There is one thing people do get right about America’s Generation X: There aren’t that many of us - roughly 65 million, according to recent data from the Census Bureau.
Here is another negative to chew on: What if everything we decided about Generation X turned out to be wrong? This generation is even smaller than it might appear Now it’s been a quarter century since the clichés ossified. To the extent that we were defined, we were defined in the negative - the first generation in American history to be written off before it had a chance to begin. No one really knew what we were.īut someone apparently knew what we weren’t: dreamers, revolutionaries, world-changers, like the baby boomers before us. At that point, the oldest members of Generation X were 25. Leave aside the fact that struggling 20-somethings of any era tend to sneer at luxury goods. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders.” They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. “They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial.
“They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own,” wrote Time magazine in a 1990 cover story called “20-something” that marked our debut, as a class, on the national stage.
What is an X? An empty set, a place-holder, a nothing that fills a void until an actual something comes along.įor the members of Generation X, born between 19, that was never us.
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