GenX Deserves More Credit Then They Get

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]You know, I think millennials and Gen Xers get mixed up.

[00:00:06]We all kind of kind of look about the same, I think. And there's a lot of bleed over between the two. But, you know, Gen Z though, we're all just boomers to them.

[00:00:20]Let's do this.

[00:00:22]Generation has red flags. We all have toxic traits. Generation X, no exception. Our number one toxic trait is that we firmly believe and we will not admit this in public that violence is sometimes the answer. And what we mean by that is everything going on in the world today that's wrong could have been solved with a good oldfashioned fist fight back in second grade. Half the stuff that people do in today's society, they would never do they would never say some of the stuff if they had to meet that person at 3:30 after school.

[00:00:55]>> Facts. So that one sweet little aunt you have, you know, it's the 50some with the high bangs, still listens to like Death Leopard and Guns and Roses and stuff, she has a friend to this day that she met because she had to get in a fist fight with her. Every Gen X person has a friend in their life that they made over a fight. I'm not saying that every Gen X can fight. I'm just saying that we understand the rules. We understand the laws of the wild. That saying don't start, no, don't be none. That was us.

[00:01:23]So when you see an older person born in the born from the 1900s tell you that violence isn't the answer. We only saying that because we don't want to get in trouble and we don't want to see you get in trouble. If you do happen to punch that one smart kid in the mouth, you doing the Lord's work.

[00:01:38]>> Here's >> So here's the thing. When you search up boomer on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, you know what you're gonna get? You get the the whiny, complainy, me generation kind of stuff. You get the the kids cutting their parents off or going no contact. You get you get some entertainment is what you get. Now, when you search Gen X though, um you kind of get a bunch of stories about how cool they are.

[00:02:17]>> Fun little game you can play with your nearest Gen Xer. next time you get bored. But trigger warning, it's not for the week. Don't do this and expect to sleep well that night. Okay, if you're new here, I'm a millennial. My husband's a Gen Xer. I've actually been tossing around the idea of just doing a podcast because we we tend to have a lot of interesting conversations usually about how vastly different our childhoods were, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

[00:02:36]Find a Gen Xer. Not hard to do. Give them a quick once over and locate a scar. There will be many, but locate a scar. And then just ask them how they got it. What's the story there? And then just sit back and enjoy the chaos because they're never going to end the story with and then I went to a doctor.

[00:02:53]Nine out of ten times it goes a little something like this. Oh, this one. This one. Yeah. See, I was working in a lumber mill and I was using this grinder and the grinder blade broke off and it skid across my skin, right? And when it hit me, it broke into a bunch of pieces.

[00:03:09]So, it took my skin off down to the down to the fat. And then I went home. I just put some gauze on it and finished my shift. I I went home that night and um I had to take some tweezers and some peroxide and I just started picking all all the pieces of that grinder blade.

[00:03:24]Please tell me you went to the hospital for what? It healed in like 2 weeks.

[00:03:28]Somebody really should have checked on them sooner. The entire generation is like that fish on Spongebob that goes into the salty Spatoon and goes, "This morning I had a bowl of nails for breakfast without any milk." And and I'm not knocking it. He's in better health than me half the time. But he should absolutely be dead. The man is somehow immune to infection and he's half bionic. I don't understand it that right there. I don't know if you can see it. Was cutting logs on a table saw cuz that was a smart thing to do.

[00:04:01]One kicked back said right there. That was that was a good day.

[00:04:10]Couple layers of painters tape held it back together.

[00:04:14]Gen X family, I got a new one. Is it just me? So, my husband and I are both Gen X and I brought this up last night because it came back to mind as we were having a conversation and he had no idea what I was talking about. So, we all know the cry I'll give you a reason to cry. Stop it crying and give you a reason to cry and right go outside till the light the street lights come on. It's time to come home. Like we all know those. So this is the one I need of answered.

[00:04:46]Did your parents ever say to you, "I hope you have a kid just like you when you grow up."

[00:04:53]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:04:54]>> So you deserve it?

[00:04:56]Is it just me whose mom said that?

[00:05:00]I'm feeling a little bit uh like maybe it was just my mom, but then I think about all the comments on my Gen X videos that people have made >> and I have a feeling it's not just me. I have a feeling there's a very core group of us whose parents said things like this. And my mom used to say it all the time when she'd be mad at me and my sister or she thought we were doing something that was annoying or what whatever laughing at the dinner table.

