Why Gen X Failed | Hacker News Reader

Why Gen X Failed

compactmag.com

28 pointspaulpauper32 comments

This reads like a load of incendiary hot garbage, written without substantive proof, and using generation labels like a horoscope.

Born in the mid '80s. Whenever I see or hear generational cohorts mentioned, my bullshit detector lights up like a Christmas tree. At this point "entitled" is more offensive to me than any swear or slur.

boomer: kids these days. gen-x: whatever. millennial: do not ever call me a millennial. zoomer: what a mess. the olds are kinda crazy.

Boomers really don't like being called boomers either. I used it once around here in an innocuous comment about the Yugo and was massively downvoted and accused of being a foreign agitator sowing strife just for using that word.

the only thing you can say in reply to that is 'ok boomer'

>using generation labels like a horoscope

Very much this.

I hate that the media loves to use labels to condemn people then the people that are condemned willingly continue the practice.

The best thing about being a Gen X'er is that the non-descript label keeps us out of the culture war crosshairs. "Boomer" has become a slur at this point and the name "Zoomer" is so cringe you are primed as an older person to not like this group. Did we really let the media name an entire generation after a corporate trademark ?

It seems harder to be divisive when you name Generations X, Y, Z but somehow Y and Z became Millenial and Zoomer. I propose the next generation is named A1 and we just cycle through the letters and then increment the numbers every 25 years.

> Did we really let the media name an entire generation after a corporate trademark

It’s not due to the product Zoom, it’s a portmanteau of Gen Z and Boomer.

Plus it seems like I hear Zoomer/Doomer used interchangeably so I'm not even sure everyone agrees on the stupid labels.

This is the first time as a boomer that I have come across the Zoomer nickname for Gen Z. What I have noticed in relatives kids that I have come to know closely is that they are more boomer like in how they approach problems than Millennials. So to me it is more self descriptive than an insult.

How so?

Millenial vs. Boomer is no longer selling :)

As a Gen X I wondered, who was the first generation mass-programming? Who brought the internet from nimble beginnings to everyone? (Bezos being an early Gen X, Brin & Page born in 1973 in the center of Gen X) - growing up in Europe at a time when the apocalypse felt near with new nuclear weapons (SS20/Pershing), dead rivers and dying forrests (the boomers left us).

I came here to say just this! Gen X is the generation that brought modern computing and the internet. Seems uninformed to call those accomplishments "failures."

As a Gen X-er, retired at age 48, I don't think of myself as a failure. On the contrary, I beat the fucking system, against all odds, despite growing up in a log cabin with no electricity and no running water in rural Arkansas, so yeah, go me. (To be fair, the only reason I was in a log cabin in Arkansas was because my hippie boomer parents decided to build a log cabin in Arkansas to evade certain nuclear annihilation in the "back to the land[1]" movement in the 70's, and, when they ran out of money, they went back to civilization with their college degrees, got jobs, and paid for my college education, so... eh, thanks to my excellent boomer parents, I thrived. Funny how that worked out, isn't it. Edit: also, the public school system in Marshall, Arkansas at the time (early 1980s) was surprisingly excellent. Not kidding about that. I remember having great science and algebra teachers, and even the art teacher was pretty awesome.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-the-land_movement

I didn’t fail, I’m installing Witcher 2 on my Xbox 360 right now and about to have an awesome evening.

We couldn’t change the world, and that’s okay. We exist in our minds and make our own worlds where we are happy.

Yeah. My immediate gen-x thought: "you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

^ Peak GenX

I alternate between trollish amusement at people writing so seriously about these vague generational labels, and quiet horror at the fact that people actually believe it.

I have much more in common with randomized Zoomers and Boomers than I have with the the people I went to high school with. Believing in "Generational identity" makes you a mark, no different from someone who believes Pro Wrestling matches are not predetermined.

Oh, just piss all the way off, Nina.

These "generation" thingies are purely arbitrary demographic groupings, and your judgement is more specious still.

We are born and die individuals, and the Almighty is the judge.

I hate these groupings because, aside from the generalizations, I was born in 1984 and my label seems to straddle GenX and Millenials depending on the author. My parents had me when they were ~22 and so they also straddle the boomer/genX labels.

Edit: And to take it a step further, my granparents were kids during WWII, both grandpas were in the armed services right after the Korean War. It’s like my entire family exists in the interludes between the “main plotline”.

Same on all accounts except only one grandpa was in the Korean war.

We're pretty squarely in the millennial cohort, which is largely defined by the major world events during our formative years that straddled the turn of the millennium.

Assuming you're in the US:

We were kids at the tail end of the cold war. We were in our early teens during the unfettered optimism of the late 90s, when the internet revolution was really kicking off.

We became adults right after the turn of the new millennium, in the wake of 9/11, between two recessions.

The world changed a lot in that timespan and we're defined by our having experienced it during our late childhood and early adulthood.

As someone very close to that age as well, I enjoy it because whenever something bad comes up in one category, I just say I'm more like the other one.

"I am playing both sides so I always come out on top." - Mac

This is so, so dumb. Gen Xers dominate US culture in music, arts, film. They are in many of the top wealth slots on the Forbes list; Elon, Peter Thiel come to mind just now. A vast percentage of the powerful and working investors are in this category. I think our hallowed saint of YC is an Xer as well.

There were in my youth, and still are, Xers who think it's cool to drop out and act too cool to work, but I bet Nina Power isn't one of these either, given that she's senior editor at a cool-looking zine thing online.

I wish I could say the essay read like a bit of performance art, but sadly I think it's just pandering, and that sucks, as we used to say to our boomer parents way back in the 80s.

Gen X didn’t fail. We quiet quit. On purpose.

How's that different? If you dare speak it.

I was being tongue in cheek. My generation literally brought us all the modern things we enjoy/loathe today. There isn’t a single aspect of life today that Gen X did not have an outsized impact in creating. Just like the silent generation’s impact through the 60s and 70s. We just do so quietly and either ignored or scorned. As it has always been.

Is Gen X not the generation that co-opted the internet that was handed to them in their post college years and turned it toward the profiteering ad filled garbage it is today?

Or maybe we built the unsustainable zany businesses that guys like Zuck replaced. Who knows, I don’t really care that much.

> Of those Gen-Xers who have done something with their lives—Elon Musk, Dave Chapelle, J. K. Rowling, Kanye West, and Jack Dorsey

I am GenX and I'd like to think I've done a lot of interesting things with my life. The folks listed by the author are rich and famous. That is not the measure of a life well lived. This entire piece is trash.

Ah, the old "split people into groups and then stoke resentment and animosity between them" trick. Where have I seen that before?

"The Boomers’ refusal to come down from their long acid trip, let alone give up their institutional stranglehold, has come at the expense of Gen X, especially. And now they, the Boomers, might send the whole thing going kaboom, if they get the Cold War replay they seem to be jonesing for. It’s only with the specter of such a conflagration that the epic nature of the Golden Generation’s historical passage can, in true narcissistic style, be recognized. By trying to live forever, Boomers risk killing us all."

You want more?! :-/

Gen-X gave us the internet that we know and ?love? today. it might have been invented by boomers, but it was gen-x kids who productized it.

the concept that gen-x didn't change the world is somewhat laughable to me.

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