Sandwiched between the indulged Baby Boomer and the entitled Millennial, Generation X is the dark moody one with an ageing vinyl collection, a fine-tuned sense of irony and (possibly still) a student loan. But we're pushing 50, reports Philip Matthews (born 1968). Isn't it time we grew up?

The first question I wanted to ask everyone is if they feel like an adult yet. Do you feel like a grown up? You may be approaching 50, or even past 50, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of middle age, but inside you feel 18 or 21 or 32.

And you never asked yourself, how did I get here? It is not uncommon, that sense of not recognising the old person in the mirror. It might even be the human condition. But the mid-life crisis of Generation X seems particularly acute or poignant because they – and I really mean "we" – are a generation shaped by crisis and alienation in the first place.

PAUL BERGEN/GETTY IMAGES Moody, noisy and sensitive: Nirvana were the ultimate Generation X soundtrack.

We should be running the world by now. But look around. It's wall to wall Baby Boomers. Donald Trump is 70, Theresa May is 60, Angela Merkel, Malcolm Turnbull and Francoise Hollande​ are all 62. John Key and Bill English are at the young end of the Boomer cohort at just 55 but English was always a young fogey. He seemed like your dad even when he was in his twenties.

The older still run things and, increasingly, the Millennials define the interesting culture. Eleanor Catton, Hera Lindsay Bird, Lorde – all were born after 1980.

In broad terms, the Boomers were born between the end of World War II and the early 1960s. Generation X runs from the early-mid 1960s to about 1980. Generation Y, or the Millennials, is everyone born since.

FRED PROUSER Generation X role models Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain and baby Frances Bean in 1992, before everything went wrong.

Canadian writer Douglas Coupland gave the generation a name that was not a name in a novel published in 1991, Generation X. One of his characters talks about his experience of Japan – it was very Gen X to delay your real adult life by spending time in Japan – where people in their twenties were known as "new human beings". He says: "We have the same group over here [the US] and it's just as large, but it doesn't have a name – an X generation – purposefully hiding itself. There's more space over here to hide in."

As that implies, Generation X could drop out and stay in simultaneously. You did not believe in work but you still worked. You had doubts about consumerism but you still shopped. You developed an ironic relationship with history, nostalgia and culture. You enjoyed what you knew to be rubbish (70s television, kitsch, movies like Wayne's World) because it communicated some kind of unnameable sadness. You watched the internet arrive and believed in its utopian promises.

You were probably alienated from mainstream party politics, which allowed neo-liberalism and privatisation to flourish. In fact, you probably benefited from the new abundance of choice and social liberalism, while feeling relatively powerless about the ways those things oppressed you: the student debt and high university fees you were stuck with, rising house prices and comparatively stagnant wages.

David White Writer Emily Perkins: "We have a really good sense of what we were lucky enough to get and what has been lost."

You were told you would be the first generation to be less wealthy than your parents. Which may be part of the reason why it took so long to feel like an adult yourself. As you got older, you had a sickening realisation that you would not be able to give as much as to your own kids as your parents gave to you.

Coupland did not coin the word "McJob", meaning "a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector", but he popularised it. Generation X was a novel that came with a glossary and statistics. A lot of it was remarkably prescient, and is more true now than it was in 1991. "McJobs" spoke of the new precariousness of work. "Brazilification" was Coupland's way of describing the widening gap between rich and poor, which we now call inequality, and "the accompanying disappearance of the middle class".

Most of us didn't notice that the middle class was falling into a void until the Global Financial Crisis a decade ago. The idea that the present is so much worse than the past was seen as one of the main reasons for Trump and Brexit last year. Did Generation X predict them? Coupland was onto it 26 years ago, and the world has only just caught up with him and us. That uncertainty about the future is the dominant mood of the book.

Chris Skelton/Fairfax NZ Broadcaster Wallace Chapman: "You were always going to wear that Nirvana T-shirt and grunge sneakers."

What future? Coupland's characters grew up expecting full nuclear destruction in their lifetimes. Nuclear anxiety is another of our generation's shared experiences. We knew everything about nuclear winters and mutually assured destruction. When nuclear terror moved to the background, you simply transferred your anxiety to the worsening environment, pictured in the same cataclysmic terms.

The book is a catalogue of anxieties. "Homeowner envy" sounds familiar. Coupland defined it in 1991 as "feelings of jealousy generated in the young and the disenfranchised when facing gruesome housing statistics". Your resentment should always have a focus. In the novel, Dagmar, who has a McJob as a bartender, vandalises a car simply because it has a smug bumper sticker that reads, "We're spending our children's inheritance".

Fair enough, maybe. It's one thing to rob the generation beneath you but it's another thing to boast about it. This is also how Gen X is suddenly relevant again. The language of generational warfare had mostly disappeared, other than for think pieces about whether Millennials really are entitled and narcissistic or just seem that way, but it all came rushing back when Boomer Prime Minister Bill English decided that his generation should keep getting national superannuation no matter what.

