I keep seeing jokes about how British people love to line up; I’m not British, I don’t get it or why it’s a thing but I’m not here to talk about idiomatic missed connections. I only threw this out there to talk about how people love to line up behind one another.

I stupidly watched a video on YouTube a while back, ruining my recommendations for a few days, entitled “Psychology of Gen X”. Why did I fall for the link-bait? As a Gen X’er of course I was interested in what the channel “Psychology Simplified” had to say about me. The thumbnail looked interesting, too, featuring what looked like a self-satisfied steamed-bun character sitting in a diner for a reason never explained in the video. Anyway, I got what I expected: an analysis of a cohort of people that was aimed squarely at that cohort, and which only provided the kind of information that reinforced the viewer’s sense of self in 2026.

Punching down

Real talk: everyone loves to feel superior to someone else. It’s hard to be humble which is why, when we find someone who seems actually humble, we canonize that person (even if it’s only in meme form). This should be our default mode as humans living in a society, but instead we’re always jockeying for some position, whether it’s professional, financial, social, or even something more granular like “best comment in the thread” or “most insightful blog post”. *cough*. Everything has become a competition, and it’s never just a case of “second place is first loser”; someone wins, and the winner has to make sure that everyone else knows that the other participants lost.

In this Gen X video, the comment section was chock full of self-proclaimed Gen X’ers who, of course, agreed with the portrayal of their generation, and who felt the need to frame their agreement in terms of other generations, notably those younger such as Millennials and Gen Z. Accusations flew about how younger generations were so involved in their tech, who can’t be alone with their thoughts, and who need to have their hands held for every task. Basically these commentors were talking shit about the younger generations in a way that had previously been the kind of thing we attributed to the Boomer generation. I spend a good amount of time on meme aggregator sites when bored, and I cannot enumerate how many Boomer vs Millennial posts I’ve seen bitching about “everyone gets a trophy” and “crippling the Millennial generation by writing in cursive”. It’s all supremely dumb, but dumb in a way that uses a generation’s most prized possessions as weapons to denigrate The Others.

I’m sad to see Gen X jumping into the fray here because historically, Gen X has been the “whatever” generation. We’ve been inconspicuously absent in Generational combat and as far as I was concerned, we liked it that way.

All for thee and none for me

One odd thing I’ve felt happen to me as I age is a slide into irrelevance. As a demographic, all I see for consideration is an onslaught of medication and daytime ambulance-chaser ads. The junk mail I get now is all about retirement, although I have seriously thought about signing up for AARP because discounts…which in itself is a laughable stereotype about older people, right?

Everything around us is aimed at the young. When I was younger I didn’t realize that because I just thought every product and every ad and every fashion and every consideration was for everyone, which just happened to include me. On this side of the divide, though, I realize that there’s a point when people become less important to the machinery that runs our society. Some would say this is a good thing because no one wants to be marketed at or treated as a commodity. On the other hand, no one likes to be discarded, especially when we’re still here, still vibrant, still contributing and — more importantly — still affected by the decisions that are being made primarily for the benefit of younger generations. I can see why older people are generally more politically active; it’s pretty much all they have, and politicians seem to be the only ones listening to older generations (even if it’s 120% lip-service).

In some ways, that makes me angry. I don’t want to be irrelevant. I want to be consulted and taken seriously when I speak but no matter how loud I get or how often, it’s only the younger generations that get heard. So yes, I can certainly see why there’s generational strife in these kinds of situation, although it’s misplaced. It’s technically not the fault of younger generations that society values them more than it does their elders, but I’m already as pissed off at Corporations as I can possibly be, so that anger has to be directed somewhere.

Clapping Back

There’s also a new wrinkle here for Gen X: getting shade. It used to be that just as Boomers laid into Millennials and Gen Z, the younger generations gave as good as they got. Remember “OK Boomer”? It’s one thing to insult directly, but to be used as an insult? That’s another level of dickery.

Now, though, Gen X is getting shit from younger generations. I’ve seen channels in which Gen X’ers are clipping rants from younger creators and responding to them in equally flippant ways. We went from the “Background Noise Generation” to the de factor inheritor of the Boomer’s legacy because everyone needs someone to feel superior to, and sometimes “punching down” isn’t actually down…it’s just who we view as being “down” from where we want to be.

Of course seeing younger generations apply the same complaints about Gen X as they did to Boomers doesn’t feel good, Bob. What have I, personally, done to these people? Yet if I’m OK with being lumped in with “Gen X”, then I guess I have to weather the bad with whatever good is supposed to come with it. I don’t accept the accusations, though, because sonder, remember, means that every individual out there bears “…the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs, and inherited craziness.”

