We’re still here. We’re the latchkey kids even on the internet. We show up, pop a TV dinner in the microwave and watch the boomers and everyone after us fight. We remember the “good old days” of MS DOS, C64s and get cranky at having to fix both our parent’s electronics as well as our kids stuff; because ot seems most anyone after the advent of the iphone tends to be clueless about tech and would rather take a selfie than learn how to assemble today’s dead-simple PC components.

We’re the last group that had a shot at getting the cheese in the laid-out easy maze of graduating college with a degree and walking into a place we wanted to work and dropping off a paper resumee.

We’ve also been at the tail end of seeing things disappear. Pensions. Affordable health care. Affordable education. Realistic retirement. Company loyalty. Etc. so we’re caught between everything the boomers had and the generations after don’t. We’re a transitional group between rotary dial phones and the modern internet.

Nobody knows what to do with us. Not even ourselves.

So we get forgotten.

Because "whatever" is and always has been our mantra.

To Millennials and Z, Gen-X is indistinguishable from Boomers - it's all 'old people,' where old is anyone over 45.

Because we were never able to make a dent in boomer tyranny. they just disregarded us, and continue to disregard us, they couldn’t even name our generation so they just filed us under “X”. they never stepped aside to let us run anything. They won’t step aside for you either. they’ll never, in a million years, relinquish power. they’ll die first. literally. meanwhile younger generations lump us in with them, when we’ve been fighting boomers longer than anyone. I admire Millenials for their ability to seriously piss off boomers. I wish we’d been able to piss them off half as much as you guys do. but they ignore us completely unless we submit, stroke off capitalism, and bring it to a screaming orgasm.

We're the generation that I think first saw shit going sideways, said something about it, got ignored then sidelined then went quiet and now get blamed by younger generations as part of the problem.

Because these arbitrary generation groups popularized by media are bullshit.

Gen x blends in with the millennial crowd or the boomer crowd. That's pretty much it.

Most of them get mislabeled as either.

Invisibility is the defining characteristic of Generation X.

When Douglas Coupland popularized the term in his novel of the same name, that was an awful lot of the point. Generation X was the generation that just sort of fell through the cracks, lost in the shadow of the baby boomers.

Over the years, we've just adapted to it, and really, at this point, it's sort of nice to be forgotten. We can just sit on the sidelines, munching on popcorn, offering up a bit of snidely cynical commentary and reminiscing about great music, great times and great hair.

We're quite happy munching popcorn on the sidelines. Please don't draw attention to us.

Shhhhhh....

don't tell anyone! we like being forgotten in the generational online wars.

Were all too busy running the actual internet

There's plenty of us here but we're not as noticeable. We're old enough that we've learned to stop incessantly complaining about shit that doesn't matter yet not so old that all we do is incessantly complain about shit that doesn't matter.

Circle of life.

I'm an older X. Another ten years and I'll be on my porch yelling "get off my lawn" and "not in my backyard", carrying on the tradition laid out by my forefathers.

Is Gen X invisible on the internet though?

It's a big place, maybe we just go to different places. I mean, I'm a late Xer (44) and I've been using the internet more or less every day since 1996, including some social media and especially Reddit/Lemmy.

I rarely use most social media now (stopped using FB in 2015, stopped using Instagram a few years ago, stopped using Twitter when it became X), except for work, but I hang out here and on a couple of old-style forums (sports), and mostly I read the news and sport, watch videos that I find interesting, and so on.

However if, by the internet you mean things like TikTok, then nah, it's not my thing. I've no problem with it (other than general issues with the Chinese government) but I don't bother with it, nor complain about it.

And I think that's fine, we don't all have to be in all the same places all the time - it's good to interact between perceived generational boundaries (one of the best things about the Reddit/Lemmy model IMO), but it's also good to have areas which are more concentrated with one group or another. It's healthy and natural I think.

I also think that while the people who are fucking up the world are often Boomers, it's important not to invert that and castigate all Boomers as if they are all the same. Plenty of them are as progressive, patient, open-minded, or whatever, as those of us in the younger generations.

And plenty of those in X, Y, Z, etc are bigoted, ignorant and/or hateful in the way Boomers are painted.

It's the classic "everyone older than me is a boomer, everyone younger than me is a zoomer" mentality.

We're using the internet the way we always have. It was non-interactive when we started.

Because (Gen) X gonna give it to ya.

Gen X writers were the people writing the Boomers vs Millennials culture war "journalism"

Obviously nothing could be their fault, including people forgetting about them as they make everyone focus on everyone else.

Millennials were still in grade school when the internet really took hold in a big way. Intelligent people can learn at any age. As a Millennial, I was trying to find AOL online free trial disks to chat with school friends over dial up, staying up late at night talking to my first GF, had a GeoCities page, downloaded bad music over Napster, and was on the first big wave on MySpace. This was my life in highschool, and when all these things really got started. We were the first kids to make the internet ours. Even if we didn't all have computers at home with internet. Schools had computer labs set up almost like old internet cafes. There was a big push to get kids access to the Internet. I spent a lot of time in those labs. I think it is that democratized access combined with the culture that only exists in grade school that really defines us at this kind of cultural level. Gen X was just too early for the real mainstream public internet. Most people didn't even have a cell phone until I was just out of highschool. I still remember when I was really young, my folks had pagers for work. Pagers would have been cutting edge tech for Gen X in grade school. Few people really adopt new tech stuff outside of a competitive social environment. You'll never have another time in your adult life where you are exposed to so many people, like in grade school, and when you are generalists open to new things and experiences like you are at a young age.

I feel like it’s easy here and on Reddit to just assume most people are in their teens, 20’s, maybe 30’s but I’m always surprised at how many 40-60 year olds are around. I’m 43 and pretty near the border where x turns y… There are a ton of us.

And many of us are busy because we are going to softball games, moving kids off to college…I have no time for anything but my kids’ sports.

Anything older than Gen Z tends to be referred to as being a boomer. Including Gen Y. I think Gen Y has the most control over the internet so this group gets brought up frequently.

I'm curious to see when Gen Alpha will start showing up. Where are those little guys?

Invisible? I'm here dawg. Been here since the early days.

The truth is though. Someone once said that we are in reality either Young boomers or old Gen X and looking at the people in my age group it kind of fits. Sadly, I'm surrounded by the young boomer types.

Aren’t they colloquially the forgotten generation anyways?

I think it simply comes down to older = boomer (that slang is staying on the internet well after boomers die out) and younger = millineal

They’re probably busy raising kids

Every gen Xer I know IRL is barely older than me, so it's easy to lump them in with my generation (millennial) since I generally think more about the people I actually know, than then actual years the generation is from.

Because they learned to keep their mouths shut at an early age and retained that wisdom throughout life.

Honestly, a lot of people use Boomers when they mean Gen X.

Uhhh...4chan? We were and to a lesser degree still around and wreaking havoc from time to time.

I mean, we did make suicide fashionable 😅