This was before the age of DVR and Netflix, so much of what we saw was advertising. Research from 2017 found that 83 percent of Gen X—more than any other generation—trust ads they see on TV.16 Gen X has been described as both repulsed by materialism and deeply materialistic, and there may be something to that. Those of us whose formative years were the 1980s were steeped in a bath of greed and gluttony: the yuppies’ BMW and Armani fetishes, sports car posters, Wall Street. We may have rebelled against it later by buying secondhand clothes, but we’re inculcated, deep down, with wanting a lot of
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