Consider that a quintessential Generation X take: a dollop of irony, a dash of fatalism and a sprinkle of self-loathing. As countless profiles of the generation have argued, the children of the Baby Bust that stretched between the mid-1960s through 1970s (now in their mid-30s through mid-40s) were weaned on a broken American dream.

Burned by recession and buried in a demographic trough between the baby boomers and the Millennials, they came of age among dire pronouncements that theirs might be the first generation in memory that might not live better than their parents. No one ever expected much of them.