Missed it by "this much!" What Gen X phenomenon do you feel like you missed out on either due to age or life circumstances.

I remember Friends being all the rage. I remember people (mostly girls) talking about it at work. I just never had any interest in it. My mother started watching it at some point when they were re-running older episodes back to back on a cable station, kinda like how USA Network used to somehow run all day Wings marathons for like a decade without airing the same episode twice. I caught a few moments here and there, some were pretty funny. Same goes for Seinfeld. Honestly, what little I saw of Seinfeld made me not want to watch it at all. Two things that were not really GenX (as far as I know) that I always felt like I missed out on: summer camp and college. Yes, going to a college and having the experience you see kids having in the movies is a relatively real enough expectation. I noticed almost immediately that most people's lifelong friends were people they met in college, and the ones I have maintained were from high school. I would later notice that people who were traditional college student think of college fondly in much the same way I still think about high school, and that they think of high school how I think of middle school. That is, rarely very kindly and consider what they haven't largely forgotten as childish. Summer camp, though...I read books and saw movies about kids going away to camp (they rarely said exactly where) for entire summers and having "camp friends" that they'd only ever see at camp every year from kindergarten til the summer before they graduated high school. All the usual adventures...pranks, bullies, mean counselors, sneaking out, summer fun. It wasn't until I started dating someone in my 40s who was heavily involved in both Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts (she had worked for a Girl Scout council, in fact) that I discovered all-summer-long camps, or even camps longer than a week or two such as the ones glamorized in books and movies, were prohibitively expensive if they even existed at all. It appears it's something only the wealthier families participate in. It also seems to be a New England/northeastern US thing more than anywhere else.