Gen X Marks the Spot | Hacker News Reader

Gen X Marks the Spot

thepullrequest.com

13 pointsandrenth16 comments

I'm a proud gen-X'er but that article made no sense to me. Felt like it was generated by a cheap AI plucking current buzzwords in today's news.

Seriously. Arguing people from other generations aren't like you and thus bad entirely because you like Joe Rogan is weird. And like, gag me with a spoon uncool.

As a proud Gen-X'er, I hear your call and say, "meh, whatever"

I couldn't figure out if that was the whole article or just the beginning. The bottom had a bar saying "this post is for subscribers"..

I'll agree it seems poorly crafted. No mention of Gen-X music, which IMHO was pretty damm good. I have a slightly chipped tooth because of all the thrashing about..

Hell yeah - early 90s music was amazing!

Yeah. Lame. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGpBnB-jYa8

i'll just assume it's gpt-3 in the wild.

I was thinking the same thing.

Any article that pans a whole generation is pretty much worthless.

This feels like a proxy article about Joe Rogan trying to pretend it's not opinionated about Joe Rogan.

It kind of does. Some of the digs at Boomers seemed accurate, though. So did the "amnesiac Eternal Present" bit. I laughed at those, just like I laugh when my daughter says "OK Boomer" just to troll me (she knows I'm GenX). But other parts of the author's depiction of post-X generations don't match anyone I've known among my coworkers or daughter's cohort, and the anti-woke vibe almost ruins the whole thing. Maybe some of the too-many Joe Rogan fans around here will appreciate it more.

I always assume people stoking these fake intergenerational conflicts are hoping to profit off it somehow.

It's so nonsensical and silly.

(Well, there are also the people who waste their lives exercising their sense of aggrievement who do it too, but they'll latch on to anything.)

One way this manifests is when people stoke fake intergenerational conflicts trying to distract you from real class conflicts. Like when you see a piece about millennials in the workplace, whoever wrote it (Forbes, WSJ, the Economist, etc.) is encouraging workers to point fingers at each other and not at the suits keeping their pay low, etc.

I agree that the generational attacks are pretty pointless. But, I think articles like this do identify a real social phenomenon: For some large percentage of people in developed countries (maybe even a majority), at some point in the past 30 years the slope of the "progress" curve turned definitively downward.

This is true on an income basis (real wages for most people are stagnant or even declining), but it's also true on a quality of life basis (metrics the author mentions include sex and the deleterious effects of the attention economy).

The downward turn probably started sometime around the year 2000, according to indicators I've seen. That does mean that people identified as "Generation X" are a sort of pivot generation between the optimism and growth of the past and today's stagnation. In that sense, the article is talking about something real.

"Millennial-and-below generations have had their brains so warped by Internet time, they live in an amnesiac Eternal Present"

I don't know that I like the big generational over generalization there, but I do like that "brains so warped by Internet time, they live in an amnesiac Eternal Present"

I think that gem can be applied to many folks, regardless of their age or generation.

Like most of these ridiculous intergenerational conflict articles lately, it doesn't even get the generations right! The rants about 'Millennials' are really about 'Gen Z' who are the current 25 and younger generation. Millennials are actually between about 26 and 41 at the moment.

The bit about skateboarding is hilarious because skateboarding was at its absolute peak of popularity in the early 2000s, right when Gen Xers would have been too old. And it almost died out entirely in the 90s.

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