[00:05:27]She'd say, "I hope you when you grow up you have kids just like you. I hope you have a daughter just like you. You deserve it."

[00:05:36]>> I think that was a common phrase. I know. I heard it. I hope you have a kid just like you. When you when you have kids, you can see what it's like. Well, I got three of them and they are just like me and they're a lot of fun. So, I don't know what the I don't know what their problem was.

[00:05:56]I can I can venture a guess, but whatever.

[00:06:01]>> Is it just me?

[00:06:02]>> Nope. Not you.

[00:06:02]>> Let me know. Let me know in the comments if it's just me.

[00:06:05]>> It is not you. Can someone out there explain what it was like to live in the year 1984? Like, we haven't reached a pop culture peak like that ever or since.

[00:06:14]>> Let me see if I can try to explain what it was like to live in 1984, even though it feels impossible to explain because you kind of had to be there. See, it wasn't just the movies and the music and the pop culture. It felt like everything was happening for the first time at the same time, but we didn't know that. Not just because it was new, but because we didn't have anything else to compare it to. We didn't have access to everything all the time. We just had moments. And because you only had moments, you were completely experiencing them when they happened because there was nowhere else to be. There was no scrolling, no ranking, no deciding if something was better. You were just in it. And there was space for it to be great.

[00:06:51]>> We could do this now.

[00:06:53]We could totally make 1984 life happen now.

[00:06:59]Just saying.

[00:07:00]>> That's the part that's hard to explain.

[00:07:02]Now everything has to fight for attention. Optimized to grab every second of your day. We didn't have to fight for it. It just it just landed. We were there for it. We didn't stream movies. Got in your car and went and sat in the dark with a bunch of strangers and decided if the movie was good or not. No reviews, no Rotten Tomatoes, just you, your car, and a lot of commitment. Or you pulled your car into a drive-in and you watched it on a giant screen the size of a building under the night sky while you ate popcorn and pizza in your car. And it was a whole experience. It was the same with our music. You heard a song on the radio and you bought the whole album. Yep. All 12 tracks, no previews, no skips, just hope. $9.99 and the very real possibility that the rest of it was garbage. And sometimes it was. But sometimes you got something better than the song that got you there. Something that nobody told you about. And you only got it because you took the risk and you got lucky. Because those moments, they were great. And now we live in a world full of everything. every movie, every song, every show, five million options, and yet we will spend half our day scrolling and go to bed experiencing nothing. You can't fully feel the weight of something when you're holding a thousand things all at once. We didn't have that problem. We had one thing at a time and we were fully in it. The risk was the reward, but we didn't know that.

[00:08:17]I'd go back in a heartbeat, not just for the music or the movies or to watch Jordan become Jordan. I'd go back for the feeling of being completely inside of something because that's all there was. We had less, but it felt like more and we thought it was just life. Turns out that was the best part.

[00:08:37]>> There have been some disparaging remarks against Gen X this week. So, let me explain if you're younger why Gen X is different. It's different because all the generations before through baby boomers, there were stay-at-home mothers. uh most women didn't work. Some did economically, but most didn't. And so for Gen X, all of our moms went to work because of divorce, because of financial whatever. All of our moms worked and the system of afterchool care and daycarees and did not exist. So we just came home alone. Um and that every every day we were alone for many hours.

[00:09:16]And that kind of neglect fostered more neglect because they just stopped worrying about us. They were like, "She's fine." And you know, and so the the absolute unparented neglect part made us different. And we romantically like to remember our freedom because we had 100% freedom. They never knew where we were or who we were with. We were gone. Um but there were very scary situations that arose as you can imagine for a girl alone or you know children alone and um that's the part that we sometimes forget was that we were navigating all of that stuff alone or just with our friends. Um it has made us different.

[00:10:02]>> Here we are at 4:00 in the morning getting ready to put in another day at work.

[00:10:08]I see all these guys in here today that look like they're in their late 60s, like 60 to 65.

[00:10:18]>> See, a Gen Z would look at this guy and call him a boomer just cuz he's got gray in his beard. Not a boomer. Nah.

[00:10:26]>> They're all wearing construction clothes and all these guys are still working it.

[00:10:30]I It sucks, man. You you get up early every day to go in to pay more taxes, pay higher gas prices.

[00:10:42]>> Yeah, these countries aren't going to bomb themselves.

[00:10:44]>> It just seems like no matter how hard you work, it's never going to be enough.

