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Good morning and Happy Friday! We survived another week of this wretched administration. Hallelujah.
I hesitate to talk too much about being Gen X, in large part because 1) we place way too much importance on arbitrary generational lines, and 2) a guy on X once told me I made being Gen X “my entire personality.” Ouch. But I do believe that shared experiences tell us certain things about groups of people; I’m just unclear as to why we drew the distinctions where we did. For this discussion, let’s just say that GenX was born between 1965 and 1980, with exceptions for those a few years on each side of the scale.
Anyway, I came across an interesting poll this week, which was making the rounds on Bluesky. It looks like this.
This led to a whole discussion of “Why is GenX like this?” I had no answer to that, as I was wondering the same thing myself. It’s going to be the only thing I write about today.
We’ve all heard the old saying that people get more conservative as they get older, but I’ve found that's not the case, at least among my inner circle. I’ve always been pretty liberal, but I’ve moved much more to the left as I’ve entered midlife. I don’t know how anyone can live in this world for 40-plus years and not move to the left. I also find I don’t care about material things as much as I did in my 20s and 30s. I still like nice things (as my absurd collection of lip glosses and perfumes can attest), but the older I get, the more I want to collect experiences and people, rather than things.
My own experiences aside, there’s no question that GenX votes much more like our parents than I ever thought we would. Hell, according to the above poll, we’re even more conservative than Boomers. That’s… that’s hard to take. Let’s talk about why. And look, we can argue until the cows come home about methodology and demographic breakdowns, so let’s just agree that GenX, as a whole, is more conservative than we thought we’d be.
Let me start by saying that I don’t have any answers, really. I’m completely bewildered that my cynical, self-sufficient, “slacker” generation went the hardest for Donald Trump in 2024. We were the first generation to grow up with computers in our homes, so you’d think we’d be a bit more adept at sniffing out bullshit than our parents were. My parents tend to believe anything they see on TV or read on the internet, and we had to have several conversations that ended in “remember, just because your friend sent it to you in a chain email doesn’t make it true.” GenXers are suspicious by nature (thanks, televangelists of the 1980s and finding out pro wrestling is scripted!), so it’s hard to imagine that technical or media literacy is the problem. We all knew the National Enquirer was full of shit, which is more than I can say for our parents.
Before we jump into it, I should probably clarify that we’re largely talking about white and Latino GenXers, because while Trump made gains with the Black voters, Black men and women still went for Kamala Harris by 75 and 89 percent, respectively. They are clearly not the problem here.
As I pondered how GenX, the generation raised by Silent Generation and Boomer parents, went so far off track, I decided to ask GenXers on Bluesky what they thought. Here’s what they told me.
Financial factors:
First, we had the Gordon Gekko theories. This is to say that GenX was in our formative years in the 1980s, when Reaganomics and “Greed is good” were the dominant narratives. “Make rich people richer, and the wealth will trickle down to the masses!” After the stock market crash in 1989 and the Great Recession from 2007 onward, it’s hard to imagine anyone really still believes that helping out the wealthy will save us. We learned that from Ferris Bueller’s econ professor.
Interestingly enough, while GenX has accumulated more than 26 percent of the wealth in the US, Boomers have accumulated 51 percent of it. So much for every generation doing better than their parents. At 53, I’m sick to death of having to work for Boomers, and many are still in the jobs we were supposed to move into. Meanwhile, Millennials are right behind us, clamoring for their turn. Retire already!
I don’t doubt there’s something to the theory that, as people get richer, they want to hoard their wealth. While I would also like to hoard wealth, I care more about living in a society with things like universal healthcare and affordable college. Most GenXers I know are more than willing to pay higher taxes if it means having a social safety net, but that evidence is apocryphal and based on my social circle, which I’ve intentionally selected to be more liberal than the general population. Like many of us, I left my friends who leaned more conservative in the past, so I’m not sampling a reliable cross-section of society.
I also think we bought into the idea that the US is “the good guy” in international politics far more than we should have. Rocky IV, anyone? While I suspected we’d been oversold on how terrible the Soviet Union was (remember the stir Sting made with “Russians”?), it wasn’t until I watched The Americans that I realized the bill of goods we’d been sold about our role in the Cold War.
