Generation X is the only generation that seems to escape contempt. Millennials get dragged daily for avocado toast, debt, and therapy memes. Gen Z gets roasted for TikTok dances, for speaking in acronyms no one over 25 understands, for allegedly killing irony and then reviving it in grotesque, twitchy new forms. Boomers are punching bags by default, condemned for hoarding wealth, destroying the climate, and still insisting on phoning instead of texting. But Gen X? The slackers, the latchkey kids, the ones who mainlined MTV like scripture? Somehow they get away clean. Nobody really hates them. Nobody even really argues about them. They are allowed to be the overlooked middle child, except—strangely—people admire them for it.
Part of this is the camouflage they perfected early on. Gen X learned to roll their eyes before they learned to drive. They cultivated irony as a survival strategy, a way of refusing sincerity at the exact moment sincerity was demanded. They could not afford optimism, but they also refused melodrama. The apocalypse was always around the corner, whether nuclear, environmental, or just economic. So they shrugged. They bought flannel shirts. They listened to bands that sang about nothing and everything. They treated adulthood like a scam, but they also accepted that they’d eventually get scammed into it anyway. When you grow up like that, the culture doesn’t know how to punish you later.
The hatred of generations is usually rooted in excess. Boomers are accused of greed, Millennials of entitlement, Gen Z of exhibitionism. Gen X, by contrast, made a virtue of absence. They weren’t too loud, too visible, too needy. They didn’t insist on being history’s protagonists. They even resented being named “Generation X,” a placeholder that was supposed to suggest blankness, and then turned it into a badge of honor. Their rebellion was not in the streets but in the refusal to show up at all. You can’t hate what isn’t there.
This disappearing act is also what makes them mysterious. For those of us who came after, the mythology of Gen X lives in fragments: grainy VHS tapes of music videos, cult films nobody watched until they were reissued as Criterion editions, sarcastic sitcom characters who cared about nothing except their next coffee refill. Gen X seems both defined and indefinable, like a band that never sold out only because they broke up before anyone noticed. They are remembered for not being remembered. Which is a trick that no other generation has managed to pull off.
Still, it would be a mistake to see their absence as passivity. They were the first to grow up in a fully corporatized media landscape, and they learned quickly how to dodge it, hack it, or refuse it altogether. Zines, indie rock, pirate radio, underground film festivals—they were the ones who built the parallel infrastructure of culture that later generations mistook as natural terrain. Even the internet’s early promise of subversion, before it turned into a mall, owes a debt to Gen X’s ethic of DIY detachment. The platforms may not have survived, but the sensibility did.
There’s also the fact that they aged gracefully into disillusionment. Boomers never forgave themselves for growing old, for watching Woodstock turn into Walmart. Millennials carry their thwarted ambitions like open wounds, convinced they were robbed of futures that never existed. Gen Z projects both doom and utopia at once, as if tweeting climate despair will substitute for actual political momentum. Gen X? They simply aged. They got mortgages, raised kids, and kept listening to their favorite bands from 1993 without pretending those bands would save the world. They didn’t demand to be celebrated for doing adulthood, and so, perversely, they earned a kind of respect.
It’s tempting to call them cynical, but that misses the subtlety. Cynicism implies bitterness, an insistence that hope is naïve. Gen X practiced a cooler form of skepticism, one that allowed them to keep going without expecting much. They didn’t declare utopias, but they also didn’t wallow in despair. They invented the shrug that millennials adopted and Gen Z turned into a meme. They knew that failure was baked into the system and acted accordingly. That posture has aged better than the loud proclamations of idealism or catastrophe that define other generations.
Maybe this is why the question of whether Gen X is the “best” generation hovers half-seriously in the air. Of course, the categories are absurd. No generation is monolithic. Every cohort is fractured by class, race, geography, luck. But still, something about Gen X seems enviable. They got analog childhoods and digital adulthoods, which means they remember boredom as a physical condition but can also navigate Spotify without fear. They never expected institutions to save them, which meant they didn’t have to pretend betrayal was shocking. They balanced irony and realism in a way that now feels almost utopian: detached enough to see through the bullshit, committed enough to survive it.
For those of us who came later, Gen X looks like a vanishing point: the last kids who could disappear for hours without being tracked, the last young adults who could afford rent in major cities while working part-time, the last middle-aged people who didn’t turn parenthood into a branding exercise. They occupy a liminal space, caught between the analog past and the digital future, but they managed to take the best of both without drowning in either. The mystery is not that no one hates them. The mystery is that, in retrospect, they might have actually pulled it off.
Maybe that’s the real reason admiration sneaks in. In a culture obsessed with visibility, Gen X proved that invisibility can be a kind of power. They weren’t the loudest, the richest, or the most revolutionary. They were the ones who figured out how to slip through, how to hold their skepticism without collapsing into nihilism, how to live without demanding that history name a holiday after them. Every other generation is haunted by its failures. Gen X just kept going. And if that’s not success, then maybe we need a new definition of it.