Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cause Everything Else That’s Great and Awful

What is an X? An empty set, a place-holder, a nothing that fills a void until an actual something comes along.

For the members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, that was never us.

“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. “They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders.”

Leave aside the fact that struggling 20-somethings of any era tend to sneer at luxury goods. At that point, the oldest members of Generation X were 25. No one really knew what we were.

But someone apparently knew what we weren’t: dreamers, revolutionaries, world-changers, like the baby boomers before us. 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.

Now it’s been a quarter century since the clichés ossified. 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

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. Sandwiched between the change-the-world boomers (around 75 million) and the we-won’t-wait-for-change millennials (approximately 83 million), we were doomed to suffer a shared case of middle-child syndrome, an eight-figure-strong army of Jan Bradys.