The self-sufficiency theory:
“Hey, I had to do it myself. Why can’t everyone else?”
There’s no doubt that GenX kids were left to their own devices more than any other generation to date. We were the first generation to grow up with working mothers, and a significant portion of us came home from school to an empty house and were on our own until dinner, at least. During the summer, there were days when we weren’t allowed back in the house until a certain time. When our moms were on the landline, we could be on fire, and no one would notice. At the tender age of 11, I learned how to deal with leering adult men on my own. None of the moms I knew thought it was anything to worry about, if they were even aware of it.
My girlfriends and I think this is why so many of us can’t help but helicopter-parent our kids. We remember the situations we found ourselves in as kids, and we’re trying to keep our own children from having those experiences.
There’s certainly something to the cynicism and nihilism we adopted by being told there was probably going to be a nuclear holocaust in the near future. Not only were we left home alone, we were left home alone during the time of The Day After, Adam, and the Satanic Panic. Chances were, we were going to be vaporized by a bomb, abducted by pedophiles, or sacrificed by a cult of D&D players in the woods before we made it to our teens.* In hindsight, the adults in our lives leaned a little too hard into all of it, and it wasn’t like we got taken to therapy to deal with our trauma.** I don’t doubt for a second that many of us just said, “Fuck it, I’ll just look after myself.”
(*Honorable mention if you were afraid of falling down a well. **Obligatory mention of watching the Challenger astronauts die on live TV and then being sent to gym class as if nothing had happened.)
Turns out, GenX was also more likely than their parents to have what researchers call Adverse Childhood Experiences (desperate apologies for using a piece penned by transphobe David French to make this point. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, but don’t click on that link because, as I said, David French is a transphobe.)
In 2024 a study done by Phillip Hughes and Kathleen Thomas from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that there are generational differences in what they call adverse childhood experiences. Generation X was more likely to endure adverse childhood experiences than baby boomers, and Generation X was most likely of all modern generations to experience an adverse childhood experience with sexual abuse.
Maybe we aren’t so much self-sufficient as we are traumatized?
The lead theory
I’ll be honest, I had never thought of this one. But many of you had!
I laughed out loud at the last one. But is there anything to this? Are we all brain-damaged thanks to lead? I started digging around, and it turns out it’s true.
The average Gen Xer lost about 6 points of IQ due to early childhood lead exposure, according to a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.
The era from roughly 1965 to 1980 — when Gen Xers were born — was also the period when leaded gasoline use peaked in the U.S. The lead in that gas got released into the atmosphere via automobile exhaust, and was subsequently inhaled by everyone living in the country at the time. That lead showed up in samples of children’s blood that were drawn as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an ongoing CDC project tracking the health of the country.
Is this where my ADHD came from? Inhaling deeply at the gas station as a six-year-old? I loved the smell of unleaded gas as a kid. I’ve been chasing that high for 40 years. Today’s gas just doesn’t do it for me; something is missing. I guess what’s missing is (checks notes)… lead.
There’s a strong case to be made that the little Gen. Xers huffing leaded car exhaust as kids became the bigger Gen. Xers driving much of the elevated national crime rate 15 to 20 years later. “Lead exposure at young ages leaves children with problems like learning disabilities, ADHD, and impulse control problems; and those problems cause them to commit crime as adults — particularly violent crime,” as Brookings’ Jennifer Doleac explains it.
That leaded legacy remains with us today. “Pronounced exposure to lead in early childhood will remain a hallmark of the US population for the next several decades,” the authors write. There’s still a lot about childhood lead exposure we don’t know — how does it affect a person’s propensity to develop Alzheimer’s or other late-life cognitive issues, for instance? How will those kids’ kidneys, lungs or hearts be affected as seniors?
