So, Gen X Is Officially Broken. Are We Surprised?
Remember us? Generation X? We were the cool ones. The cynical, sarcastic slackers in flannel shirts who listened to good music and rolled our eyes at the earnest Boomers and the not-yet-online Millennials. We were the latchkey kids, the self-sufficient, media-savvy generation that was supposed to be the stable, moderate bridge in the culture wars.
Yeah, that’s over. It’s so completely, utterly over.
The other day, as described in Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile, a writer was in a grocery store, an Aldi of all places, and the guy behind her in line started casually talking about how the government needed to be “taken out” by ex-military types. He wasn't screaming. He wasn't wearing a tinfoil hat. He said it with the same calm, conversational tone you’d use to complain about the price of eggs. The queue went silent, people shuffled their feet, and the unspoken reality hung in the air like the smell of cheap disinfectant: the brain worms have escaped the internet. The comment section is now standing behind you at the checkout.
This isn’t some isolated incident. It’s everywhere. It’s the "sauna politics" a friend of the writer mentioned, where casual chats in a steam room veer into chemtrail conspiracies. It's the school-gate parent who seems perfectly normal until they start spouting weird ideas about vaccines. For years, we watched our Boomer parents get radicalized on Facebook, sharing pixelated memes and ALL CAPS diatribes. We laughed, smugly assuming our digital literacy made us immune. We were wrong. This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire, and my generation is holding the gasoline.
The Midlife Crisis Gets a MAGA Hat
Let's be real. Middle-aged radicalization is happening, and the Gen X generation is at the epicenter. We’re not just talking about a few grumpy uncles. The numbers are staggering. In the UK, a third of people in the Gen X age range (50-64) now say they’d vote for the populist Reform UK party. In the US, my generation—the "Cool Britannia," Nirvana-listening generation—has been dubbed the "Trumpiest generation." We are more likely to identify as Republican than any other age group, including the Baby Boomers.
How the hell did this happen? It’s the classic midlife crisis, supercharged by an algorithm. The Gen X years of our youth are long gone. Now we’re old enough to worry. We worry that if we get laid off, we’re toast. We worry our marriages will implode once the kids are gone. We worry that our knees hurt all the time and that the world is changing way too fast and leaving us behind. It's not like the economy has done us any favors, either. I remember when a house was something you could actually, you know, buy.
That simmering pot of rage, disappointment, and fear needed a release valve, and the internet provided it. The internet’s rage machine is like a predator that found its perfect prey: a generation that remembers a world before all this noise but is now too plugged in to escape it. We’re not digital natives like Gen Z, but we’re not analog tourists like our parents. We’re trapped in the middle, and it’s curdling our brains. We think we’re too smart to be influenced by what we see online, but offcourse we're not. We’re just better at hiding it until we’re standing in a checkout line.
So what’s the real story here? Are we just lashing out because we realized we’re not the main characters in the story anymore? Did we spend so long defining ourselves by what we weren't—not Boomers, not Millennials—that we forgot to figure out what we actually are?
It's All Just a Glitch in the System
The great irony is that the Gen X generation built a lot of the early internet. We were there for message boards, for Usenet, for the promise of a connected global village. We were supposed to be the ones who understood the rules.
Instead, we’re proving that the wall between online talk and real-world action was always tissue-paper thin. We’re the ones trying out the toxic rhetoric we see in our feeds on real-life people and acting surprised when it doesn't go over well. The internet’s unfiltered id isn't a separate place anymore; it's just a rehearsal space. The performance is now happening at bus stops, in hospitals, and in grocery stores.
There’s some research project called Smidge looking into this, trying to figure out how to de-radicalize 45- to 65-year-olds. Good luck with that. It feels like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. You can't de-radicalize people who don’t even think they’ve been radicalized. They just think they’re finally brave enough to say what "everyone's thinking."
We were the generation of irony and detachment. We thought we could observe the chaos without being consumed by it. But the chaos came for us anyway. We’re not the cool, detached observers anymore. We’re the ones screaming, and the whole world is starting to notice. And the worst part is, nobody seems to have a plan to fix it. We're just supposed to get used to the guy in the grocery line talking about overthrowing the government, and honestly...
We Became What We Mocked
So that's it. That's the punchline. Gen X, the generation that prided itself on being too cool for school, on seeing through the BS, became the easiest marks of all. We spent our youth mocking the simplistic, black-and-white worldview of our Boomer parents, only to adopt our own algorithm-fed version of it in middle age. We’re not slackers anymore. We’re rage-farmers. And we're a bigger problem than anyone wants to admit.
