THE RENAISSANCE OF GEN X

Stuck between "greedy" boomers and "narcissistic" gen Y millennials, you'll find gen X - also known as the forgotten generation. According to writer and fellow gen Xer Alexandra Carlton, these silent "slackers" are sick of being the invisible middle child in the mix

- Alexandra Carlton

What springs to mind when you think about generation X?" I ask my hairdresser, who is in her mid-thirties. She puts down her scissors and squints at me in the mirror. "I'm gen X," I prompt. Her brow furrows further. "I mean, I feel like I don't really have any thoughts about your generation," she finally admits. "You guys just sort of chug along and don't harm anyone, do you? You're not hoarding all the houses and wealth like the boomers and you're not jumping up and down and loudly demanding stuff like gen Y. Yeah, no. You seem really nice, I guess, but other than that, I don't really know what you are."

"I don't really know what you are" could easily be the generational tagline of those of us born between 1965 and 1980, the small, low-key, don't-mind-us generation X. Australia's 2021 census showed that we're not only metaphorically unseen, we're also literally quite tiny, only a small blip of the population compared with other generations: there's just 4.9 million of us compared with boomers and millennials who number almost 5.5 million each.

We were the latchkey kids, mostly left to raise ourselves as our "me generation" baby boomer parents - the first gen where both parents likely worked - yukked it up in the wealth-grubbing 1980s. In the 1990s, when we were in our teens and 20s, they called us the "slacker generation" for reasons that aren't entirely clear possibly because we shrouded ourselves in flannelette shirts and floppy hair to blend into the background even more than we already did.

Ironically (and don't we love a bit of irony, we cynical gen Xers), by the time we appeared in the workplace we'd shown everyone exactly how slacker we weren't. As employees, we're often described as hardworking, self-sufficient, uncomplaining, and loyal, which is probably at least partly to do with the fact our DIY childhoods showed us that no one was coming to save us except ourselves.