Less famous than the baby boomers before them and the millennials after them, Generation X, or Gen X, is sometimes referred to as the “forgotten generation,” “slacker generation,” or the “forgotten middle child.” To be clear, they’re the folks born between 1965 and 1980—but if those dates don’t mean much to you, Forbes contributor Angela Woo paints a clearer picture. She explains that a large number of Gen Xers grew up as latchkey kids—coming home to an empty house because both parents worked, or because their parents had split up. Globally, many Gen Xers also lived through major political shifts. They saw the Berlin Wall come down, the Cold War end, communism collapse, and apartheid end in South Africa—all this, Woo explains, “to a backdrop of grunge and disillusionment.”