If the narrative of Gen X is that we’re highly cynical slackers, and always has been, we should not gloss over how Baby Boomers helped shape that narrative. It is also true that many Gen Xers took on cynicism as a key aspect of their identity. Meanwhile, our contributions to culture have often been ignored and overlooked. Quite a few members of Gen X took punk’s DIY attitude to its logical conclusion, building up alternatives to the mainstream culture where young people could practice forms of consumer democracy. The insistence on understanding Gen X only via the lens of negative cynicism—aloof, scathing, tuned out—ignores the many contributions made by Gen X to the culture, especially to popular culture. As a generation, we leaned hard into culture not just based on cynicism, but on anti-commercialism. The internet provides an example of that. In the early days of the World Wide Web (WWW) after Eternal September in 1993, Gen X found new ways to make and share culture. When we say the WWW, we don’t mean the internet itself. That existed prior to the WWW, as did cultural exchange on the internet. Many Gen Xers with access to computers created the earliest culture on the WWW. They often created culture for its own sake, for the pure fun of it. A good example is the Brothers Chaps, creators of the website Homestar Runner, which started as a book project in 1996. They still make videos for the Homestar Runner website. Despite its online popularity in the early 2000s, the series was never sold off to be monetized by a corporation. Today, it remains a sort of underground phenomenon for those in the know. Projects like Homestar Runner perhaps smacked of a kind of cynicism that questioned the mode of production for much of our pop culture. But the videos they made had a playful sense of optimism, too.
Their work tells us that we can create things for its own sake, rather than for simply building wealth. This sort of culture both appeals to our sense of insiderism that makes cynicism so attractive, but to our instinct for community building via the production of culture.
Digging deeper into the history of phenomenon such as post-punk or the early WWW culture, a new way of thinking about the cynicism of Gen X presents itself. The poster on reddit could be correct—Gen X is not nearly as darkly cynical as we are often perceived. A recent Ted-Ed video details a historical overview of cynicism as a philosophical stance, starting with Diogenes of Sinope. His primary philosophy, the narrator noted, was later taken up by the hippies and I’d argue some punks.