[00:10:50]They got us right by the balls. 40 hours a week used to give you a good quality of life. Now, you can't you can't even get by on 40 hours a week.

[00:11:06]But this is for the working class, the people that get up early every day and go in and try their best and never give up. Not sure if it's a Gen X thing or what it is, but >> it's a Gen X thing, but >> it it's a Gen X thing, but it's also just a survival thing.

[00:11:25]They're still out there, still cr still chugging away.

[00:11:31]>> They keep pressing on. They don't give up.

[00:11:36]The people born from 1970s to the late 1980s.

[00:11:43]They're just a different breed.

[00:11:44]>> Well, early 198. They're things I just don't have the patience for anymore. And if you're Gen X, I think you're going to recognize every single one of these.

[00:11:55]After 50, you realize peace isn't free.

[00:11:59]What you allow into your life either protects it or it costs you. Here are three things I won't tolerate anymore.

[00:12:07]Number one, people I have to make excuses for.

[00:12:11]>> This dude's intimidating. I'm like, whoa, I will not tolerate this anymore.

[00:12:15]Like, okay, I'm listening, buddy. I'm I'm paying attention.

[00:12:22]>> You know the ones. That's just how they are. They don't mean it that way.

[00:12:27]They're going through a lot. We grew up learning to smooth things over, keep the peace, stay dependable. But at 58, I've stopped calling that loyalty. If someone consistently leaves you drained, dismissed, or walking on eggshells, that's a pattern, not a personality.

[00:12:46]Number two, performing like I still have something to prove. Gen X was wired to push through, work harder, handle it, don't complain, be useful. And for a long time, the staying busy felt like staying valuable. But after 50, your body starts telling the truth that your habits were hiding. The exhaustion, the tension in your body, the fact you can't remember the last time you truly rested.

[00:13:16]That's not strength. That's that's a habit. that's outlived its usefulness.

[00:13:23]>> What really sucks is when you finally find some time to literally just take a step back and rest.

[00:13:31]It doesn't work. You You feel like you're being lazy. It It's crazy. It It is impossible. Not impossible, I'm sure, but it is incredibly difficult to just do nothing.

[00:13:48]I don't know. Let me know in the comments what y'all think.

[00:13:51]>> And number three, and this is the one I think hits hardest, shrinking myself to keep other people comfortable, staying quiet when I needed to speak, downplaying my needs so nobody felt inconvenienced by them, making myself easier to manage so my growth didn't challenge anyone around me. At 58, almost 59, I'm done with that. I spent too many years making myself smaller.

[00:14:18]These days, I don't dim, I refine. And here's what I want to leave with you.

[00:14:24]The older I get, the clearer this becomes. Tolerating what drains you isn't kindness. Eventually, you wake up and realize you disappeared inside your own life. You're allowed to stop. And if this spoke to you, follow me. There's more where that came from.

[00:14:43]>> Yeah. But we were always told that doing anything like that, that's just being selfish. How dare you, selfish and lazy.

[00:14:50]I don't know if I'm going to ever be able to completely break free of that mindset. It's like something I have to constantly remind myself of that no, you're not being selfish. Putting yourself first is not selfish because all you're doing is putting yourself last and putting everyone else first and they don't care.

[00:15:08]>> Look, Gen X was taught basically to ignore all the warning signs. We have bulldozed our way through the majority of our life. No matter what stress we were under, no matter how tired we were, we kept going. I mean, let's be honest.

[00:15:25]We're the generation that partied until 5:00 a.m. and showed up at work in the same clothes wreaking of alcohol at 7 8 a.m. At some point, we have to decide to start taking care of ourselves. I'm not saying I'm living a cush soft life. What I'm saying is that maybe it's time for us to start supporting our bodies so that we can continue bulldozing our way through.

[00:15:52]>> Yeah, there's been there's been more than a couple comments on the videos about, "Hey, Gen X, the forgotten generation, we're not going to forget you. We're going to do some more Gen X stuff." Anytime you look up boomer stuff, it's me me poor me, poor me, are cutting their parents off. Anytime you look up Gen X stuff, tough as nails, raise themselves, power through.

[00:16:17]Yeah, Gen X deserves uh a lot more credit than they get. Yep. A little bit shorter of a video, but yeah, we're we're not going to forget about the Gen X.

[00:16:28]Like and subscribe if you want to.

[00:16:30]Appreciate you sticking around this long.

[00:16:34]See you.