Gen X - We Grew Up Through It All

All my younger life I heard about the Baby Boomers, how important they are, what that generation accomplished and so on. Now it seems that all anyone talks about are the Millennials and what they aren’t doing and what it’s like to work with them. Just look at the hundreds of memes on how to stump a millennial. But what about my generation, Generation X? On the surface it appears we’re the forgotten generation but think again.

Very simply put we are the hardest working, most flexible, most diverse generation on this planet. We’re targeted to surpass the Baby Boomers in population by 2028 when there will be approximately 65 million of us. Let’s talk about what makes us the best generation. We were taught to drive when manual transmission cars were still common. Many of us passed our driving tests in one. Mine happened to be a 1986 Toyota Tercel. That means we can drive the fastest sports cars in the world and hope in a tractor trailer without blinking an eye. We remember how to pop the clutch when our cars wouldn’t start and change a tire (left loosey, righty tighty) because who the heck had AAA back then. We survived all the horrible things now outlawed like riding in the bed of a pick-up truck

and sitting in front seat of a car between your mom and dad on the bouncy bucket seat without a seat belt (the horror of it all). We grew up before everything had to be politically correct. Not going to lie, we started out as insensitive, cracking ethnic jokes, but many of us learned that even simple things, like telling a joke, perpetuate stereotypes, which are ridiculously incorrect to begin with. The transformation we underwent was incredibly impactful and helped us shape how we see the world today, not just our little corner of it. You see we ushered in a new age, we were in the middle of all the changes and we adapted to the new order of things. That doesn’t make us pushovers it makes us engaged in the world around us in a very elemental way.

I’ve witnessed many people who can’t handle change, it scares them to think about waking up and things would be different. They cling to schedule and conformity. For Gen X, that was and still is our lives. Think about this. When we went to school, there were still ditto machines, not even copiers and there sure weren’t any tablets or computers in the classrooms. Most of us lived to see the advent of computer labs on college campuses where you had to know DOS prompt commands to work one and get your paper completed, where printers were dot matrix and used stacks of boxed paper. Who remember separating each sheet and pulling the edges off before you turned it into your professor? But wait there’s more. We got to see the beginning of portable phones from the kind that required a

shoulder bag to flip phones to the mini-computers they are today. Did it scare us? Hell no! Gen Xers ate it up, we loved all the new technology and its ever-changing form. To this day we still love it and can’t wait until the latest generation of phone hits the market. And guess what? We can afford them because we’re at the pinnacle of our careers. So, let’s talk about how we got there.

This is easy. We’ve been working our asses off since we were 14 or 15 years old. We’ve worked all types of jobs. I’ve been a waitress, cashier, retail sales and telemarketer before I settled on my career in IT. I held down a full-time job while going to college full-time like many of my fellow Gen Xers did. We innately understood we weren’t going to be CEOs our first job out of school, that we had to pay our dues, get much needed experience and work our way up the proverbial corporate ladder. With every job we learned valuable lessons like how to treat people, what makes a good leader, how to work professionally with people you don’t like and how to get the damn job done whether we wanted to or not. And get this, we saw the workplace transform before our very eyes. We saw profession after profession changing from being dominated by all white males to what they are now. Today’s workforce is a diverse and ever-changing group of individuals. You’ll work beside males and females, you’ll hear multiple languages spoken and see a variety of cultures. For Millennials and Generation Z they’ve only known a diverse workforce. They will never revel when the first female CEO of a tech company was named or to celebrate Diwali for the first time. We saw all of that. They will always know the English language as a compilation of words and phrases from other languages. Who doesn’t know what Hola means or chic? Words we take for granted that are not actually English. We were here when all this occurred, we witnessed all these things and we chose not to take a rigid stance but embrace the change swirling around us.

Some people will never understand what it’s like to witness the “big bang” of technology. Millennials and Gen Z were born with technology in their hands. That’s not a ding, just a fact. We earned our knowledge through trial and error as we went through it literally for the first time. We learned on-the-fly how to incorporate technology into our daily lives and how to learn about people from other cultures with openness and grace. These changes affected us profoundly and made us better world citizens. I’m not saying we’re perfect, but we’ve been learning from our mistakes in a very human attempt to make a better place to live for everyone. Our intrinsic natures have unfolded in ways other generations can’t fathom. And because we’ve been exposed to a wide variety of circumstances it makes learning new things later in our lives that much easier. I would have no qualms picking up any model of cell phone or tablet and figuring it out, nor would I be afraid of stumbling my way through meeting new people from all over the world because this is simply how we grew up.

Let me leave you with this. While we might not jump around and say we’re Gen Xers, look at some notable individuals who are also Generation X. We're definitely not forgotten.

Princess Diana Marissa Mayer Wayne Gretzky Carl Lewis

Michael Jordan Laura Alber Jeff Bezos Ryan White

Tony Hawk Elon Musk