We’re still here. We’re the latchkey kids even on the internet. We show up, pop a TV dinner in the microwave and watch the boomers and everyone after us fight. We remember the “good old days” of MS DOS, C64s and get cranky at having to fix both our parent’s electronics as well as our kids stuff; because ot seems most anyone after the advent of the iphone tends to be clueless about tech and would rather take a selfie than learn how to assemble today’s dead-simple PC components.
We’re the last group that had a shot at getting the cheese in the laid-out easy maze of graduating college with a degree and walking into a place we wanted to work and dropping off a paper resumee.
We’ve also been at the tail end of seeing things disappear. Pensions. Affordable health care. Affordable education. Realistic retirement. Company loyalty. Etc. so we’re caught between everything the boomers had and the generations after don’t. We’re a transitional group between rotary dial phones and the modern internet.
Nobody knows what to do with us. Not even ourselves.
So we get forgotten.
I throw the “ok boomer” back at my teen kids when I’m sorting out tech problems for them, just like I do for my actual boomer parents 😆
Hah. Mine aren’t old enough yet to get the connotation.
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To Millennials and Z, Gen-X is indistinguishable from Boomers - it’s all ‘old people,’ where old is anyone over 45.
I definitely don’t see gen X as anywhere close to boomers. Especially on the Internet. Gen X is much more technically literate than their predecessors.
Side note: writing the vague generalized names for entire generations makes me want to vomit. Although the majority of boomers definitely do seem to adhere to the “I got mine fuck you and yours” mentality that completely disregards the context that different generations live and grow up in, there were awesome boomers who were anti war, anti capitalist, and down with free love and expression. Just like on the flip side there are shitty right wing millennials and even gen Zers now out there trolling and even believing the vile shit that gets spewed onto social media.
To Gen Z, millennials are boomers. I’ve been called one a lot in online games and social interactions (especially vrchat).
That’s a pretty general brush to paint millenials with, considering we are pushing 40 or a couple years in to our 40’s already.
This makes me sad. But its probably true.
As a millennial I find genx cool. Probably a lot of that is because of the music
Because we were never able to make a dent in boomer tyranny. they just disregarded us, and continue to disregard us, they couldn’t even name our generation so they just filed us under “X”. they never stepped aside to let us run anything. They won’t step aside for you either. they’ll never, in a million years, relinquish power. they’ll die first. literally. meanwhile younger generations lump us in with them, when we’ve been fighting boomers longer than anyone. I admire Millenials for their ability to seriously piss off boomers. I wish we’d been able to piss them off half as much as you guys do. but they ignore us completely unless we submit, stroke off capitalism, and bring it to a screaming orgasm.
this kind of black and white, defeatist logic is the problem not the generational bullshit
Yes it’s totally defeatist to talk about things in the past that happened and acknowledge things that are presently happening. I didn’t say no one would beat them, I said that they will never relinquish power. Two very different concepts.
Because “whatever” is and always has been our mantra.
Whatever
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Shhhhhh…
don’t tell anyone! we like being forgotten in the generational online wars.
Were all too busy running the actual internet
Every other generation gets sort of skipped. Silents, Gen-X. It will happen to Gen-Z as well, they’ll forever be overshadowed by the Millennials. They get talked about at the moment because they are the current generation coming of age, but they’ll be forgotten just like Gen-X was in a decade when there is another cohort coming of age.
Is Gen X invisible on the internet though?
It’s a big place, maybe we just go to different places. I mean, I’m a late Xer (44) and I’ve been using the internet more or less every day since 1996, including some social media and especially Reddit/Lemmy.
I rarely use most social media now (stopped using FB in 2015, stopped using Instagram a few years ago, stopped using Twitter when it became X), except for work, but I hang out here and on a couple of old-style forums (sports), and mostly I read the news and sport, watch videos that I find interesting, and so on.
However if, by the internet you mean things like TikTok, then nah, it’s not my thing. I’ve no problem with it (other than general issues with the Chinese government) but I don’t bother with it, nor complain about it.
And I think that’s fine, we don’t all have to be in all the same places all the time - it’s good to interact between perceived generational boundaries (one of the best things about the Reddit/Lemmy model IMO), but it’s also good to have areas which are more concentrated with one group or another. It’s healthy and natural I think.
I also think that while the people who are fucking up the world are often Boomers, it’s important not to invert that and castigate all Boomers as if they are all the same. Plenty of them are as progressive, patient, open-minded, or whatever, as those of us in the younger generations.
And plenty of those in X, Y, Z, etc are bigoted, ignorant and/or hateful in the way Boomers are painted.
We’re using the internet the way we always have. It was non-interactive when we started.
Because (Gen) X gonna give it to ya.
Millennials were still in grade school when the internet really took hold in a big way. Intelligent people can learn at any age. As a Millennial, I was trying to find AOL online free trial disks to chat with school friends over dial up, staying up late at night talking to my first GF, had a GeoCities page, downloaded bad music over Napster, and was on the first big wave on MySpace. This was my life in highschool, and when all these things really got started. We were the first kids to make the internet ours. Even if we didn’t all have computers at home with internet. Schools had computer labs set up almost like old internet cafes. There was a big push to get kids access to the Internet. I spent a lot of time in those labs. I think it is that democratized access combined with the culture that only exists in grade school that really defines us at this kind of cultural level. Gen X was just too early for the real mainstream public internet. Most people didn’t even have a cell phone until I was just out of highschool. I still remember when I was really young, my folks had pagers for work. Pagers would have been cutting edge tech for Gen X in grade school. Few people really adopt new tech stuff outside of a competitive social environment. You’ll never have another time in your adult life where you are exposed to so many people, like in grade school, and when you are generalists open to new things and experiences like you are at a young age.
I feel like it’s easy here and on Reddit to just assume most people are in their teens, 20’s, maybe 30’s but I’m always surprised at how many 40-60 year olds are around. I’m 43 and pretty near the border where x turns y… There are a ton of us.
And many of us are busy because we are going to softball games, moving kids off to college…I have no time for anything but my kids’ sports.
It’s the classic “everyone older than me is a boomer, everyone younger than me is a zoomer” mentality.
They’re probably busy raising kids
Invisible? I’m here dawg. Been here since the early days.
The truth is though. Someone once said that we are in reality either Young boomers or old Gen X and looking at the people in my age group it kind of fits. Sadly, I’m surrounded by the young boomer types.
