X was not a class, but a “self-cultivated” meritocratic “category” in which anyone could join: “You are not born an X person, as you are born and reared a prole or a middle. The final chapter of Class is called “The X Way Out” where Fussell identifies an emerging group in society he calls “Category X” - well-educated, Bohemian-like consumers who construct obscure lifestyles in order to transcend traditional status symbols. In Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties, Coupland reveals that he lifted it not from the name of Billy Idol's punk band (although “Dancing with Myself” is a great pop song that happened to open my brothers’ 1988 college mixtape “PARTY TAPE FROM HELL”), but instead, the 'X' came from Paul Fussell’s 1983 book Class - an incredibly acerbic and often cruel book about American socioeconomic stratification. The reason Coupland chose 'X' is quite revealing. Demographers and media pundits took the term directly from the Canadian author Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, a book that contemplated and encapsulated the supposed post-materialist ethics of people born between 19.

Of course, Gen Z and Gen Y were just plays on 'Generation X,' and it's worth remembering that the 'X' wasn't an arbitrary designation. This is a good reminder not to begin your alphabetic division of demographic cohorts at letter 24 of 26. Someone the other day mused what we would call the generation after “Gen Z,” since we’ve already landed at the very end of the English alphabet.

Douglas Coupland's book Generation X ended up giving his demographic cohort a permanent name, but we shouldn't overlook the deeper cultural implications of his logic in choosing 'X.'

Generation x by douglas coupland