People talk a lot about millennials as if they were some sort of brand new species, a wussy-feely generation faced with an unprecedentedly bad social lot: priced out of the housing market, doomed to the gig economy, their whole existence monetized for advertisers, and so on.

An obvious way to test whether this characterisation is apt is just to look at previous generations and see if this is so — is there something markedly different about millennials?

The generation prior to millennials are called generation x, and they are done so in homage to Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X. Thus a bit of low-hanging intellectual fruit is to check out that novel and see if its characters are markedly different from millennials as characterised in the popular press.

You might be forgiven for thinking that they would be markedly different. After all, wasn’t the 90s a time of emotional stuntedness and disaffection typified, say, by Nirvana, the smiling nihilism of Seinfeld, the angst of Fight Club? And wasn’t it a time of unprecedented economic growth (4% per annum during Clinton’s years)? One might be forgiven for thinking that generation x was disaffected but prosperous, and thus opposite to millennials who are affectionate but broke.

That would a mistake, though. If you look at Generation X, the supposedly voice of a generation text, you’ll see that its young people were just as emotionally open and economically alienated as the young people today, and moreover — and less surprisingly — exhibited the same mistrust towards the megabrands that wove into their lives as facebook and uber weave into milennials’.

I’ll make this point basically just by presenting a bunch of quotes from Generation X, centred around the three topics of economic alienation, mistrust of brands, and emotional openness.