The weirdest thing about Generation X being erased is that in the late 80s and early 90s, before anyone was calling anyone millennials, marketers were directing things at tweens and teens (those who would come of age at the millennium) and calling us Generation X.
Like, I feel like Generation X really caught on as a pop culture and marketing buzzword *just too late* to be used to market to the Youths but it was such a buzzy word they powered through and did it anyway.
I'm pretty sure "Generation X" was the yearbook theme one year at my high school, at a point when only a small portion of the school was on the cusp of the trailing edge of the most elastic definitions of the cohort.
So it's like for years everybody was saying "Generation X" without actually knowing what it meant, or even knowing it meant anything.... and then the word "Millennial" came along and it sounded current and new while I guess "Generation X" sounded a bit dated and cringey?
THIS HAPPENED. It seriously happened. You are not imagining this or making this up.
So I think that's part of how "Generation X" disappeared... the label shifted to the younger coherent in marketing and pop culture stuff (even while a lot of more serious culture stuff still used it correctly), and then the term "Millennial" displaced it for those same people.
Yep. They tried to coin Generation Y for the generation after Generation X but, again, no one outside of demographers and like disaffected (actual) Generation X artists, no one knew who Gen X was, so it was doomed to fail.
I seriously think this has a lot to do with how Generation X fell through the cracks of collective cultural consciousness, and I find it weird how no one talks about it. It's like the ultimate "Only real 90s kids remember".
It's like our shameful secret, like we engaged in generational cannibalism, like marketers secretly fed us another cohort and now we can't meet each other's eyes.
Apparently advertising mags first coined "Generation Y" to distinguish it from "Generation X" in 1993. Earlier than I thought. I imagine that just exacerbated things because the label immediately makes you think "Generation X" is cooler.
