Jason Salmon has his finger on the pulse of just what makes Generation X tick. But in typical X fashion, his own promotional YouTube page boasts that he’s been “described as like getting the best advice you’ve ever gotten from the dumbest guy you know.”
His humility only makes him that much more charming. But the truth is, what we think doesn’t really matter to his X Generation. In his comedy special, Biscuits and Gravy, at one point, he asks the audience if there are any Gen Xers. A few people clap and cheer, and he responds, “Yeah. I don’t even care. That’s how Gen X I am. That’s a calling card to our generation.”
He points out the unlikelihood of a Gen Xer even being offended by that. “That’s not even dismissive to a Gen Xer. It’s like ‘I don’t care.’ ‘I don’t care, also. Nice to meet you.’”
He then points to a person in the crowd and asks, “What generation are you?” But before they have a chance to answer, he jokes, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. That’s the beautiful thing.” He adds that if an audience member doesn’t like the joke, guess what? Doesn’t care. “If y’all don’t like this joke, guess what, you’re only giving me more cred as a Gen Xer. You’re only making me more powerful.”
Gen Xers fought the ‘Battle of Who Could Care Less’
The truth is that some of the stereotypes about Gen X aren’t exactly true. Sure, director Richard Linklater’s film Slacker helped pin that label on us. And Ben Stiller’s film Reality Bites didn’t exactly help dissuade the argument that we were unprepared for adulthood. Gen X earned a reputation for apathy and ambivalence because it was skeptical of the status quo. In the ’90s, Gen X was often stereotyped as apolitical (even though, as Holmes notes in the same article, Gen Xers also brought a “chaotic and effective” kind of political organizing) and loved everything with a sense of irony. There was nothing less cool than being sincere, and credibility was king; there was nothing worse than being a sell-out or a poser.
But in an October 2023 article called “8 Things That Gen X Gave the World” (via The Arrow, via, gasp, the AARP website) Esquire editor at large and radio and television personality Dave Holmes dispels some of those myths. “Generation X is exactly like corn. We’re largely ignored in the broader culture, disregarded in polling, a demilitarized zone between the boomers and the millennials. But we’ve actually contributed a great deal to the society that has spurned us.” (Pew Research Center counted 65.2 million Gen Xers in 2019, compared with 72.1 million Millennials, and projected that Gen X would outnumber the Boomers by 2028.)
Gen X made some big cultural contributions
He goes on to list some of those contributions, which include, in part, blogs, alternative comedy, “comic books as our new global religion,” and a little something called the internet. Of the latter, he writes that in 1994, after he’d graduated from college and moved to New York, he had a friend who was “writing code for the Sony Music website.”
He shares, “At the time, I had no idea what the word ‘website’ meant. My understanding of the internet came entirely from Prodigy, a rudimentary content delivery network. But then one Saturday afternoon, Mike and I went up to his office, he turned his monitor on, and after that 20-minute connection process, he opened Netscape and typed in ‘https://www.yahoo.com.’ ‘There,’ he said, ‘search for anything.’ ‘Anything?’ I asked. ‘Anything at all. Someone will have made a website for it.’”
So what can we say about Gen X now?
So while apathy might not be the best description for Gen X, Jason Salmon proves one thing we can all agree on: they (we) have a sense of humor.
Many of the comments agree. One commenter under his YouTube clips proves that maybe we DO care a little. “Why is Gen X trending so much lately? Are we finally getting the recognition that we don’t care about?”
This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.
