I was born in 1971. I can’t speak for all of Gen X, but my experience growing up in the 80s is that I was presented with “everything’s fine, you just need to get a job and it’ll all work out.” So that’s what I did, and got nowhere fast. Married too early to the wrong person because pooling our resources seemed to be the only way out, then still struggled to get anywhere. Everything pointed to “I guess we’re just not trying hard enough.” Follow this with depression, divorce, working multiple jobs at a time to keep a roof over my head…

I think plenty of Gen X were just on the the earlier edge of the wave that became what it is today.