Generation X Needs to Stop Complaining

Opinion|Don’t Be a Loser, Gen X Baby

Pour out a Zima for Gen X-ers, who will never end up running the world. This was the theme of a Wall Street Journal article recently about corporations that are skipping over the Slacker generation — those of us born between 1965 and 1980 — and promoting millennials instead to C.E.O. As The Journal put it, presumably channeling the anxieties of one of the paper’s frustrated editors: “As they enter what is usually the prime, C-suite career stage, more businesses are retaining their aging leaders or skipping a generation in search of the next ones.”

I was born in 1976, and my reaction to this news was, in Gen X parlance, whatever, man. The disappointment some X-ers feel about this is indicative of an inherent contradiction: They did not trust institutions, empty ambitions and rampant consumerism when they were young, but still feel let down when, as middle-aged adults, the system has not delivered the professional success and extreme run-up of home equity that boomers have accrued. This is especially true of X-ers who happen to be white and male and C.E.O.-shaped. And it’s a bummer!

In theory, these X-ers were well aware that their parents were probably going to be better off than they themselves would ever be and couldn’t decide whether to be angry about it pre-emptively or to just slackerishly opt out of the corporate and political structures that led to it altogether. The Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, who popularized the term “Generation X” with his 1991 novel of that name, had a character in it named Dag, who puts it thus: “I don’t know … whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world or whether I’m just upset that the world has gotten too big — way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are those blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers.”

Mr. Coupland has an entire chapter titled “Our Parents Had More.” And you know what? They did. Education was cheaper, cities were less gentrified and corporations at least put on a show of being loyal to their employees. Many of us aging Gen X-ers work in the gig economy, piecing together several jobs and hoping our potential income isn’t undermined by the post-human, tech-oligarch-enriching promises of A.I. As a result, many of us are now background players in the grand narratives we imagined for ourselves. In the words of the iconic X-er band Pavement, we’ve “been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.”

These circumstances have turned some of us into self-pitying whiners. (Maybe we always have been: Cue Beck whining, “I’m a loser, baby.”) I’ve heard so many X-ers complain incessantly about younger generations. First, millennials, but now Gen Z-ers, are accused of not wanting to do any work, being too sensitive, not wanting to pay their dues. But boomers looked down on us, too, and I’m not sure our failure to remember that can be exclusively explained by the brain cells we killed by disregarding Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, or by the perimenopausal brain fog some of us are experiencing. The younger generations are not lazier; they’re just more skeptical of institutions than we are. They can already see that they may not be better off than our generation. And the fact that they think John Hughes movies are more creepy than cute does not mean that they’re prudes or sensitive little snowflakes.

The inability to accept this may explain why so many Gen X-ers voted for Donald Trump. If they view him as anti-establishment, he validates their need to feel that they’re being subversive. If you see a post that used generative A.I. to make Mr. Trump look like a U.F.C. fighter or Rambo, I’ll bet you a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill that it was made by a Gen X-er. Mr. Trump is more Beavis or Butt-Head than John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt, and that appeals in the sense that he annoys the responsible grown-ups, which X-ers have loved doing since “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” And mostly, he gives them a story that says: Yes, you were lied to, and that’s why your life sucks, dude.