has no memory of the Kennedy assassination; and ends, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, with those who can recall the farewell episode of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show (1992) but isn’t a Boomer. In other words, a generation fluent in both rotary phones and early dial-up, shaped by a sense of cultural acceleration they learned to navigate on their own.

Most illustrative of the cohort might be an oft-shared social media post from 2022 that asks, “Who is the most ignored generation?” and shows four choices: Gen Z, Millennials, Baby Boomers, or the Silent Generation. For Generation X, being forgotten is a feature not a bug. This invisibility, however, offered a kind of freedom: room to observe, absorb, and decide who you were without a spotlight or algorithm demanding performance.

Ignored by parents—both of whom worked or, more likely, were divorced—Gen X sought refuge in their bedrooms. These were rooms lit by the glow of MTV, lined with cassette towers and thrift-store furniture, spaces where taste was assembled slowly, deliberately. Pouring over the pages of magazines and tearing them out to haphazardly emblazon their walls with actors and bands, Xers created mosaics of their inner selves for themselves. Identity wasn’t something expressed publicly on Instagram, but within small groups of likeminded friends, far underneath the radar of absent mothers and fathers who were often depicted as total morons in films from that era. Style wasn’t fully commercialized, but remained a code composed of shared glances, borrowed records, and worn-in denim that meant something only to those who knew.

Take Winona Ryder in both Heathers (1989) and Reality Bites (1994). In the former, she portrays Veronica Sawyer, who famously goes on a killing spree at her high school with her boyfriend J.D. (Christian Slater). A dark satire wrapped in neon and shoulder pads, Heathers distilled Gen X’s suspicion of hierarchy and popularity into something brutal and funny. In a recurring bit, Veronica sits at the breakfast table to regale her parents with life updates that fall on deaf ears. “Goddamn, will someone tell me why I read these spy novels,” asks her dad, to no one in particular. “Because you’re an idiot,” retorts Veronica. “Oh yeah, that’s it,” he replies. 

As Lelaina Pierce in Reality Bites, Ryder approaches her mom and stepfather to ask for a loan after getting fired from a job. Casually smoking cigarettes and drinking Diet Cokes, the trio navigates her predicament, with her stepfather asking if the money is for drugs. The scene unfolds like a generational stalemate: earnestness versus complacency, idealism flattened by a culture that had already cashed out.

Eventually, Lelaina’s mother suggests some humility might be in order. “Well, I hate to say it. Times are hard. You’re just gonna have to swallow your pride,” she says. “Why don’t you get a job at Burger-Rama? They’ll hire you. I saw on the TV… they had this little retarded boy working the cash register.” After a pause, and a gulp, Lelaina replies, “Because I’m not retarded, mom. I was the valedictorian of my university.” Her stepfather, breathing from an open mouth, tamps out his cigarette in an ashtray. It’s an exchange soaked in the bluntness of the era, with its characteristically unfiltered language, casual cruelty, and scarce empathy.

What other generation could so brazenly toss off a word that Gen Z now deems offensive than the one that channeled “founder mode” into starting a band instead of a start-up? Before disruption became a pitch deck, it was a distortion pedal. A generation whose ultimate achievement wasn’t to attract Series A funding from a venture capitalist, but to get signed to Seattle indie record label Sub Pop? Or whose ultimate ideal in a sex symbol was Kate Moss at her most thin, or Brad Pitt at his most filthy—and called it “heroin chic”? 

Perhaps nostalgia for Generation X lies in the notion that they didn’t really give much of a fuck about anything, or at the very least wanted to give the impression of a self-styled nihilism (that, in retrospect, looks a lot like trailblazing indifference to the differences between people). A refusal of spectacle, a distrust of slogans—more armor than  optimism.

“Well, it’s a ball, so I thought I’d wear a gown. He didn’t wear a tux,” Kurt Cobain says, wearing a yellow silk prom dress, and gesturing to bandmate Krist Novoselic during an appearance on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball. “He didn’t give me a corsage either.” 

“At least I asked you out,” replies Novoselic.

In classrooms across the country, Generation X watched the Challenger space shuttle explode, live on television. A collective loss of innocence transmitted via cathode ray tubes. Instead of being ushered into counseling, the bell rang, and they were moved along down the hallway to their next class by teachers with tears in their eyes. In a current era where university students can claim to be “traumatized” by a sentence in a book (or the r-word in an essay such as this one), Gen X, for better or worse, learned to move through life with a shrug. 

And they looked pretty cool doing it, too.