What if you had a birthday, passed one of life’s milestones and nobody noticed? Members of Generation X start turning 40 this year, and it doesn't seem to be registering in the same way that the Baby Boomers hitting 60 does. X Saves the World is an attempt by Details editor-at-large Jeff Gordinier to celebrate the achievement of his generational cohort.

Gordinier finds much to applaud, such as the fact that it’s hard to go back to listening to the likes of Queensryche, Milli Vanilli and New Kids On the Block after hearing the raw emotional power of Nirvana. Wait — isn’t that the Jonas Brothers I hear?

Gordinier marks the rise and fall of Generation X as lasting from 1991, with the release of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” to 1999, when Britney Spears’s debut album rocketed to the top of the charts. However, the Spice Girls served notice in 1996 that the music industry had found a cash cow far more willing to be milked.

The most interesting part of X Saves the World is not Gordinier’s trips down nostalgia lane, but rather his observations about the effects of being sandwiched between the Baby Boomer and millennial generations, both of which are numerically superior to Gen Xers. Much of Gordinier’s work comes from the realm of pop culture, and a few of his chapters read like rogue stories rejected from Details, but essentially pop culture provides a suitable barometer here — although, as usual, economic practicalities are not far from the surface.

Xers, as Gordinier puts it, were far too cynical to be swayed by advertising and marketing. Many also proved to be independent, somewhat iconoclastic, and in this sense, saved the world from sucking. Most of the pop culture moments Gordinier celebrates are by people like Quentin Tarantino, Lauryn Hill and Jon Stewart, artists who deconstructed expected notions and clichés. But part of this, downplayed by Gordinier, rested on the presumption that Generation X would follow the historical pattern of 18- to 35-year-olds leading per capita disposable income charts. The recession of the early to mid-1990s, however, left most young people broke, as youth unemployment hit 50 per cent in some areas. Once the dot.com boom began, advertisers noticed that parents were only too willing to indulge their pre-teens, and left the hard-to-reach Gen Xers out in the cold once more.

Thus, in many instances, the only real change lasted when it brought with it economic incentives, as with the case of Google, another Gen X success story. Nirvana, Tarantino and company could be seen simply as a trend, a different way to dress the same old product, and the larger Baby Boomer and millennial crowds inevitably bought more product. However, enterprises like Google and Wikipedia, that translated the Gen X values of do-it-yourself experimentation and an invidious sense of individual isolation to business models, were far more successful in managing change.

Gordinier's Gen X presents a Sisyphean image, pushing a rock of progress up a Baby Boomer mountain, only to have it tipped back over the edge by a happy-go-lucky millennial already waiting at the top.