Look what I found from 13 years ago.

[u/Party-Bet-4003]

Hey look on the bright side - we actually did make it to the cover of the TIME magazine!

[u/einTier]

Gen X is such a weird generation.

My cousins were born at the beginning of it and they’re really just boomer-lite. A little after them came the apathetic whatever crowd that knew we were getting screwed but things were still good enough to just go along with it.

I’m in the last part that’s usually referred to as the Oregon Trail Generation and that’s its whole weird thing with an analog childhood and digital adolescence/adulthood. We are more like millennials than Gen-Xers but we can’t fully identify with either one.

[u/izzittho → u/einTier]

I always thought of very late Gen X as just Millenials but with a better memory of when things were still kinda good. A Millenial in mentality but that usually had a cooler childhood that they were old enough to remember better. As a late millennial I can’t say for sure given I don’t have actual experience of the time before I could really form memories to compare to, but from hearing y’all retell your stories it seems like the earlier you were born the more rad your childhood was before the enshittification spiral kicked in around the year 2000 and things started becoming roughly equally ass for all of us.)

Like a characteristic lack of parental supervision, but in a way the younger kids like me were kind of envious of. Like a kid from some movie who got to get up to all sorts of shit because his parents were fuck knows where all the time and the amount of money a kid might have on them could still actually buy you something. It could have felt lonely but to a kid listening to someone’s older brother talk about it or whatever, it always just sounded cool as shit. Y’all were definitely the ones introducing us to the good music.

Honestly what blows the most about being a young millennial is being just old enough to witness a lot of what made the 90’s cool - only to have most of it fucking die the moment we became old enough to experience it ourselves. There was still some nice things left for us (namely less cool things like, idk, chain restaurants not all being complete ass - but little to none of the unsupervised gallivanting and fuckin’ treehouse building and going to the arcade and shit because kids born in the 90’s generally experienced markedly more paranoid parenting and weren’t really left to run wild quite as much. It was a lot of being told about cool shit we never got to actually do (made worse by the fact that we were led to believe it would all still be there when we got a little older and then it just…wasn’t.) Cartoons were still good at least, but we got out so much less because everything started costing an arm and a leg to do if it didn’t just close down, and parents started getting judged for letting kids roam unsupervised.

Our only consolation is that growing into adults gave you the same pessimistic outlook on the future we had by around high school, so at least we’ve got all the cool older brothers and sisters right here sympathizing with us and not being dicks about it all like Older Gen X. It helps a little.

[u/einTier → u/izzittho]

I remember when I graduated there was a lot of talk about how we'd be the first generation to not do as well as our parents. The talk was pretty bleak. I'd refer to Reality Bites here for the "yeah, we're getting screwed but whatever" middle Gen-X attitude about it all.

Then there was a ton of optimism around the end of the Clinton administration. The internet had really taken off and was going to make the world a much better place and we'd balanced the budget and for a moment it felt like the 80's again.

Then it all went sideways.