Gen X Cool With A Mortgage To Pay

There is a particular indignity in reaching the absolute top of your field, accumulating twenty-five years of experience, then discovering that the next stage of your career apparently depends on your ability to talk to your own phone.

“Just post the thing.”

“Jump on video.”

“Stop overthinking it.”

Excellent advice, usually delivered by somebody young enough to have documented their entire adolescence online.

For a lot of Gen X women, turning the camera around and saying “Hey guys, I just wanted to hop on here” doesn’t feel like a simple marketing task.

It feels as though somebody has asked us to run naked through the park.

THE LAST UNRECORDED REBELS

Gen X came of age through punk, rave, hip-hop, grunge, indie sleaze and a healthy scepticism towards almost every form of authority.

We spent our formative years pursuing a particular kind of cool, one built on not appearing to try too hard. Self-promotion was faintly embarrassing. Selling out was an actual accusation. Being caught taking yourself too seriously could result in social death.

Crucially, most of it happened before our lives were recorded.

Canvas8 describes Gen X as a generation shaped by rebellion and counterculture, but also as the last cohort to grow up before the internet turned ordinary life into a public performance.

Then, somewhere along the way, the slackers became the establishment.

Gen X now occupies a significant proportion of senior leadership positions. It is also entering a period of reinvention. A third of Britons aged 45 to 54 expect to change careers before retirement, while more than half of Gen Xers say their identity has changed or is still changing.

This is where things get interesting.

Because many of the women I meet aren’t winding down. They’re emerging from long, eclectic careers with original ideas, hard-earned authority and a desire to build something much more consequential.

They want to reimagine a category. Start a business. Take up a bigger space in leadership. Become a cultural voice around the thing they know deeply.

And then somebody tells them they need a personal brand.

PERSONAL BRANDING FEELS DEEPLY UNCOOL

Even the phrase can make your skin crawl.

It suggests turning yourself into a product, manufacturing relatability and publishing every passing thought in pursuit of engagement.

It conjures up a very specific world of content pillars, morning routines, ring lights and videos beginning with an artificially urgent hook.

For a generation raised to distrust both corporate messaging and people who seemed excessively pleased with themselves, this can feel spiritually incompatible.

The reaction isn’t always fear. Sometimes it’s anger.

Why should I have to do this? Why isn’t the work enough? Why, after everything I’ve achieved, do I now have to dance for an algorithm to prove that I’m relevant?

Fair questions.

The rules do feel ridiculous. But there’s an uncomfortable truth hiding underneath them.

Brilliant work doesn’t automatically travel.

If you want your ideas to influence a category, reach the people who need them or create opportunities beyond those already inside your immediate network, the thinking has to become visible somehow.

The objective isn’t a personal brand.

The objective is a body of work with enough profile to move through the world.

EXPERTISE AND PERFORMANCE ARE DIFFERENT SKILLS

One of the strangest parts of this transition is the sudden disconnect between professional authority and public performance.

You can command a boardroom, advise the CEO, lead a thousand people through enormous change or know more about your subject than almost anyone in the country.

You can also look at the little green light on your phone and lose the ability to form a natural sentence.

These things can coexist.

Being awkward on camera doesn’t make you less authoritative. It means you are not yet good at being on camera.

Speaking to a lens is a particular performance skill. So is writing for a public audience, being interviewed on a podcast or delivering a keynote. Your expertise may inform all of them, but it doesn’t automatically make you fluent in their form.

Unfortunately, the internet collapses the distinction.

We watch people who are extremely polished online and assume the polish is evidence of expertise. Then we compare their ease with our discomfort and conclude that we must not be made for visibility.

But confidence on camera is not the same as having something consequential to say.

And having something consequential to say is not the same as knowing how to communicate it yet.

IT’S HAPPENING IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING ELSE

This reinvention is rarely taking place against a beautifully calm backdrop.

Gen X is the sandwich generation, dealing with some combination of teenage children, ageing parents, financial responsibility and the dawning realisation that retirement may be considerably more fictional than previously advertised.

For women, add perimenopause, disrupted sleep, fluctuating confidence, a changing body and the cultural experience of becoming less visible at exactly the moment our expertise has become most valuable.

Canvas8 found that 82% of women in their fifties believe they are poorly represented by the media. One interviewee described the brutal transition from being seen as a fully functioning woman to becoming culturally extinguished almost overnight.

So yes, getting on camera may be objectively low-risk.

Subjectively, it can collide with ageing, identity, credibility and the question of whether the world is interested in hearing from you anymore.

Then there’s the mortgage.

The freedom-based online business looked lovely in 2020. Now there are actual financial responsibilities, an unpredictable economy and less appetite for spending three years gently finding your voice without earning anything.

You need the profile.

You also need the profile to produce something more useful than likes.

BUILD A BODY OF WORK, NOT A PERFORMANCE

The mistake is assuming that becoming visible requires performing a louder, shinier version of yourself on every available platform.

It doesn’t.

Personal brand has become shorthand for the public expression of your value. But the real strategic question is what you want to become known for, by whom and to what end.

If you want to become a cultural voice, what’s the body of thinking underneath that ambition?

What do you see that other people don’t? What’s your interpretation of the moment? What ideas, language, methods or intellectual property could become associated with you? What larger conversation do you have the authority to lead?

Once that’s clear, the channels become choices rather than obligations.

Your ideas might travel through essays, research, podcasts, keynote speeches, filmed conversations, salons, collaborations or a genuinely excellent book. Instagram and LinkedIn can distribute fragments of the work without being expected to contain the whole thing.

You may decide to get good on camera because film is powerful and you have something worth capturing. But that’s very different from churning out Reels because somebody told you the algorithm likes faces.

Visibility should build towards authority, not trap you inside a content schedule.

COOL HAS BILLS NOW

There is no particular virtue in remaining the best-kept secret in your industry.

There is also no requirement to become an oversharing content machine.

The opportunity is to find a form of visibility that feels expansive enough for your ideas, natural enough to sustain and strategically connected to the opportunities you actually want.

You’re allowed to practise. You’re allowed to look slightly uncomfortable at first. You’re allowed to become more visible without becoming performative, and commercially ambitious without abandoning every instinct that has kept you interesting.

Gen X cool may not have been designed for the personal-brand economy.

But it contains exactly what the internet is increasingly short of: experience, discernment, scepticism, cultural memory and ideas forged somewhere other than inside the algorithm.

The mortgage still needs paying.

You might as well become known for something worth knowing.