CORPORATE AMERICA, EVERYWHERE USA (The Daily Whatever Press) — Members of Generation X learned this week that Millennials and GenZ are fighting over who gets to have jobs and who should be forced to give them up and retire, as if that’s a thing people still get to do. GenX had not been invited, consulted, or apparently counted among the living or employed.
“We’re right here,” said a 54-year-old woman holding a printout of her bleak AF 401(k) balance. “We have been right fucking here the whole time.”
GenX was never invited to the retirement party, and also — there is no party.
Here’s what happened: earlier this month, a GenZ TikToker posted a video telling Millennials, “Y’all need to retire so we can have some jobs open for us.” It has since been deleted. Millennials responded the way people raised on AIM away messages respond to everything, which is with a bit. One creator said Millennials have 68 people sharing a single streaming password, so retirement isn’t exactly on deck. A 44-year-old TikToker said she’d leave tomorrow if someone could tell her how to pay for it.
VICE wrote it up. Everybody had a great time.
GenX shows up in that coverage exactly once. It’s a single embedded TikTok from a guy pointing out that GenX had been forgotten, again. So the only mention of GenX in a story about generations fighting over jobs is a clip of a man saying GenX isn’t mentioned. You could not write this timeline, and I write not-quite-fake news for a living, or at least, a side-hustle. Because GenX needs those, too.
It’s Ferris Bueller, except Ben Stein reads the attendance sheet from Boomers straight to Millennials and never even says our name. Bueller?
No. He skips the whole row.
GenX is now somewhere between 46 and 61 years old, and we’re the first generation that was expected to retire on a 401(k). Our parents got pensions. We got a login, a pamphlet about index funds, and a guy named Chad from benefits who said the market “always comes back.” Then the dot-com bubble burst, then 2008 happened, then a pandemic happened, and Chad probably got promoted.
In 2023 the National Institute on Retirement Security published a major study on how GenX is doing. They titled it “New Report Finds Alarming Retirement Outlook for Generation X.” No shit, we all muttered in unison. No one listened. The study found the typical GenX household had $40,000 in retirement savings. The median for GenX women was $6,000.
Six. Thousand. Dollars. That’s a used Honda Civic with a check-engine light and freaking cassette deck. That’s what a generation of women got for doing the part-time-work-plus-all-the-caregiving shuffle the system was built to extract from us for free. We raised the kids. Now we’re managing our parents’ Medicare paperwork.
And somehow our average retirement plan is a four-digit number.
This year, 49% of GenXers said they think they’ll be financially prepared for retirement. That’s the lowest of any generation, below GenZ, who have barely started. Totally tubular, amirite?
To the 23-year-old with 300 applications out: you have every right to be pissed. You’re just pissed at the wrong people.
Revelio Labs, a workforce data firm, found that the average age of a new hire rose sharply after 2022 and passed 42 by 2025. Over the same stretch, the share of new hires under 25 dropped from about 16% to single digits. Meanwhile, the share of people 65 and older starting new jobs shot up. Grandpa did not retire. Grandpa un-retired and took the sales job. And Stanford researchers found that employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed fields like software and customer service sits about 19% below where it would’ve been.
Here’s a memo I found in a corporate break room:
“Per our refreshed talent strategy, we will hire zero (0) 23-year-olds this fiscal year. The 38-year-old’s role will transition to an AI agent named Kyle. The 54-year-old will train Kyle, and then RIFed. She will not be thanked. Pizza Friday is canceled.”
I made that memo up. But ask anyone over 45 with a corporate badge how made-up it feels.
The villain in this story isn’t a Millennial hogging a cubicle. It’s the company upstairs that worked out it can skip hiring both of you, once the woman in her 50s has documented every process in a Confluence page nobody will read.
On the same site, in the same week, VICE published a piece called “Every Millennial Will Remember These 3 Alternative Rock Hits From 1999.” It ran with a photo of the Foo Fighters.
Dave Grohl was born in 1969. He was in Nirvana. He is one of ours. Down the same sidebar there’s a piece on Kathleen Hanna’s favorite albums. Kathleen Hanna, born 1968, invented half the reasons I’m the mouthy feminist killjoy I am.
So let me get the custody arrangement straight. Millennials get our music. GenZ gets our jobs, or would if anyone were hiring. Boomers get to retire, mostly. And GenX gets to be the one generation that both younger groups forget exists, while they argue over the stuff we made.
I spent the early 2000s running a Seattle music website. You can have my job, sweetie. You cannot have Kathleen Hanna. Dave Grohl? Eh, these days he’s still ick.
But you can’t take Nirvana away from us.
The thing that kills me is that GenX already lived through a youth jobs crisis. It was the early ’90s. Douglas Coupland named the dead-end low-wage gig a “McJob.” Winona Ryder spent all of Reality Bites getting turned down for jobs she was overqualified for while we all thought greasy-haired Ethan Hawke was hot when it fact he was tedious and horrible. We graduated into a recession, got told we were slackers, and then built the internet. You’re welcome.
Nobody retired to make room for us, either. We just got older and waited for the line to move, and it never did. We hit the front and found out the counter had been turned into a self-checkout.
I’m raising two GenZ daughters. I’d give either of them my desk tomorrow, ergonomic chair and all, if retiring didn’t mean living in a 2004 Subaru with a 401(k) worth about as much as said Subaru.
So here’s what I’d suggest instead of a generational cage match. The 23-year-old, the 38-year-old, and the 54-year-old should stop fighting over the same three jobs and go upstairs together. The people up there have spent 40 years turning pensions into pamphlets, entry-level jobs into chatbots, and retirement into a vibe. That’s who owes all of us an answer.
Bueller? Bueller?
Here. Still fucking here.
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As an elder millennial, I am 100% on team Gen X. Here with solidarity. It's the boomers that are the problem and no, I don't want to kill them.
It’s me again. I retired from federal service last year and my annuity is on the small side, contrary to popular belief. I tap into my TSP (read 401k) to supplement it and eye the market warily. Every pay raise I upped the % of my salary going towards my TSP. Full disclosure—I worked in DoD and yes, I was paid well. I also had to go without a raise for three years while property taxes and property insurance rose. I refinanced my mortgage to save some money. Last year as the DOGE buzzsaw started its dirty work, I was offered an early retirement. They threatened to fire the probationary employees. I saw the writing on the wall and said like a true Gen Xer—“fuck this shit” and took the early out. I’m glad I did considering the shit show in progress. And by the looks of it, it was primarily Gen Xers who took the early outs and DRPs. Granted, my parents have passed on and I have no children, but living on a single annuity and 401k is daunting. I’m still a few years out from collecting Social Security and word in the street that the powers that be are meeting behind closed doors to fuck (read destroy it) with that too. The generations that came after us should listen to what our experiences have been. They could learn a lot!