Surprise, Gen X! History didn't end, your RRSP is tanking and the nihilism isn't fun anymore
'Right now, cynicism doesn't seem so cool ... because you see what genuine nihilism is'
They watched what was supposed to be the end of history; now, they're watching President Donald Trump align the United States with Russia, threaten Canada with annexation, and dial global tariffs up and down like an indecisive contestant on The Price is Right.
It's probably safe to say not a single member of Generation X, witnessing the Berlin Wall crumble in 1989, imagined life would look like this in 2025.
Back then, the triumph of democracy and free markets over fascism and communism seemed decisive. The present might not have been the best, economically speaking, but the future looked, if not bright, at least stable. And the 1990s, for all the political nihilism that defined the Gen X era, ended up looking pretty good, in retrospect.
Fast forward to 2025. Stuart Knetsch is in his mid-50s and well into an IT career. He assumes the recent market turmoil has done a number on his retirement savings, but he's been too afraid to examine the damage in detail. Besides, the husband and father of two has more immediate concerns. He worries Trump will trigger a global recession, which could lead to mass unemployment. And it's tough to make a career pivot at his age.
"What I'm seeing just terrifies me, every single day," said Knetsch, who lives in Cambridge, Ont.
"It's tough to plan a future for myself, my family, my kids, when it just kind of all looks hopeless right now."
His worry goes well beyond the ups and downs of the stock market, as wild as those swings have been. It's the complete upending of a global order that had defined his life to date.
Not that Gen X is alone in facing this new reality. Millennials are right there with them, living through yet another historical event, to the point that it's become a defining meme of their generation. Gen Z, meanwhile, has learned to cope with dark humour as they struggle with high rates of depression and fears about the future. (Boomers, meanwhile, report the highest levels of happiness.)
Gen X folks, though, find themselves in a life stage with a confluence of challenges and overlapping anxieties. Many are still in the thick of demanding careers with a shortening runway to retirement. While eyeing their RRSPs nervously, some are also starting to draw down on their kids' RESPs and caring for aging parents at the same time. This, in large part, is the "sandwich generation" squeeze that has long been documented. To a degree, it simply comes with the territory of being aged 45 to 64.
But for Gen X, it's more than that, too.
Being of this particular age, with their particular set of life experiences, at this particular moment in history (which didn't end, as it turns out), means the generation once notorious for its cynical and detached attitude has a particular way of experiencing all that's going on.
'Uncharted territory'
Knetsch is the kind of guy who has read a lot, studied history, and is "perpetually online," keeping up with the latest twists and turns of politics as they happen nowadays.
The second Trump presidency, he says, has him on a "hamster wheel" of emotion.
"I think we're totally in uncharted territory," he said. "I don't think we've had — well, not in recent living memory, anyway — so many pillars of the stable global order knocked out all at once."
The day-to-day drama and the hour-by-hour market swings aside, his biggest worry is that the cumulative effect of all the U.S.-led destabilization will be a prolonged economic downturn — a worry shared by a growing number of economists, as well.
"If it goes along the trajectory it's projecting, this is going to be a longer recovery than I might find I have patience for," said Knetsch, who had been hoping to retire in 11 years but now isn't so sure what his future will look like.
"In your darker moments, you wonder why you bothered at all," he said. "I've been working for over 30 years and, why? Like, should I just take all of my savings and just have a glorious moment of excess?"
His sons are 18 and 20 and he worries about their economic prospects, too. Buying a home seems unattainable for them and the family has half-joked about all living together well into adulthood "because that's the only way we can make it affordable."
"And we were talking about that before all this went sideways with Donald Trump," Knetsch said.
"It sounds incredibly selfish, but you know … you live your life and then all of a sudden your future is just yanked out away from you, and the future for my kids is yanked away from them."
That's an experience Heidi Jaklin has had enough of, for one lifetime.
Thrice burned, now shy
Watching Trump's "liberation day" tariffs announcement and the massive market turmoil it unleashed brought back painful memories for Jaklin. Now in her late 50s, the Vancouver resident has felt burned, over and over again, as she's tried to save for her future retirement.
Her first experience came in her early 30s, when she had just left a job in Ontario and taken her modest company-backed pension plan with her, just in time to be struck by the first of several market downturns.
"I remember watching that amount go from like $8,000 to $3,000," said Jaklin.
