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Guest Essay

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

Pour out a Zima for Gen X-ers, who will never end up running the world. This was the theme of a Wall Street Journal article recently about corporations that are skipping over the Slacker generation — those of us born between 1965 and 1980 — and promoting millennials instead to C.E.O. As The Journal put it, presumably channeling the anxieties of one of the paper’s frustrated editors: “As they enter what is usually the prime, C-suite career stage, more businesses are retaining their aging leaders or skipping a generation in search of the next ones.”

I was born in 1976, and my reaction to this news was, in Gen X parlance, whatever, man. The disappointment some X-ers feel about this is indicative of an inherent contradiction: They did not trust institutions, empty ambitions and rampant consumerism when they were young, but still feel let down when, as middle-aged adults, the system has not delivered the professional success and extreme run-up of home equity that boomers have accrued. This is especially true of X-ers who happen to be white and male and C.E.O.-shaped. And it’s a bummer!

In theory, these X-ers were well aware that their parents were probably going to be better off than they themselves would ever be and couldn’t decide whether to be angry about it pre-emptively or to just slackerishly opt out of the corporate and political structures that led to it altogether. The Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, who popularized the term “Generation X” with his 1991 novel of that name, had a character in it named Dag, who puts it thus: “I don’t know … whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world or whether I’m just upset that the world has gotten too big — way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are those blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers.”

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