03-05-2025
Hear Me Out: What If Gen Xers Are Actually the Cool Ones?
I am nine years old and my mother—in her mid-20s at the time—is vacuuming the living room while 'My Favourite Game' by the Cardigans plays on full blast. With each drum thwack she hits another corner with the power nozzle, bare feet padding across the carpet in low-rise jeans, me watching deadpan from the sofa. I will always associate that song with this memory. Sunlight splashing through the open window; those distorted vocals, turned up to full; and the big, blocky CD player, with speakers that make your hands shake if you touch them.
Though I was born in the '90s—a millennial—I was raised by a dyed-in-the-wool Gen Xer, and was therefore spoonfed Gen-X culture from an early age. Our CD rack was full of '90s bands: Pixies, PJ Harvey, Placebo. The films I later became obsessed with were all of this era: Girl, Interrupted; Fallen Angels; Run Lola Run; Hackers. By the time I got into Bret Easton Ellis, Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, and Irvine Welsh—all Gen-X writers, with Gen-X sensibilities—something had become abundantly clear. I had been born 15 years or so too late. And now I was destined for a life of Instagram and Asos packages, as opposed to being a '90s slacker making mixtapes and hating on my corporate job.
Over the past few years, generational warfare has only ramped up—so much so that it's become boring to even reference: Gen Z hating on millennials for being cringe, millennials hating on Gen Z for being puritanical, and everyone hating on boomers for being, well, boomers. But Gen X—born somewhere between 1965 and 1980—has been largely forgotten about (although even saying that has become a cliché of sorts). Alongside all of this finger-pointing among the generations are claims that, actually, we were the cool ones—no, it was me! But what if it's none of us? What if the cool ones are actually those unbothered people that nobody talks about?
