It isn’t really the character traits I’m criticizing though. I share some of them. For context I’ve been getting a lot of “you know you’re gen x” memes in my social media feed and couldn’t help but notice quite a lot of chuddy comments with no push back at all. So, yea, the commenter sample is biased to people who identify with the term “gen x” rather than all people in that age bracket. It just got me bummed. Like how can you watch things get worse and worse in terms of inequality as you age and become MORE conservative. It was the exact opposite for me so I just don’t get it.

It's frustrating. They say good things when they are removed from power. He sounds like a good person, but he was not a good president. Obama will probably gradually come around to this kind of talk when he gets older too. He recently all but admitted middle class decline due to concentration of wealth was responsible for the rise of MAGA. Don't know if he will ever admit that drone "assassinations" he was in charge of were war crimes (assassinations in quotes because more than half the time the intelligence wasn't even correct).

It's sad that they only say the truth after they are far removed from power.

The boundaries are all rather arbitrary, but there is a grain of truth to some of the analysis.

Elon Musk probably is more representative these days though, sadly. I'm an older Xennial (born 1980) and I can tell you Gen X mostly sucks. At least Gen X Burgers suck. The good ones seemed to have all died. So many chuds now. I mean, they are different from boomer chuds in that they aren't quite as high on American Exceptionalism. They also made weed legal most places. That's about it though.

They have that famous morose cynicism, but it all got conveniently steered into reactionary rugged individualism. They have that "I am a lone wolf, I go my own way" attitude, but because they can't think outside the current atomized box, they focus their skepticism and distrust on "government". Covid completely melted their brain too. The anti-mask shit was very Gen X driven. They like the idea of "being a rebel" but because their thinking is so individualistic, it is impossible for them to even consider the kind of collective rebellion needed to threaten the actual levers of power in our society. Instead they protest stupid shit like mask mandates. The Capitalist Realism runs so deep and fits right in with their cynicism and apathy.

So yea, fuck Gen X. People born before 1980 are mostly a lost cause. So they supposedly had a hard childhood, but its the people born after 1980 that suffered more economically because they didn't have time to get their careers established before the dot com crash of 2000 and the 2008 housing/financial crash.