Mike Scott Politician Nandor Tanczos: "It has been fascinating to watch the previous generation take all the benefits from their parents, then refuse to pass them on to their kids."

If you are born in 1972 or before, you will get super at 65. Half of Gen X and all Millennials need to work until 67 at least. It fits the Gen X narrative about Boomers. They had it easy and then wouldn't stop gorging on everyone else's share.

It was left to 36-year-old Labour deputy leader Jacinda Ardern, who sits on the exact cusp between Gen X and Millennial, to be the Dagmar of the narrative and see the policy in generational terms. She said the generation who paid for their own education and are unable to buy a house now have to pick up the tab for everyone else's retirement.

Right on. Maybe age can be the new identity politics. Gen X: too young to retire, too old to use Snapchat, the overlooked middle child of the generational debate.

In New Zealand, the golden age of Generation X produced one good book, some bad TV and lots of art. The book was Emily Perkins' short story collection, Not Her Real Name. The characters had McJobs and McRelationships. Local TV? There was a notorious series called City Life, which was all gritty handheld cameras, Auckland warehouse settings and soap opera bed-hopping. Like Friends or Reality Bites, it got the broad social trends but not the sadness or meaning and it was pulled off air within weeks. The good art came from people like Michael Parekowhai​, Saskia Leek and Peter Robinson who nailed a particularly local blend of humour and seriousness, high culture and trash.

The internet aside, the world that Coupland described doesn't seem old. Not as old as 1965 would have seemed in 1991, anyway. Perhaps the world has ended and somehow it always been 1991? While the superannuation argument brought back the chin-stroking, sociological side of Generation X, it has reappeared in popular culture too. The Pixies are still on tour. Twin Peaks is almost back on television.

But one thing really said the early 1990s were back. One particular sighting. Did you ever think you would ever see Generation X it girl Winona Ryder again? No wonder she looked so confused at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. We felt the same way. But stranger things have happened.

VOICES OF A GENERATION: THREE X-ERS REFLECT

Emily Perkins, writer (born 1970)

Did she identify as Generation X? "I loved the Douglas Coupland book. Alienation or pessimism was being framed creatively in an interesting and energetic way. Like most things, I didn't mind thinking it about myself but didn't want anybody else to apply it to me.

"When Not Her Real Name was referred to as a Generation X book, I felt it was reductive and belittling. But 20 years on, that term is neutralised for me. Now I would very comfortably say I'm Generation X because it sums up an age group. Now the Millennials have to take all the s--- we had to take. Generation X has completely lost its complaining rights. We have a really good sense of what we were lucky enough to get and what has been lost."

Do you feel like a grown up yet? "It totally depends on what you mean by grown up. There is a difference between the material trappings of adulthood and the kind of certainty we might ascribe to adulthood. Maybe we just think our parents were like that because they were our parents. Maybe they were roiling masses of self-doubt as well."

Wallace Chapman, broadcaster (born 1969)

"There were things in pop culture I fully identified with. The key cultural landmarks for me were a couple of films, Slacker and Clerks. They were totally f...ing plotless, pretty unfocused. I was in Dunedin and they really spoke to me. I shared that lack of focus. Millennials are typically seen as extraordinarily driven. Perhaps one could say early Gen Xers didn't have that sense of drive."

Do you still think in generational terms? "I don't. Gen Xers were actually pretty entrepreneurial, particularly in the tech industry. I don't see generations as much as class. When I go to Greenlane hospital to get a bone scan, I see a lot of Baby Boomers who are absolutely struggling. When we think of Boomers we see two Pakeha people. They might have a bach on Waiheke. They're drinking a nice chardonnay on their deck and have a tidy investment somewhere."

Do you feel like a grown up yet? "I'm a middle-aged man but I don't see myself as that and lots of people don't see me as that. I've had to remind myself to start acting my age. Gen X was always young at heart. You were always going to wear that Nirvana T-shirt and grunge sneakers."

Nandor Tanczos, Whakatane District Councillor (born 1966)

"I saw myself described as a '50-year-old gentleman' on an official document the other day. It was a brutal opening line, I thought. But I became an adult when my first child was born and my ego took permanent second place. We mostly lack meaningful rituals and ceremonies and go through life without feeling we grew up until something like the birth of a child happens.

"I received some of the benefits that the Boomers enjoyed – I got the last year of free university education – but I also spent my adult life in the harsh new world of neoliberalism. It has been fascinating to watch the previous generation take all the benefits from their parents, then refuse to pass them on to their kids. To be fair, though, you can't blame a whole generation for what their governments did and the struggle between greed and compassion is the struggle of every generation and individual.

"Weirdly I feel more optimistic as we race ever quicker towards the cliff. I have a profound faith in our ability to collectively understand what we are doing to the world and ourselves. I see us waking up."