Gen X is taking over the world
Never mind the millennials — we’ve got the power
You don’t hear much about us, but my friends and I are changing your life.
We are Generation X. Once dubbed the “slacker generation” we started out lost and lazy. Though our dates are disputed, we are commonly known to be born between 1965–1984. We grew up on MTV, microwave meals and pop culture, and maybe that is what made us a bit cynical. Neglected by our working parents, now society seems to have forgotten about us too.
While the millennials were being born, we were in our formative years. We got university degrees and paid for them ourselves without complaining (unless you lived in the UK and got one for free). Our sense of adventure saw us travelling the world on our “gap years” before we got our first proper jobs.
And ever since we entered the workforce we’ve been champions of work/life balance. In fact we’re changing how work works. While millennials get all the column inches for their expectations of working life, we are the ones writing new rules (and throwing the established ones away). Self management, flexible working, radical transparency, purpose-driven cultures. These are our ideas and we are making them a reality.
Millennials are supposed to be the digital generation. Yet contrary to that popular belief, we spend more time on social media than our younger peers (an extra hour per week). That shouldn’t be surprising since we were the ones who invented it (see Zuckerburg b. 1984, Dorsey b. 1976).
Our generation learned the internet easily, probably because of all that time we spent playing video games. Now we’re helping the digital world find its full potential, with more than half of corporate leadership roles held by us Xers. Elon Musk (b. 1971) might be taking us all to space; chances are your next boss will be of his generation as well.
We are political. As kids growing up in the 80s we lived in fear of the Cold War, nuclear annihilation and AIDS. Our grandparents tore down the Wall, but it was our parents who inspired us with their activism roots and we carried on their work. We are feminists, despise poverty, and we fight for equality. There’s less of us but we show up and vote in greater numbers than the millennials. We are #metoo and we are #lovewins.
And now we are leading nations. Justin Trudeau and Emanuel Macron have given us a good start. Hopefully we will be able to unite our elders who still control much of our democracies. Our track record so far hasn’t been perfect — one of our own opened the doors to Brexit (David Cameron, b. 1966). Alt-right attention seeker Milo Yiannopoulos is also one of us (apologies), proving that our generation aren’t all liberal snowflakes. Clearly your date of birth does not place you on a political spectrum, and yet I wonder if our generation’s anti-establishment ideology might just end the bipartisan bitching once and for all.
We are changing your world. We have the power. How will we use it?
The biggest problem we’ve created is the millennial myth. We are responsible for the generational label and it’s becoming an issue. A whole section of society now feels a weight of expectation upon them. They are told they are entitled, narcissistic, that they are financially stressed, that they will never be able to afford their own home — and they have come to believe it. They also think they are more enlightened and purposeful (yet they aren’t — boomers being the most driven to find purposeful work). They are valorised and scrutinised — mostly by corporate America who look for reasons to sell more shit to them.
What must change is our need to segment and stereotype each other. To create binaries. Boomers vs millennials. Men vs women. Black vs white. East vs west. Republican vs Democrat. Winners vs losers. From that vantage point we only see division. We miss out on the beautiful space in the middle. The connection between the polarities. Because it is from that delicious, uncertain and confusing place that things will change. We grew up in that mess. We know how to navigate it.
Who will Get X — the messy middle generation — be to change the world? The final scene of our manifesto, John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, offers the answer:
“You see us as you want to see us — in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain…and an athlete…and a basket case…a princess…and a criminal. Does that answer your question?”
