I think every generation has myths it tells about itself. This is why older people are often upset that "Boomer" is now so frequently used a pejorative; it was the generation that famously said never to trust anyone over 30, and now they're the people folks under 30 definitively do not trust.
As someone coming right at the end of it, I do feel like Gen X has a lot of myths about itself that it tells and I am never entirely sure if it believes them or not.
As someone born "smack in the middle" of the Generation X cohort, we can't even admit to ourselves how terrible we are as a group. Like how at least half of us were die hard Reaganites before we could even vote.
Where the US (and the world) is today is as much on us as it is on Baby Boomers.
Reagan imprinted so hard on gen x baby birds that to overcome it you had to have parents who *hated* him and also watch imports of Spitting Image on HBO or whatever.
Never liked him at all, and my opinion was reinforced when I read "The President's Speech" in Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985).
He describes patients in the aphasia ward laughing uproariously at Reagan's delivery and mannerisms because the import of his words was lost...
"There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal…The President ... was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?”
Aphasic patients are better able to tell when someone is lying, fearful, or hiding something.
“it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients."
