about target markets

Got to talking last night about this theory I have that my generation, the most recent to enter the working world and which can only be called the September 11th generation, is inherently disenfranchised because we never got to become the target market. As in, we consumed media heavily and were subtly trained to identify with the Generation Xers portrayed and always feel like we were born just a few years too late to be part of something, and just as we were about to enter the promise of being the same age as the glamour portrayed in media the dot com crash wiped us off the marketing map and the Tweens were the next big thing. And suddenly we were not only born too late, we were never going to come into our own as glamourous or important because we were also born too early. And the only thing we got to identify with as a generation was September 11th, war, bad politics and an unpromising economy.
But a fellow 9-11 generationer didn't have the same sentiment, and felt that he was always part of a target market, especially now. Which brings up an interesting question: Was I just choosing not to identify with people in MTV programming, clothing, cosmetics and soda ads because I identified with some kind of supposedly counter-subculture?
If that's true, does that mean that maybe our generation isn't disenfranchised with something to prove as I have thought?
I concluded only recently that maybe it's not so much the sixties and seventies that I hate, but youth culture in general, which the more I study the more I realize is always consumerist in nature, fetishizing political action rather than actually taking it and commodifying culture by any means possible. Maybe the reason I didn't identify with advertising was because I was deluding myself so heavily into believing I was above marketing. But since most of the people I know identify with either another nationality or a subculture, maybe marketing has only been targeting the subcultures that would actually put up the money, and the only place where I fit in is as someone who rarely will. And could that be the death of a kind of marketing?