Outraged by Outrage

In 1993, when I was twenty-one, several of my friends and I appeared on the front page of the arts and life section of the Winnipeg Free Press. Wearing our army boots and band T‑shirts, we were illustrating a story on Generation X, the cohort born between roughly 1965 and 1980. The lighthearted piece, a primer of sorts for older readers on this newly named generation, depicted our supposed cynicism and disaffection with almost everything but irony. At the time, there was a lot of talk about my generation, the successors to the baby boomers. Demographers had named us after a Douglas Coupland novel, and Hollywood movies such as Singles and Reality Bites documented our many quirks and foibles.

We’ve since fallen off the demographic radar. Two years ago, Forbes called Xers the “forgotten generation,” in an article about targeted marketing; numerous newspaper and magazine pieces about home ownership, job security, and other metrics of success...