Films such as Clerks and Reality Bites and Suburbia were said to display Gen X's slacker ethos.
TV's Friends was the flagship Gen X sitcom.
Grunge was their music. After Kurt Cobain killed himself, I heard Courtney Love say on the radio, "We Gen Xers have lost our John Lennon."
The media, at least, never portrayed Gen X as particularly conservative. Xers were portrayed as cynical nihilists who rejected corporate culture, patriotism, as well as hippie idealism
The term was assigned to that generation before they were even born just as future generations are already being named today even though they dont yet exist.
(Most of us were too busy working and partying to spend time “slacking” by watching those types of stupid movies.)
The first half and the second half are almost different generations unto themselves. By 94 when Friends went on the air we were already in the service or trying to find our place in the corporate world and maybe start our own businesses. Maybe the second half sat around watching that when it aired. Every woman did seem to have it on VCR mostly because there wasnt much else on.
We would have shot Cobain and Love ourselves had we the chance. Grunge was the destruction of the rock star life we were trying to live when we werent working. Our off time went from singin, dancin, drinkin and sexxin to “parties” where it was cool to sit around with angry guys until some drunk incel picked a fight.
“The media”. And all boomers were laying around half naked and stoned at Woodstock then moved off to live on some free love commune where they subsisted on weed and acid. We know it must be true because the media has said so since the 60s.