I think that kind of generational trashing is actually eternal human behaviour – we all just never collectively lived long enough before to see it repeatedly deployed. It has been entertaining for me over the last 15 years to see the exact same venom that was thrown at Gen X being thrown at Gen Y (millennials): they whine, they’re lazy, they’re useless and all of that. The false assumption of human sameness is a key ingredient in generational discussions, because without it, you can’t demonise younger people – and there’s a ton of money to be made from demonising the young. It’s been entertaining for me to see the exact same venom that was thrown at Gen X being thrown at millennials Generations are united and divided over sentimental markers much more than when they were born. Now that I see myself as an app, I see one of my jobs is to explain the old era to the new era, but there’s nothing quite so micro-humiliating as making a Brady Bunch reference and the room going silent. Marketeers love to carbon date generations. I was born in the 20th century at a specific moment in human history where my brain was exposed to TV and film and then, starting in the late 80s, digital technologies. At some point I realised X had become something other than me.

It would be preposterous to think otherwise.” The thing about a term like “Gen X” is that everyone has his or her own definition, and people always wanted me to agree with theirs. I spent much of the early 90s in TV studios with perplexed interviewers saying: “But surely all young people are boomers. Let me tell you from experience that nothing makes you cringe more on the inside than being introduced somewhere as a voice of a generation. ‘There’s nothing so micro-humiliating as making a Brady Bunch reference and the room going silent.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo The term became a meme back when society only had five or six of them a year. It became a cliche that every other advertising montage showed someone sledge-hammering the Berlin Wall – and there was this new group of younger people who obviously didn’t fit into any pre-existing category, so who were they? Marshall McLuhan wrote that the oversimplification of anything is always exciting, which is I think what happened with Gen X. Why accelerated? By the tail end of the 80s and the start of the 90s it felt as if history was finally emerging from locked-in syndrome. In the late 1980s, I disliked being classified as a baby boomer so much that I had to invent my way out of it my debut novel, published 30 years ago, was called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. How you identify has always been a big deal. I filter the ways I experience the world. I’m 59 and a half years old – and these days I no longer feel that I identify as a human being.

Generation x douglas coupland review