There’s a particular kind of irony that follows Gen X around, and it’s worth sitting with for a minute.
We’re the generation that complains about social media toxicity, algorithmic outrage, everyone-has-a-platform chaos — and we’re also the generation that built most of it. Not in a bragging way. In a quietly-showed-up-and-did-the-work way that turned out to have consequences nobody fully mapped in advance.
That was the thread running through a recent episode of the Free Will Burning Podcast, where Troy and I went through how other generations actually perceive Gen X — the good, the bad, and the parts that made us look directly into the camera.
What They Get Right About Us
The consensus across multiple generational studies and cultural takes is that Gen X is self-reliant to an almost stubborn degree. Latch-key upbringing, less parental oversight, problems you solved because there was nobody else around to solve them — that’s not mythology. That’s just how it was.
The traits that come out of that aren’t glamorous: comfortable making decisions without supervision, adapting when systems fail, not waiting for permission. Troy put it simply — you just went and did what needed doing. That wasn’t a philosophy. It was Tuesday.
The bridge between analog and digital is another one they consistently flag. We’re the last generation with a full professional memory of the pre-internet world, and the first to build careers on top of it. We didn’t get a training manual for either half. We figured it out as the ground shifted.
What They Get Wrong — Or at Least Oversimplify
Cynical and jaded comes up every time, and honestly, fair enough on the surface. But there’s a distinction worth making: what we call realism, other generations call cynicism. We grew up through Watergate’s aftermath, the Cold War, corporate layoffs that started happening to our parents, and an institutional culture that taught us trust had to be earned and verified. Skepticism wasn’t a personality defect. It was pattern recognition.
The workaholic label is similar. Gen X doesn’t separate work from identity the way the framing implies. For a lot of us — especially those who went independent early or built something from scratch — the work was the expression of survival instinct. You kept going because stopping felt like a trap. Troy noted it clearly: up until around 40, it was full throttle. Then you start doing the math on what it’s actually getting you.
Nostalgia is the one that stings a little because it’s partially true. Yes, we think the music was better. Yes, we reference the 80s and early 90s constantly. But there’s a reason for that — it was a genuinely distinct cultural moment, and we were right in the middle of it. That’s not delusion. That’s accurate memory.
The Part We Didn’t See Coming
Here’s the one that lands differently when you say it out loud.
In 1997, I started UGASports.com — a community-driven platform built around the idea that the media was filtering reality through their own bias, and that everyday people should be able to report, discuss, and share information directly. Citizen journalism before anyone called it that. It grew into one of the first large-scale digital communities of its kind, predated Twitter and Facebook, and was eventually part of what became Rivals.com before being sold to Yahoo in 2014.
The distance between what I was trying to build then and what Twitter is now? That’s roughly the trajectory I was pointing at. I wanted everyone to have a voice. I got everyone having a voice. The echo chambers, the vitriol, the information laundering that happens when a story passes through six people before it reaches you — I didn’t foresee that in 1996. Nobody did.
Mark Zuckerberg is Gen X. A lot of the people who built the algorithms shaping what you see and believe are Gen X. We were the ones in the workaholic chair while all of this got developed, deployed, and scaled.
We quietly built the world we now complain about. That’s not self-flagellation — it’s just the honest read.
What the “Forgotten Generation” Actually Means
The forgotten generation label isn’t about invisibility. It’s structural. No Gen X president. The loudest cultural arguments are still between Boomers and Millennials. Most of the rock stars and cultural icons we claim were technically Boomers. We consumed and refined more than we defined — at least in the ways history tends to measure these things.
But the work got done. The infrastructure got built. The frameworks that the next generation inherited — digital media, remote work culture, the internet as a commercial and social space — a lot of that has Gen X fingerprints on it. We just didn’t make a lot of noise about it at the time. That’s pretty on-brand, actually.
Watch the Full Episode
We cover the Iron Maiden documentary drop, the Nomad Capitalist expat conversation, cursive handwriting as a dying art, and the registration story involving a VW bus, Arizona plates, and a Grateful Dead show in California. It goes where it goes.
Comment below if any of this lands. We read everything.
Steve R. Patterson is a counselor, author, and host of the Free Will Burning Podcast. He writes about recovery, adaptation, and navigating major life transitions. Find more at stevepatterson.online.