An Ode to Gen X

Some Appreciation for the Generation That Never Expects It

(I wasn’t really planning on a follow up to my Boomer article, but that last one got me thinking. And you know how that goes...)

There’s this idea floating around that every generation thinks it’s the best. Boomers definitely believed it. Millennials joke about it. Gen Z memes about it. But here’s the thing nobody really says out loud: the one post WWII generation that actually earned the right to brag a little, never really brings it up.

Generation X.

Yeah. Fuck it. I said it.

We didn’t grow up with fireworks and slogans about how special we were. We grew up with neglect, recession, and the low background hum of “figure it out yourself.” We were the free-range latchkey kids, the forgotten middle children wedged between two demographic giants. Our parents were divorcing, our schools were underfunded, and the adults in charge were too busy chasing their own dreams to bother with any of ours.

But we persevered.

We learned early how to survive. How to adapt. How to carry ourselves. How to drink out of the backyard garden hose. And how to stop expecting the world to give us anything.

We came of age during a plague. A real one. AIDS didn’t just change the world. It shaped our adolescence. It stole friends from us in our teens and twenties. It turned intimacy into fear. It showed us a level of government apathy and societal backlash that should’ve been unthinkable. It forced us to grow up before we even understood what adulthood was. And it sparked a kind of compassion and toughness that ended up defining who we became and who we still are.

And while all that was happening, we were also bridging the most disruptive technological shift in human history. We’ll soon be the last people on Earth who remember what life felt like before the internet, and were the first people to build what came after. Boomers didn’t make the modern digital world. Millennials didn’t code the backbone of it. Gen X did. We learned computers before Google existed, back when “try turning it off and on again” was a mystical chant, not a meme. We wrestled with dial-up, drivers, frozen DOS screens, hardware that felt held together with stubbornness and hope. And that fuckin shit show known as AOL. We built websites, forums, video games, and the early architecture of what became the “information super-highway”, or whatever the hell we’re calling it these days.

We didn’t do it to change the world. We did it because someone had to.

That’s the Gen X way. No fanfare, no sermons, no crying for credit. Just figure it out, do the work, and shrug when no one notices.

The Greatest Generation (and they truly were) saw that in us. They recognized the grit. They recognized the quiet capability. They didn’t respect many people, but they respected strength and humility. Gen X had both. And in some ways, we resemble them more than we resemble anyone who came after.

Boomers didn’t like us much. We didn’t worship their counterculture myths or validate their need for constant attention. We weren’t impressed by their “we changed everything” narrative. We saw the wreckage they left behind. And we paid the price for it.

Millennials and Gen Z, on the other hand, depend on us. They depend on the world we quietly built. They depend on the tech we assembled in the dark, on the infrastructure we created, on the cultural groundwork we laid. And we help them because we remember what it was like to be ignored when you needed someone to show the way.

We’re also the one generation that didn’t distort society around ourselves. We never got big enough. And thank God for that. We’ll never be the political wrecking ball Boomers were, (and in many ways still are), and we’ll never have the cultural fragility of younger generations. We’re too small, too grounded, too self-reliant to try reshaping the world in our own image (shit, would we even really want to?).

And somehow, weirdly, it makes us the generation best positioned for the future. We retire after the Boomer bulge passes. We’re supported by massive cohorts beneath us. We’ll have a more balanced dependency ratio, better healthcare capacity, and a system already stress-tested by the demographic tsunami just ahead of us. Gen X is the one generation that stands to have a surprisingly comfortable retirement.

We earned that, too.

The truth is, Gen X is the only generation that fully understands both the world that was and the world that is. We lived both realities, mastered both, and built the bridge between them. We survived chaos, disease, neglect, recessions, parental absence, cultural uprooting, and the most challenging technological transition in history.

And we did it without demanding applause. Without demanding monuments. Without demanding anyone rewrite history to make us look good.

We just kept going. We kept things running. We kept the lights on while everyone else had meltdowns. And now, on the far side of it all, we’re the ones with our feet on solid ground.

Maybe that’s why we don’t brag about being the “best” generation. We don’t need to. And most of us wouldn’t ever give it much thought. It’s a stupid notion anyway.

Cuz that’s just who we are.