Meanwhile, Psychology Today says GenX was more affected by lead than any other generation:
A major source of lead exposure used to be through automotive exhaust. The neurotoxicity of lead means that there is no safe level of exposure at any age, but young children are particularly at risk for impaired brain development and lowered cognitive ability. Although leaded gas for cars was banned in the U.S. in 1996, the findings suggest that any Americans born before then, and especially during the 1960s and 1970s, may be at a greater risk for lead-related health problems such as reduced brain size, greater likelihood of mental illness, and increased cardiovascular disease in adulthood.
I’m thinking about this in the context of why so many in the MAGA crowd strike us as “crazy,” and this is one factor I never considered. I’m sure there are many more components involved in the psyche of Trump voters, but I had never even considered lead exposure before now. Turns out, even those of us who weren’t eating paint chips are at risk. YIKES.
The “everything is fine” theory
Racism? Solved! Pollution and acid rain? Solved! Sexism? Solved! What else is there to worry about?
We survived (and won) the Cold War. We saw MLK Jr’s birthday become a national holiday. We grew up on stories of defeating the Nazis in WWII. We saw the first woman nominated for the Supreme Court. Did we assume there’s nothing left to worry about? I guess I did. My little activist self joined Amnesty International at the age of 13, possibly because I thought we had no problems to worry about in the US.
I’d be lying if I said a number of GenX men haven’t asked me, “What racism?” or “What sex discrimination?” over the years.
And speaking of the men…
The “It’s the GenX men” theory
We all know that white GenX women went for Trump in numbers that are truly depressing (I console myself by remembering that white women with college degrees went big for Harris), but white GenX men really went for Trump by 10 additional percentage points. I would bet that much of that differential can be accounted for by not having to worry about your reproductive rights being taken away.
I’ve been thinking about the number of beloved GenX movies that have aged terribly with regard to sexual politics. Ghostbusters’ Dr. Peter Venkman is a creep who won’t take Dana’s “no” for an answer, even when she tells him to get out of her apartment. There’s an entire genre of films built around spying on women in various states of undress (Porky’s, Revenge of the Nerds, Animal House). Sixteen Candles has a real problem with the consent of a certain homecoming queen who gets drunk and is shipped off with a freshman on the make by her boyfriend.
I won’t excuse it, but I do recognize that growing up inundated with women seen merely as sex objects (and the butt of every joke) likely makes it harder to be upset by Trump’s rampant misogyny. We were swimming in sexism every day of our lives as kids and teens, and not all that much has changed.
I want to mention one more factor that came up a few times — the loss of so many in the LGBTQ+ community to the AIDS crisis in the 80s.
Because so many of my left-leaning cohort DIED is my guess. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AID...
— Spaceweft (@spaceweft.bsky.social) 2026-04-16T23:23:43.321Z
In the 1980s, over 100,000 Americans died of AIDS. In the 90s, that number jumped to more than 448,000. That’s an awful lot of people. Gay and bisexual men, who tend to lean more left than their straight counterparts, made up between 55 and 59 percent of cumulative AIDS deaths. In short, AIDS took a lot of potential Democratic voters from us, and that’s before we consider the impact all the artists we lost could have had on our society. Hell, Freddie Mercury alone probably could have dragged a bunch of voters away from Trump.
As I said, I don’t have any answers. I think all of these things probably contributed, in various ways, to the rightward lurch of my generation. But it does make me sad. I went to a (then) pretty liberal university, and there was a sense that, once we got our turn in power, things would be better. It hasn’t worked out that way, and it’s upsetting to think that we fell into the same traps as the deservedly-maligned Boomers. I’ve often said that being GenX feels like arriving at the party 10 years too late, and that’s been a constant theme of my adulthood.
Why do you think so many GenXers drafted to the right? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Personally, I was radicalized by Sassy Magazine and never looked back.
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Because we could all use a trip down the best parts of memory lane these days, I give you MTV Rewind. You’re welcome.
And while it’s tough to think that we may not have turned out the way we would have liked, read this NYT piece on GenX before you give up on us entirely. We’re not completely terrible.
The High Note
Each day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the courage to fight another day.
In honor of the GenXers fighting through all the bullshit:
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down. John Bender would hate that for you.
Have a great weekend!
