[Please note that in the interest of time and the original spirit of this article, I am ignoring all discrepancies around race, gender, and other factors that have skewed privilege and opportunity over time… but they are not forgotten]

I hear and get all of the frustrations expressed in this piece, and in fact have experienced them myself. But it is interesting to see yet another in a seemingly endless stream of boomer-vs-millennial articles that literally disappears the entire Gen X population. Our “sandwich generation” is once again ignored… perhaps we should be called the Silenced Generation.

I’m joking to some extent (certainly note my caveat up top)… but not once is Gen X mentioned in this piece, or countless others like it. We — yes, I am squarely in that demographic — suffer many of the same frustrations that Millenials suffer, most of which stem from a Boomer (and even Silent Gen) population that refuses to give up control of whatever they have. We are all caught in this vice together, just at different points along the shrinking spectrum.

This will, of course, inevitably end; the Boomers will fade away eventually, and I predict that Gen X will suddenly re-appear in this type of article, cast as the new villains of the generations. Whoever is at the top is likely to face the ire of many below them.

There are key differences between Boomers and Gen X, however. As noted above, we are used to invisibility and a measure of disappointment that no other surviving generation has experienced in the same way.

For the Boomers, life may have started rough, but for many in that group it has been a pretty rosy and steady upward trajectory for them. Why would they WANT to give that up?

Millenials grew up in a world where Reaganomics and radical income inequality had already taken taken off, AIDS (the first real pandemic in many American’s living memory) was a factor, the environmental crisis was known and growing, if ignored; computers were ubiquitous, for better and worse. They have grown up in a world of consumer plenty but declining social safety, in which no matter how fast you run the American Dream train keeps pulling further out of reach.

A large swath of the forgotten Gen X is experiencing those very same challenges. The key difference is that we grew up with the PROMISE of the utopia that was life for the Boomers, and the expectation that we should do what they did to live a reasonably happy and successful life. But that was a false promise. We have lived to watch that utopia get fragmented and the biggest pieces grabbed by the most ruthless (or lucky) among us, leaving the rest of us pedaling faster and wondering what happened to the scenery.

We ARE more likely to have the blessing, in some privileged cases, of generational wealth, inheriting the resources still being gathered from our parents pensions, insurance, investments, etc, if we were lucky enough to be born into that. The “afterglow” of the Boomer era of plenty. But this is a much smaller segment of our population than it should be, as wealth gets vastly concentrated and the costs of what used to be baseline assumptions now skyrocket.

The other difference is that we in the Gen X are older and more tired. We have far less time or energy to overcome the broken promises, close those gaps, and have a prayer of living out our lives without working to the end. Retirement is not a concept many of us are likely to realize in the form we were told it should take.

Gen X was raised to believe we could achieve that life of two kids, two cars, a house, a comfortable lifestyle, and a reasonable retirement with social security, all on a single income. All we had to do was work hard and go to college and it would happen just like it did for our parents. To some extent, for some of us, that has even been true… but it has not gone at all the way we were led to believe.

Millenials have likely never fully bought into in that form of the American dream, growing up with a certain cynicism that was necessary to make it at all. But Gen X was raised to believe in unicorns unironically; we just lived to learn that it was a fiction all along, and now there is a price to be paid.

We’re not alone in this disillusionment, to be sure, but please stop leaving us out of the conversation altogether.