Generation X’s poisoned chalice

Can a bunch of irony-drenched, unassuming cynics oversee the Singularity?

I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1932

This reminds me of how at a partnership I used to work for, as soon as the last Boomer made full partner, they IPO’d the company and capitalized all the future returns for themselves. Future generations would never get the opportunity previous ones had. Or think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back.

As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become over-optimized around a single person (or generation), no matter how talented, in ways that sacrifices the long-term trajectory of the institution or future generations.

Part of leaving a place better than when you found it means making sure its future stewards have the same or better opportunities than you had. Our failure to do that in America writ large - or at least the widespread feeling that we’ve failed - is why so many people think the American Dream is dead.
Aaron M. Renn, 12/5/26

I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.
Hannah Horvath/Lena Dunham, Girls, 15/4/2012

Something that has long been unthinkable in Anglosphere politics occurred in Australia a few days ago. The governing party – the centre-left Australian Labor Party – put a thumb on the scale for post-Boomer generations. Or more precisely, took a heavy thumb off the scale for the luckiest generation in history.

I won’t bore you with details of Australia’s new tax arrangements, but I will note a telling lacuna in the ‘This is generational war!’ media coverage and public debate about them. Many pundits have pointed out that the new tax regime is designed to benefit the under-45s by redistributing Boomer wealth to them.

(Australians aged 65 and over make up about 17.5 per cent of the population, but households headed by someone aged 65 or older hold A$6 trillion, or over 32 per cent, of Australia’s household wealth.)

If you were consuming Australian media in the last couple of days, you might have assumed there were only two generational groupings – the (affluent and widely resented) Boomers and the (less affluent, more aggrieved) under-45s. Not for the first time, everyone appears to have forgotten about the neglected middle child of the post-war generations.

Those born between 1965 and 1980, who are now aged 46 to 61.

Gen X Studies 101
Before exploring why Gen X may soon be playing more of a society-shaping role, we need to examine the five extant generations – the Silent Generation, the Boomers, Xers, Yers and Zers. (There’s also Generation Alpha, but they’re currently all children.)

They never got much appreciation for it, but the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945) created the post-WWII order that delivered so much peace and prosperity to the Boomers. For economic and geopolitical reasons, the Silent Generation was a small cohort and, given its hardscrabble ‘lived experience’, inclined towards civic-minded stoicism. As a rule of thumb, the older Silents created the Boomers, while the younger Silents birthed Gen X.

The Boomer hegemony of the last half-century being what it is, there’s little need for me to recount how the Boomers prospered in the decades following WWII.

But around the time Gen Xers began entering the workforce, Anglosphere societies became less prosperous as the 1970s degenerated into stagflation and bitter industrial conflict. Then they became less egalitarian as many of the same PMC Boomers who spent their youth campaigning for greater equality morphed into Reaganite/Thatcherite tax hawks. (I’ve always thought Jerry Rubin, co-founder of the Yippies turned stockbroker, was the quintessential Boomer.)

The neoliberal turn meant Gen Xers encountered a different labour market to that of their parents and grandparents. One that offered ever-greater rewards to an ever-shrinking proportion of the population. One in which Capital was able to remove pricing power from Labour by simultaneously outsourcing jobs to developing nations while insourcing cheap labour from them.

That’s just the economic side of things. Along with more economic liberalism came more social liberalism. Gen Xers were supportive of greater social liberalism up to a point. Many felt that point was reached sometime around 2012-2014, when largely Gen Y/Millennial activists unleashed the Woke Cultural Revolution.

Many of the controversies of the woke era involved twentysomething and thirtysomething progressives facing off against fortysomething and fiftysomething old-school left-liberals. An argument could be made that 2020 was the Millennials’ 1968, with Gen Xers thrust into the role of Mayor Daley.

Prince Charles Syndrome
Whatever other legitimate grievances they have, Generations Y and Z have only spent, at most, 45 years being cockblocked by the Boomers. Older Xers have now spent six decades waiting for their turn to ascend to the top of the greasy pole.

