Neil Howe's view of GenXers

What do you think?

(Looking at Zoomers, Millennials, GenXers, and Boomers in four posts.)

What are your perceptions of America’s Generation X? In his July book The Fourth Turning Is Here, Neil Howe, arguably the world’s leading generational expert, offers us a range of observations about Xers. What do you think?

We Xers were born from 1961 to 1981. In 2023, 85 million Americans are Xers age 42 to 62. In 2033, there will be 84 million Xers age 52 to 72. And in 2056, there will be 47 million age 75 to 95.

Perceptive, pragmatic, and savvy, we Xers have excelled at self-sufficiency, resilience, keen survival instincts, initiative, daring, and bottom-line results.  We were the neglected “latchkey” kids of the 1970s – that “slum of a decade” as John Updike called it, including runaway divorce among Folk-Generation parents that devastated young Xers. 

And so we learned to rely on ourselves and we ended with our stance of skepticism and Punk and Grunge alienation. You can see it even now in our comedians.  “This generation’s most celebrated humorists,” Howe observes, “(from Conan O’Brien and Tina Fey to Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Dave Chapelle) come across as rough-edged and grumpy, full of snark and vitriol.” 

On the positive side, we became a generation of tech-savvy MBAs who used digital technologies to boost workplace productivity and revolutionize the world economy.  As Howe notes, Dell, Andreesen, Page, Brin, Bezos, Thiel, and Musk are all Xers.

In 2023, we are almost perfectly aligned as the midlife generation.  We’re gritty – having been knocked down by the Great Recession and then the pandemic – and we’re paying off debt and saving up, even as one in ten of us relies entirely on gig work and half of us say of our retirement we’ll “just figure it out when we get there”.

In midlife, we Xers are trying to tune out what doesn’t matter and focus on the tasks and relationships that really do.  And many of us are, usually for the first time, assuming responsibilities in our communities.

Most of all, we Xers are super-protective parents – always there, always knowing where our child is, always looking out for danger.  We’re still burning about being neglected in the Seventies and Eighties, and we’re obsessively determined to give our kids hands-on care.

GenXers and the Future

In the crises of the next couple decades, America and the world will need tough, gritty, resilient, gutsy leaders and managers.  And whaddya know?  Here we are.

Howe observes that we Xers will bring to crises our quick thinking on the fly and outside the box, our deft timing, and our tactical creativity.  We will be daring and unfazed by risks as we move from problem to problem and come up with solutions that work. 

We may have spent our youth wandering alone in a land without boundaries, rules, or structure.  But in large part because of this experience, Howe sees us excelling as midlife crisis leaders and managers. 

In the darkest of our society’s trials, at the fulcrum between tragedy and triumph, with everything at stake, we Xers may well anchor and ultimately save civilization – or at least the Republic – as we safeguard Millennials and Zoomers and secure a better future for them.

In good times, we’ll stop arguing about values, calm society down, and get the job done.  We’ll focus on getting things working – especially securing the peace and raising wages.  And we’ll set aside our differences with Millennials to build a workable civic order.

From now on, as midlifers and then as elders, we Xers will invest more and more time in mentoring the young in our communities.  Millennials and Zoomers may find us too risk-averse, too cautious, as we age, but we’ll teach them a few hard-scrabble lessons and the value of ice-cold realism.

What have you observed about GenXers? What do you think?