Nine years ago, in the immediate aftermath of yet another British general election that left everyone claiming victory while secretly nursing a hangover, I penned a modest manifesto on behalf of my fellow travellers in Generation X. We were, I declared with the breezy confidence of a man who had just discovered that his mortgage was slightly less ruinous than expected, the overlooked middle child of history: industrious yet playful, cynical yet optimistic, the generation that invented the internet only to watch everyone else monetise it.
We had, I argued, the best of both worlds — the Boomers’ work ethic without their nostalgia for ration books, the Millennials’ tech-savviness without their conviction that a strongly worded hashtag constitutes civic engagement. While the old and the young squared up to each other like rival stag parties in a provincial nightclub, we — Generation X — would quietly get on with saving the world. And, I added with a flourish, we would do so without expecting anyone to pick up the bill for both sides’ mistakes. How young I was then. How touchingly naïve. I return to the subject now, in the chill opening weeks of 2026, prompted by a post on what we must still call Twitter — or X, if one wishes to sound like a failed Bond villain — from a Canadian observer who has articulated, with admirable economy, the quiet despair that has settled over my cohort like a damp North Atlantic fog. “Gen X lived, and will die, in the shadow of the Boomers,” he wrote. “We’ll never really get our turn. They’ll still outvote us for another 10 to 15 years, and when they’re gone, Millennials and Gen Z will take over right where they left off. Gen X will never truly have a say. That’s why we’re pissed.”
One does not need to be Canadian to recognise the sentiment. One merely needs to be alive, solvent, and born between, roughly, 1965 and 1980. The numbers, those remorseless actuaries of human ambition, are unambiguous. The Baby Boomers — that vast, echoing cohort born in the afterglow of victory and penicillin — continue to dominate the electoral rolls with the serene implacability of a herd of elderly elephants refusing to yield the watering hole. Higher turnout among the over-55s, a phenomenon as predictable as the tide, ensures that their preferences — lower taxes on pensions, higher spending on healthcare, and a vague suspicion of anything invented after the compact disc — remain the default setting of democratic politics.
Meanwhile, the Millennials and their younger siblings in Gen Z, armed with the megaphone of social media and the moral certainty of people who have never known a world without Wi-Fi, are already queuing impatiently at the stage door. And there we stand, Generation X, in the wings, clutching our dog-eared scripts and wondering whether the director has forgotten we exist. It is not merely a matter of demographics, though demographics are cruel enough. In Britain, as in Canada and much of the Anglosphere, the Boomers’ numerical advantage, combined with their enthusiastic participation in the democratic process, has kept the political conversation anchored in the late twentieth century. We are governed, to a remarkable degree, by people who came of age when the Berlin Wall was still standing and the threat of nuclear annihilation lent a certain urgency to one’s choice of hairstyle. Even when the faces change, the assumptions remain: property is the only reliable store of wealth, the welfare state must be preserved in amber, and the young should jolly well stop complaining and get on with it, just as we did.
Yet the young, bless their cotton socks, have no intention of getting on with it. They have discovered the novel expedient of voting in large numbers for parties that promise to redistribute the remaining assets of the middle-aged downwards, ideally before the middle-aged have finished paying off their student loans from the 1990s. The result is a pincer movement of rare elegance: the Boomers guarding the past, the Millennials seizing the future, and Generation X compressed in the middle like a forgotten slice of processed cheese in a gourmet sandwich. One might have expected, back in 2017, that our moment would arrive naturally. After all, we were entering our prime earning years, our cultural references were suddenly retro-chic, and our leaders — Trudeau in Canada, Macron in France, even our own fleeting experiments with middle-aged competence — were beginning to appear on the world stage. Surely, I thought, the Boomers would eventually retire to their cruises and their conservatories, leaving us to impose a sensible, ironic order on the proceedings.
Alas, biology is not so accommodating. Advances in medicine — many of them, ironically, developed by Gen X scientists who grew up watching too much Star Trek — have extended Boomer lifespans to the point where actuarial tables now resemble optimistic science fiction. They are not merely living longer; they are voting longer. And when, eventually, the inevitable actuarial correction arrives, the stage will not be cleared for us. It will be occupied by a generation that has grown up believing that disagreement constitutes violence and that the primary function of government is to validate one’s identity.
There is, I confess, a certain comic symmetry to our predicament. We who prided ourselves on our independence — latchkey children who learned to microwave our own dinners while our parents pursued self-actualisation — now find ourselves permanently supervised. We who mocked the Boomers’ nostalgia for the post-war consensus are now nostalgic for the 1990s, when house prices were merely extortionate rather than hallucinogenic. We who once dismissed Millennials as fragile now watch them reshape institutions with the serene confidence of people who have never been told no. Some insist that we have only ourselves to blame: we raised Gen Z, and must therefore accept responsibility for their more exotic pronoun preferences. A few cling to the hope that longevity research will keep us around long enough to enjoy the fruits of our own ingenuity, like elderly rock stars refusing to leave the stage after the encore.
All of which is true, yet none of it alters the central fact: we are the intermission generation. Our cultural contributions — grunge, Britpop, the first tentative steps toward a digital world — have been absorbed and commodified by others. Our political leaders, when we produce them, are swiftly co-opted into the prevailing orthodoxies of left or right. Our characteristic stance — sceptical, self-deprecating, allergic to ideology — is precisely what renders us unfit for power in an age that demands absolute conviction. There is, perhaps, a bleak consolation in this. While the Boomers and Millennials engage in their interminable culture war, each convinced of their own moral superiority, we remain free to observe the spectacle with the detached amusement of the true cynic. We know how these stories end: the Boomers will eventually depart, taking with them their encyclopaedic knowledge of the Beatles’ B-sides; the Millennials and Gen Z will inherit a world they believe they invented; and somewhere in the middle, a small cohort of middle-aged people will continue to fix the Wi-Fi, pay the taxes, and occasionally permit themselves a wry smile at the absurdity of it all.
In 2017, I concluded with the hopeful assertion that Generation X had this in hand. Today, with the wisdom of added years and subtracted illusions, I revise that verdict. We never had it in hand. We were merely passing through, briefly illuminated by the stage lights before the next act began. And yet, in our quiet, sardonic way, we endure — the only generation capable of laughing at its own irrelevance. That, at least, is something the others cannot take from us.