The analogy is a little off the mark given it involves a Silent and her Boomer son, but Gen X has had Prince Charles Syndrome since it reached adulthood. And while Boomer hegemony is now waning, it remains powerful. Both of the world’s superpowers are led by Boomers, as are Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel and Russia. The Boomers have proven reluctant to pass on the torch and Anglosphere societies have become increasingly gerontocratic as a result.

Having been overlooked all their lives, many Gen Xers feared that when the time did come for a transfer of power, the Boomers would be bequeathing their corner offices to their equally self-assured progeny, the Millennials. If J.D. Vance, or one of Trump’s children, succeeds Trump, such a Gen-X-skipping changing of the guard will take place following the next US presidential election.

When I interviewed Gen X author John Birmingham about this almost two decades ago, he wearily sighed:

X will never be in control. Those boomers will hang on till their dying breath. And then Y will sweep in at the funeral looking for the keys to the house and the car. When I raise these issues in my blog writing, the X-ers who comment all do so with deeply bitter black humour. We tend to think of ourselves standing mute in front of history’s big black tsunami; there’s a sense of pointlessness to organised political activity that stops us from getting too worked up. We’re tired. We’ve been tired from the age of 17.

I’ve long assumed Birmingham’s bleak prediction would be fulfilled. But changing economic, political and technological conditions now lead me to wonder if Gen X’s moment has arrived.

A little earlier than it did for Charles, who was in his mid-70s when he ascended to the throne.

Gen X’s second act. Or maybe its first
It’s not like Xers have been entirely bereft of influence. While technically making the cut-off to be Boomers, Barack Obama, Anthony Albanese, Sanae Takaichi and Keir Starmer are culturally Gen X. Argentina, Canada, Finland, France, Greece, New Zealand, Spain and Ukraine are led by Gen Xers. If J.D. or Don Jr. doesn’t succeed Trump, a Gen Xer – possibly Kamala (once again, technically a Boomer but effectively a Xer) – might.

The digital world that’s subsuming the old meatspace version was also largely built by Gen Xers – Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Travis Kalanick, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, Larry Page, Sundar Pichai, Peter Thiel and Susan Wojcicki.

Gen X was also the driving force behind grunge, alt rock, hip-hop, rave-techno-electronic music, indie film, several classic TV shows (The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Office), video games, early internet culture and DIY publishing.

Mid-to-late-career Gen Xers are now overrepresented among the ranks of business owners, CEOs, judges, journalists, religious leaders, union bosses, university vice-chancellors/presidents and so on.

But at the risk of repeating myself, Gen Xers have spent their lives in the long shadow of the Boomers. They never challenged what might be labelled the ‘Boomer settlement’.

However, the Boomers are now on the way out. The potent mix of economic and social hyperliberalism that worked out well for them has been less agreeable to succeeding generations. Plus, we are in the foothills of the Singularity, the most momentous development in the course of human history.

A generation of Cincinnatuses?
For two and a half millennia, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus has been held up as the exemplar of the reluctant but self-sacrificing leader. Cincinnatus was a Roman general who, as the story goes, grew weary of the burdens of high office and retired to his farm, metaphorically beating his sword into a ploughshare.

Then Rome gets into trouble, Cincinnatus is appointed dictator, saves the Roman republic and – get this – gladly surrenders the emergency powers he’s been given and returns to his farm. (Maximus in Gladiator is loosely based on Cincinnatus.)

Once again, this is an inexact analogy in that Gen X hasn’t yet fought any great battles. It was raised in the shadow of two World Wars, but has lived in a world largely at peace. In stark contrast to the ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty/Hope I die before I get old’ Boomers, Xers never even went into Oedipal battle against the older generation and remade society in their image. As Birmingham observed, Xers embraced a cynical, moderately anti-authoritarian worldview while remaining quiescent in the face of history’s big black tsunami, having concluded that resistance was futile.

But Gen X’s moment may just have come.

The data suggests we are now at an inflection point. Human labour is being automated away, institutions are being drained of the last of their legitimacy, the postwar liberal order is disintegrating, and politics is entering one of its “now is the time of monsters” phases.

And Xers are the ones in the driver’s seat. Or at least they will be once the few remaining Boomers are escorted off the premises.

Like Cincinnatus, a generation that mostly wanted to hunker down and be left alone may soon find itself summoned from the farm.