The Quiet Cool: Why Gen X Isn’t Trying to Be Cool—We Just Are

The Quiet Cool: Why Gen X Isn’t Trying to Be Cool—We Just Are

When Vogue asked, “What if Gen Xers are actually the cool ones?”, it didn’t feel like a revelation. It felt like a quiet nod to something many of us have always carried: we were never trying to be anything. We were just being. And that, ironically, might be the very thing that made us cool in the first place.

Daisy Jones’ reflections in the piece hit home for me—especially the image of her Gen X mom vacuuming to The Cardigans with the volume turned all the way up, barefoot in low-rise jeans. That snapshot of raw, everyday life wasn’t performative. It was honest. Alive. Unbothered.

And that’s what I love most about Gen X. We were never the loudest generation, but our fingerprints are all over culture: the music, the fashion, the edge, the refusal to be easily defined. We grew up analog. We made mixtapes, not playlists. We passed notes in class, called people from payphones, and watched entire albums unfold without skipping tracks. Our world wasn’t curated—it was lived in.

For me, being a Gen Xer has meant a lot of shape-shifting. Not to fit in—but to survive. I’ve reinvented myself more times than I can count. I’ve walked away from things that looked good on paper but didn’t feel right in my gut. And for a long time, I thought if I could just get to the “next version” of myself, everything would click.

But recently—maybe finally—I’ve stopped trying to outrun the hard parts.

Midlife can feel like an unraveling. But instead of resisting it, I’ve started leaning in. Owning the mess, the beauty, the uncertainty. The sharp edges and the softness that follows. And something unexpected has happened: I’ve found meaning in helping other women do the same. No blueprint. No promise of transformation. Just showing up and telling the truth about what this part of life actually feels like.

We may not be trending on TikTok.

We may still listen to music with lyrics that mean something.

We may not care to explain ourselves.

But we’re here. Still evolving. Still standing.

We’re analog sound in a digital world—and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.