“Is Gen X actually the greatest generation?” The New York Times asks this week.
Betteridge’s law of headlines famously states that “any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with ‘no’.” We know this is going to cause you to rage. Please click and fulminate.
Your current columnist has a wider structural problem with the concept. What is Gen X? Articles written in the mid-1990s imagined a casually employed slacker in a plaid shirt who struggled to engage politically. You know. People like Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Julian Assange or Zadie Smith.
The New York Times goes on to mention cultural markers such as Friends, Pulp Fiction and ER. Hang on. I experienced all those things as a relatively fresh-faced person. Yet, by most reckonings, born in late 1963, I am among the youngest of the baby boomers.
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Those who draw up these generational cohorts expect me to identify culturally with the flower-power era: stuff that happened when I was still not able to cross the road unaided.
I come to praise Amanda Fortini, author of the New York Times piece, not to harangue her. For the first time in print, I see acknowledgment of a petty gripe that has been eating me up for 15 or 20 years. Fortini notes that the age bracket for X usually covers those born between 1965 and 1980, but she acknowledges that “there’s widespread confusion about these parameters”.
She has more. “The consensus, particularly among elder Gen X-ers – the cuspers of 1961 to 1964 … – is that the endpoints were mysteriously revised,” she writes.
“President Obama is arguably the United States’ first president who is a member of Generation X,” Harvard Business Review noted in 2010. Obama was born in 1961. In 2019, Brigid Delaney, writing in the Guardian, argued that Gen X included Boris Johnson, born as late as 1964. All this makes sense. Hooray! We are not boomers. We are X cuspers.
If you see all this as the act of a vain man desperate not to be lumped in the same generational cohort as the members of Black Sabbath, then you would be entirely correct. But the slippage Fortini acknowledges does illustrate how absurdly formalised these once casual classes have become.
If anything, in the mid 1990s, when “Gen X” was coined, people of my age felt themselves neither in that category nor in the older boomer sect. In recent years, commentators have coined the phrase Generation Jones – perhaps for its anonymous mass, perhaps for its sense of yearning – for Obama, Johnson, Madonna, Tom Cruise and me.
We Joneses entered the world between 1954 and 1965. I will take it, but I would be happy to remain uncategorised. Initially, boomers (named for the US baby boom after the second World War) and Gen X (named for an influential Douglas Coupland novel) covered age brackets of 10 or 15 years. The first bought new Beatles records as teenagers. The second bought new Nirvana records as teenagers.
But, as the obsession with age cohorts grew – driven by marketing professionals – each bracket was widened closer to a full two decades.
The revisionism went backwards. Somehow, the phrase “Greatest Generation”, coined to cover those who contributed to the second World War effort, came to mean anyone born between 1901 and 1927. After Gen X came the Millennials, Generation Z and (the Latin alphabet now exhausted) Generation Alpha.
These thoughts were all prompted by the little-heralded fact that we have, apparently, just lived through the first year of a new cohort. The oldest millennials are comfortably into middle age. Bits of Generation Z are fighting for a place on the housing ladder. Alpha is heading to college. McCrindle Research, an Australian consulting agency with form in this area, has decided that those born in 2025 are the youngest members of something called (please try harder) Generation Beta.
[ Generation X: Born at the wrong time, an entire generation struggles to surviveOpens in new window ]
So the world will wait and see what that set becomes? Think again. There is already a wealth of speculation about what the next generation will get up to. “Asia’s Gen Beta population will be smaller but richer,” the World Economic Forum tells us. “Gen Beta will grow up in a constant hum of overlapping crises,” the Future Today Strategy Group tells us. “Forget a stable childhood when wildfires, service disruptions, power outages and climate-forced migration are routine.”
Give them a break. They’re only a few months old. This desperate need to divide society into successive tribes can have no good end. The generalisations are often absurd. As we have seen, the age brackets are constantly unreliable. The online yearning for conflict turns such sociological categories into warring armies. Remember “okay boomer” and the absurd demonisation of millennials?
No generation is the best. None is the worst. We are all great. We are all appalling.
