Gen Xers were never meant to be leaders

The top job in this country has gone from the baby boomer Barack Obama to the barely boomer Donald Trump to the throwback Joe Biden, a member of the so-called Silent Generation. At this rate, the presidency may do the natural thing and skip over Generation X entirely.

Wait, you may be asking yourself: Gen Xers are supposed to be in charge now?

It may not seem like it, but do the math: Born between the years 1965 and 1980, Gen Xers are now between the ages of 42 and 57, prime time for being the boss, whether of country, corporation or just a small sales team.

And yet after years of being outnumbered in the workforce by boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), Gen Xers have already been overtaken by another, larger cohort: millennials (born between 1981 and 1996). According to a Pew analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, Gen Xers were a majority of the U.S. workforce for only a few years — a brief period of dominance ending in 2016.

If Gen Xers are the bosses now, they are the bosses only in a very Gen X way: ambivalently, fleetingly and with dubious authority.

Here’s a refresher on the measliness of Generation X: Our parents were typically members of the Silent Generation, that cohort born between 1928 and 1945 — people shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, people who didn’t get to choose what they were having for dinner and made sure their kids didn’t either. The parents of Gen X believed in spanking and borderline benign neglect, in contrast to the boisterous boomers and their deluxe offspring, the millennial horde.

Grubby Gen Xers were designated the OG slackers, which did not bode well for becoming the bosses of the future. It wasn’t our fault! I mean, mostly not. Reality bit for Gen X because when we started to join the workforce around 1990, the economy was in a recession; the recovery that followed was sluggish.

These are broad strokes, of course, but as a former editor at bygone magazine American Demographics, which specialized in generational generalizations, I believe there’s some truth in the truisms.

Once Gen Xers managed to land jobs, we were but lowly peons hanging by a thread, prepared to be fired because we’d worked less than 80 hours that week, because we’d failed to “perform,” or simply because our boss liked to yell and one of the things he liked to yell was “You’re fired.”

But we were also a generation that specialized in sucking it up. The contemporary pop culture emblem for the Gen X manager may well be Mark S., the inadvertent and hapless leader of a tiny and testy group of employees in the TV series “Severance.” Mark, as embodied by the ur-Gen Xer Adam Scott, is simultaneously thwarted by his staff members and lorded over by the manager one rank above him, ever subject to the strict bylaws of an indifferent corporation.

Now that’s a Gen X boss.

Least of all ourselves. - New York Times News Service