She said she was burned again by the 360networks meltdown of the early 2000s. The Vancouver-based fibre-optics company launched an initial public offering with great fanfare in April 2000, attracting the interest of everyday Canadian investors.
At first, the company's stock price surged — just as the dot-com bubble was starting to burst. The strong initial trading made 360networks the second-most-valuable communications firm in Canada, based on market capitalization, but the party didn't last long. By the summer of 2001, it had filed for bankruptcy and informed shareholders they would not "recover any value from their investments."
The third and final straw for Jaklin was the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, when she lost even more money in the stock market while governments bailed out major banks, insurance companies and investment firms.
"I felt like I was feeding a cycle where a bunch of privileged men were making money at my expense and I kind of had enough of it," Jaklin said. "And at that point, I thought I might miss out on stock gains that I would have otherwise got, but I'd had enough. I'll just go GICs and bonds and be as safe as I can be and do the best that I can do."
Her best investment, she said, turned out to be her condo in Vancouver, but cashing it out will come with mixed feelings.
"When the time comes, I will sell the apartment and go live in Nova Scotia with my favourite sister," she said.
"No complaints. But I do love my home. I do love my neighborhood. I would love to stay here, if I didn't need the money that's wrapped up in the apartment to live on."
The fragile decade
For those still invested in the stock market, there are plenty of advisors out there who recommend staying the course, even in choppy seas.
That gets trickier, of course, as you're approaching the rocky shores of retirement.
The last five years of working life and the first five years of retirement are sometimes referred to as "the fragile decade," as financial decisions and market conditions can have an outsize impact on the savings meant to last the rest of your life.
"Having multiple down or negative years in those first years of retirement, that can have a really lasting effect," said Evan Riddell, an investment advisor with the Riddell Wealth Management Team at Richardson Wealth.
Known as a sequence-of-returns risk, Riddell said it's "a really big thing for retirees, or those facing retirement."
Nancy Burns is keenly aware of the risk and weighing delaying retirement altogether.
In her 50s, with a daughter in Grade 11, the Saskatoon resident says she's been watching the recent market turmoil with apprehension, knowing it may throw a wrench in her best laid plans.
"If the markets are in really rough shape, I'm far more inclined to give it a chance to bounce back," she said. "I wouldn't want to be in a position where I had to tap into my retirement savings and have it be at its low."
She feels fortunate to be self-employed, while her partner works a more traditional job, giving them a combination of flexibility and stability. Retirement isn't on the immediate horizon; they hope to get their daughter set up in post-secondary education before she fully calls it quits.
She had, at one point, imagined making the retirement decision entirely on her own terms. But she's realizing, lately, that external forces may have more of a role to play.
And she's philosophical about it.
"If I have to work another two or three or four or five years — I don't really want to work five more years — but if I have to work an additional five years beyond what I originally planned, I can do that," she said.
'Gen X is in a weird spot'
By now, you may have noticed a theme in all these Gen Xers' attitudes toward the situations they face: On the one hand, they have genuine fears and frustrations; on the other, they know it could be worse.
In a word: "meh."
Andrew Potter has some thoughts about this. He's an author, former journalist, associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University and, in his spare time, a chronicler of all things Gen X on Substack.
"Gen X is in a weird spot. We like to complain about the Baby Boomers and so on, but we were the last kind of generation that had a certain set of privileges, I think, about baseline career expectations, so I wouldn't want to get into kvetching mode," he said.
Sure, his own RRSP has taken a hit. But Potter looks at the economic prospects of the students he teaches and, suddenly, middle age doesn't seem so bad.
"All things considered, I'm less worried about me than I am, frankly, about, the 20-somethings, who I think are actually in a bit of a pickle."
In the strictly financial sense, he says, Gen X isn't too badly positioned to survive whatever's coming next. It's in the psychological sense where many might struggle, as the entire social, political and economic context within which the "stick it to the man" attitude that defined their generation has suddenly been turned on its head.
"I do think that the 'end of history' moment that really started with the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, it locks you in a certain understanding of the way the world is," Potter said.
"Dissent, non-conformity and Gen X cynicism seemed kind of harmless … but you could afford to be so culturally playful and cynical and non-conformist because, ultimately, the system is basically stable."
Today, as the system is shaken at its foundations, it forces a rethink of everything.
"Right now," he said, "cynicism doesn't seem so cool … because you see what genuine nihilism is. And I think that's what's happening down south, in particular. There's a fundamental nihilism that's actually quite scary."
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