It helps me deflect criticisms that might actually land a bit to close for comfort sometimes.

Backing your tribe

I can’t help but draw the obvious lines between a bunch of commentors on a YouTube video lining up behind the representation of “the best of themselves” and [gestures to everything, everywhere, right now]. Was it always this way, or is this actually a symptom of the Internet as pundits like to claim?

I guess that throwing our lots in with a group is a human condition. We’re social animals — yes, even you die-hard introverts — so “finding our tribe” is a very important task. Thinking back, in elementary school kids were pretty much egalitarian and would play with anyone and everyone. It wasn’t until middle school and — *gasp*! Puberty — that kids started trying to get themselves sorted in ways they wanted. It was all down-hill from there, but in the days before we could shout at each other from opposite sides of the globe the groups we ended up in for whatever reason were always local. I don’t think that one Girl Scout troop was beefing with another troop one town over because there was no need to do so. I feel that even generationally, things never got bad Back Then. Sure, there was the disconnect between giving “my house, my rules”-type speeches and receiving them, but I would be willing to bet that was more of a learned hand-me-down than the opening volley in an intergenerational war.

I was reading a post on MassivelyOverpowered this morning, and stupidly ventured into the comments which were, as one should expect, assuming that the original post was opening the door to offer ever-increasing hot-takes on the situation. Somehow, we’ve gotten into the habit of using primary sources as a go-ahead to take over with our own complaints, even when those complaints are only loosely coupled to the original screed. I admit that I have done it myself; I’ll also admit that it’s kind of hard to leave a comment on a post that doesn’t shift focus away from the OP and onto ourselves, even when we honestly offer them in support and agreement.

The point here is that we’ve become very bad at our social constructs. I feel that in all ways, being social should mean “for the good of society”. In truth, it seems to mean “for the good of our tribe”, where the meaning and make-up of a tribe can be as broad or as granular as we need it to be in order to feel safe and accepted. Sometimes it’s enough for someone to like the thing that we like; more often these days, it’s also acceptable for someone else to hate the things we hate. I suppose in many ways the Internet is to blame, because before we could connect with everyone all the time the only communities we had available to us were those physically around us, and that came with benefits and consequences that do not and cannot apply online.

Be an individual like everyone else

As always, I get way off tangent, so here’s my attempt to bring it back around and summarize. We all like being part of a group, and sometimes the worst part of our day/week/month/year/life is when we can’t find a group that we like or which likes us. It’s never more necessary than when we feel like we’re being attacked, as it’s normal, I think, to want to find shelter from such assaults. Logically, finding people who share our circumstance, our beliefs, our interests, and our experiences are the places we are the most happy because we’re social animals and those factors shortcut more lengthier introductory rituals. You like Star Trek? I like Star Trek! We should be friends!

As kids, that’s all it took, but now it’s not enough to like Star Trek, you have to like only certain iterations of Star Trek, and you have to hate other iterations of Star Trek or else you don’t really like Star Trek. Once one person starts hate-mongering, those who monger the same hate come out of the woodwork and create a new tribe, making absolutely everything worse. Opinions are compounded in these echo chambers, and suddenly we’re hearing stories about doxxing and other dumpster fires when it should be these similarities that bring us together.

Not that I have a choice, but I like being Gen X primarily because people left us alone. I guess I did like being Gen X before certain cohorts needed new targets and found a pristine generational punching bag that no one had been paying attention to. Boomers felt the need to punch, and Millennials felt the need to punch back. I don’t want to punch. I’m tired of everyone lining up behind one another for the purpose of punching. I kind of hate the Internet for what it allows us to do, but it’s not something we can roll back.

But this post is irrelevant because it’s considering the wrong things. It’s not that we “tribe-up” and are pushing society towards a Mad Max future as a result; it’s really a question of why we’re doing it. Why are we lining up behind people expressing hate? I get that maybe we’re unhappy with something and other people who are unhappy about the same things are kind of “our people” in that regard, but why are we going so hard and allowing our discontent to group us rather than our aspirations? Yeah, I’m Gen X, and I’m supposed to “not care” but all Gen X knows that it’s a bullshit attribute; we care, but we care about things differently than our parents. I care about how badly we’re doing as a species, and how much we seem to be enjoying it. We’re not even considering that we’re all focused on the wrong common threads, and how we’re not using positive threads as a way to form our tribes. Instead of coming together to build, we’re coming together to tear things down and the kicker is that no one is really happy about doing it, yet do it we do because of what? Mob mentality, maybe? Being part of a group feels better even if individually we feel worse.