Consulting as Gen X: Is being the “Lost Generation” a secret weapon?

Don't ask why (or blame my age), but I was pondering yesterday whether there was any value in being a Gen Xer in the consulting business.

Remember who we are?

Probably not. That's our feature as a generation. Always forgotten.

We are the generation that got stuck between two worlds. A world that no longer exists, one of profusion and abundance, and a new world starting to appear; a harder world, economically tougher, where social realities became stronger. We’ve always been “in between”, an odd generation out. I think that this experience of being almost locked out, but not entirely, gave us a strange and maybe powerful vantage point when used properly.

See, we witnessed the end of the old certainties that our Boomers' parents trusted, but we never had the optimism of Millennials, who were already in a post-crisis world. Us? We were just thrown into the deep end of a new reality. That taught us to understand both nostalgia for a stability we never directly experienced and the pragmatism needed to navigate chaos, making us uniquely effective at bridging different realities. Not by choice but rather as the messy result of a Darwinian necessity. We were the first to struggle finding housing... but we could still access it (eventually). The first to face profound job insecurity, unable to find work easily... but without the job market being completely locked down (yet). The first to understand that nope, we won't have only one job for our entire life... but not yet in slashing mode.

This gave us the ability to operate without clear rules or guarantees, being cautiously pessimistic about everything and taking the upsides when we find them.

And when I hear the terms 'digital native' applied to Gen Y or Z, I cringe. We were the first proper digital natives. Not completely immersed in the digital world, true, but our digital world was of the 80s, where you had to charge operating systems with floppy disks in beige boxes the size of mini-fridges and type stuff in command lines without mice, resizable windows, or icons (at least for quite some time). A proper (if harsh) digital upbringing. One that depended on understanding what was under the hood, making us pragmatic about technology, and understanding digital power, without worshiping it because we knew its guts.

I think that all this in some way made us pretty good at being on the outside, not main characters but involved spectators, inventing for ourselves a posture, sometimes distant, sometimes curious. A detachment that probably played a role in many professions, like journalism or, yes, consulting.

Also, with our entire adult life shaped by transitions we didn’t choose, we are less attached to rigid structures. We know that a truth today might become wrong tomorrow. And it's OK, it's as it should be. Over the years, a form of reinvention has been necessary for all of us.

With all that, and just because I've been around for fifty-odd years, there's also the notion for me that I haven't seen it all (not by any means), but I've seen quite a lot. I now know things. Something I vividly remember from when I was younger, during my PhD, or later as a junior in the corporate world. Seniors who would just know what to do precisely in hectic moments or difficult juncture points without seemingly breaking a sweat, and have a certainty about them that they were properly knowing what to do. Not just pretending.

Feeling I'm genuinely there now, is quite interesting...

Why do I write about this?

I'm not sure.

But it's summer. And maybe we should all (re)read Douglas Coupland's Generation X and compare notes on our present.