Shazaam! I’m GenX!

I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as GenX for most of my life. Then in the early 90’s GenX was all over the media. I thought GenX referred to the kids in high school. But then in 1996 I read (being already 30 years old),

“As it is most commonly understood today, Generation X refers to what can be called a ‘lost’ segment of America’s youth too young to remember the assassination of President Kennedy and too old to have missed the end of disco. Having watched our immediate elders transform from hippies to Yuppies to New Agers to landowners, we get the feeling we are living in the wake of the postwar baby boom and bearing the economic and cultural burden of a society run on financial credit and social debit. Following the massive ‘boomer’ population, a huge lump in the snake’s digestive tract called American history, we, the self-named baby ‘busters’ have learned to call this intestinal vacuum home.

We did not ask to be encumbered with this legacy, but we have chosen to make the best of it. …”

I said, “That’s me!” It was in a book called The GenX Reader by Douglas Rushkoff. I think I only read that one page and maybe a couple more. I didn’t have to read any more. It was an epiphany, “Shazaam! I’m GenX!”