It’s simple:
It doesn’t look like it but we’re the smallest adult generation alive and paying taxes. There are 10 million more boomers and 15 million more millennials. Not only those generations boast 25 million more people, those are so much more prone to consumerism. Thus the media only talk about them, duh.
Gen X grew up conflicted with capitalism. On one hand, we wanted Jordan’s too but on the other hand we were like Fuck You I Won’t Do What You Tell Me, right? We’re an annoying market for the new economy which relies so much on impulse and sucking the hell out of our wallets, a subscription and a convenience fee at a time.
The differences don’t stop at economics. It’s for everything, it’s such a fascinating lens. Take firearms: Boomers want to keep their guns, Silent gen wants more guns, Mills want gun laws, we just want guns to be thrown into the nearest volcano so that we never have to fucking mourn every week ever again. We’re about solutions right now, whatever it takes. Regardless of what was before. Because unlike younger generations who don’t know and haven’t lived the non-digital world long enough before 2000 and might doubt themselves, we did live enough through those times to know what to do, change, edit, reverse in today’s world.
I think Gen X is very important in History. Gen X is quite unique: what millennials experience economically, we pioneered. What boomers had, we got a quick taste of it. The fact that we grew up through the most massive changes in human history made us super wise and also, super tired. It made us determined in our thoughts and trains of thoughts though. We’re the middle generation that shared big moments with all the people alive right now: talking about WWII with greatest gen and silent gen when the internet didn’t exist, making cassettes from our boomers parents’ vinyls and VHS from TV shows, installing computers or making websites for our younger siblings. And of course, going through the entire history of computer games, from the first console ever when we were kids to now.
We’re the most intersectional generation ever. We really went through the world being local to becoming global. Nobody else experienced that monstrous, massive change as a backbone of their lives. Gen X did.
Today, Gen Z’s oldest members born in 1998/1999 are adults. They don’t give a fuck, for what I see. They’ll say “fuck Beyoncé and fuck yo mama too”. They’re like Gen X. Millennials and Boomers share consumerism and complaining. Gen X and Z share the punk attitude and questioning. It makes sense. Things cycle.