Love this. Feel the same.
And maybe want to revise “mirage” to “collage.” 
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To the broader point, it seems a bit like some want to have it both ways - that we matter, or that we don’t matter…
But honestly, I don’t think the reason that there isn’t a lot of Gen Xers in national politics is entirely down to boomer domination… That might play a role, but I’m guessing that quite a lot of liberal or left-leaning Gen Xers just had not interest in being in politics, because they did not see any point to it. Less true of more conservative Gen Xers, I’m guessing…
I would say that we probably have had a larger influence in popular culture than some people would like to admit though…
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I do think Xers have had a harder time breaking into politics in the US due to Boomers who have retained their seats at the state and federal level for way too long. The EU and UK Commonwealth have done better at electing leadership with focus on the future than the US. US Millennials stand a chance at capturing more seats, but my fingers are crossed for my son’s generation, GenZ.
They’re motivated toward activism before graduating high school thanks the shitshow presently before them, and I, for one, will not stand in their way. They want what a lot of us want, and this is pretty US specific since these artificial generational divides don’t exist to such a great extent elsewhere on Earth: gun control, bodily autonomy for ALL, free and fair elections, defunding police, equity for all our citizens, strong but not corrupt labor unions, taxing billionaires and corporations appropriately for the harm they impose on society, radical movement on climate change, single-payer (ie - Medicare for All) healthcare, secure retirements, etc.
As for your final point - we rule the heck out of ‘popular culture’ starting in about 1995! The current Star Wars power struggle at Disney is a great example. The writers and directors for current content are all younger than Boomers, but at the production level, Boomers are interfering, and it’s to the detriment of the overall stories being told. 
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Anachronisms be damned I wish we’d stuck to naming them mix tapes. Making a mixtape for yourself or someone else was a labor of love.
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I think so, but I also think we did not have the big motivation like many Millennials and gen Zers have. A subset DID get involved in the anti-nuclear war movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and other forms of protests (especially in punk circles), but the media tended to focus on the “violence” of the punk scene and gloss over those other things (and the embrace of DIY culture). And I think that probably a lot of people who stuck with underground culture became activists outside the system (or it seems plenty ended up getting an advanced degree and becoming college professors!) - because we did inherit the mistrust of the system from the boomers…
But by the time I was a teen, history was “over” - it seemed there was much less to worry about since the Cold War had ended and liberal democracy was victorious, and we were gonna fix our problems - it was all bullshit, but that really was the sense of things that I remember in the 90s. And of course, people who grew up in the late 70s, 80s, and 90s were raised in an era of mistrust in government, so I’m sure that played a role in how little Gen Xers seem interested in getting involved in politics.
They (millennials) are also a much larger cohort than we were (since we were born into lower birth raters and higher divorce rates) and it’s become abundantly clear that history is far from over, but is in fact back with a vengeance. The bill is coming due on our overconsumption, and they are the ones who are paying the biggest price for that across the board. So it makes more sense that they are more politically engaged and more visible in politics.
It seems like Gen X is over-represented in pop culture, but under represented in politics… I wonder if that proves my thesis a bit! 
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The post does seem a bit, disjointed?
If you wanted a more cohesive response of, “yeah that logic appears to make sense” you should have narrowed the focus to a specific thing, and also address the “it is probably hard to claim that we invented it as there will be prior art” e.g. mixtapes got big in the 80s but people distributed tapes of their own selection of music tracks before the 80s.
Easier to claim “Gen X, we made the mixtape a cultural phenomenon” or “Gen X, the playlist of digital music started with us” (though older millennials were in their teens and they’d have using digital music software in the late 90s too).
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That one has my vote.
Britain already has a millennial Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. He’s just as much an arsehole as his predecessors. David Cameron and Liz Truss are Gen-X.
Every generation has it’s heroes and villains.
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For Gen X… let’s not forget Paul “Rage against the Machine are WOKE” Ryan… a failure of a house speaker!
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I know I am late to this discussion, but I am a leading edge Generation X slacker (born in 1967), and I think the problem is in the word “invented”. As best as I can recall, mixtapes aren’t so much tied to the recording technology as they are with the playback tech.
It was the Sony Walkman and the explosion of knockoffs that made the mix tape become popular.
By the time I hit college in 1985, the way to show affection for someone was to make a mixtape. It was a semi-disposable way to share music, and was so popular that the hardware manufacturers were making special cassette decks for tape-to-tape transfer, much to the ire of studios—this was before Sony bought up Columbia, remember.
So, yeah. We didn’t invent the playlist. But during my generation a milestone was passed on the way to the modern playlist.
And now I have to get that image of John Cusack out of my head.
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