Gen X -- the Last Generation of Culture

The other day I noted that Gen Z's use of the word "bet" is the equivalent of Gen X using "word." When I said that, a colleague asked what the Millennial word was, and I glibly and somewhat sarcastically scoffed that Millennials had no word -- they just copied Gen X. That said, I think "word" remained the word for a while

With that in mind, I've noticed a strange uptick in news, or perhaps better said "commentary" on Generation X lately. Since 2025 began, there's been a steady stream of Gen X stories, features, lists, and more with an ironically heavy bit of nostalgia. The most recent one -- which I passed on to my Millennial colleague and a fellow Gen Xer who, because I work in a library and featured Coupland's pivotal novel Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture, rolled her eyes and said she's never read and doesn't need a book to tell her who she is -- is an extensive and engaging piece from Gen X culture writer Amanda Fortini in the New York Times asking: "Is Generation X the Greatest Generation?"  

There’s a collective fascination with Generation X, for both good and ill, as told by numerous think pieces and memes that have begun proliferating like gremlins in recent years. Most of these memes are humblebrags created by Gen X-ers themselves, applauding our toughness and resilience, honed by benign parental neglect (“The official sports drink when I was a kid,” reads a caption over a child drinking from a garden hose), or celebrating our own coolness, an aura cultivated by pretending not to care (“Them: The world is falling apart! Gen X kids: Have you ever had a bologna potato chip sandwich?”). Many express nostalgia for the lost relics of a simpler time, like mixtapes, malls, daytime soap operas, the mentholated burn of Noxzema or the ritual Friday night rental of Blockbuster videos.

According to the articles, Gen X is either the last awesome generation, despite the fact that we keep such a low profile — or maybe precisely for that reason (Vogue: “What if the cool ones are actually those unbothered people that nobody talks about?”) — or the worst, which is not news to us since we’re so self-loathing (The New York Times: “Hate Gen X? Get in Line [Behind a Gen X-er]”). There are denunciations of Gen X for not being progressive enough, or at least not as progressive as millennials (according to Gallup, as of 2022, 44 percent of Gen X-ers identify as independents and tend to vote on candidates or issues rather than by party). And then there are the hand-wringers, who either express retroactive concern about our traumatic childhoods (The Wall Street Journal: “Is Gen X Nostalgia Just Trauma-Bonding?”) or lament our unfitness for jobs, our ill-fated careers and the fact that it seems unlikely we will ever have a true Gen X president — though, by the old measures, Barack Obama, born in 1961, qualifies. If you were to ask Gen X-ers about any of this, most would simply shrug.

As readers of this blog may know, I am obviously Generation X, and I am a Gen X writer, having published my Master's thesis on the novels of Douglas Coupland, and putting together a steady stream of Gen X commentary, including a popular piece on "Gen X Parenting."