It's Time to Stop Talking About "Generations"

[marble falls]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-generations?utm_source=pocket-newtab

It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.

By Louis Menand
October 11, 2021

-snip-

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID. But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.


Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

-snip-



It's like decades. There is nothing in nature that corresponds to 'decade', 'century', or 'millennium'.

"... terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers."

[Blues Heron]

1. I think the gen xers started post JFK assn.

That seems like a generational divide to me. That said the whole idea of these generations and their dipshit names is irritating. especially the names. Xers and Zoomers and of course the generation everyone loves to hate- the Millennials.

[lagomorph777]

2. Agreed. It's like the chronological version of racism.

Just stupid and annoying.

[marble falls]

4. I believe it's being pushed to divide us.

[lagomorph777]

5. Probably so. Same as all -isms.

[PatSeg]

7. Yes and it makes absurd assumptions

about people. Personally, I really hate tags. Putting people into categories tends to divide us. I prefer to see people as individuals.

[sanatanadharma]

3. I am glad I am a poor boomer of the first cohort from the returning troops

As a boomer , I am now simply ignore-able and that is freeing.

It is nice to no longer compete in the job pool, gene pool, nor generational pool.
No bucket list of left-over desires; nothing left to do except leave.

[MineralMan]

6. Try being born in 1945, like I am.

I have no generation, apparently. A year too early to be a boomer. I feel, you know, lost somehow...

I'm now a representative of the "geezer" generation.

[PatSeg]

8. Same here

I figure we go with the generation we most identify with and for me that would be Baby Boomers. My sister is only a year older than me and she definitely seems to be from a different generation.

Meanwhile, new schools were built in my town for the kids born in 1945, so there must have been a "Baby Boom" that year. New elementary school when I started kindergarten, another new school when I entered the fourth grade, new junior high when I was in the 7th grade, and a new high school when I was a freshman. There sure were an awful lot of us compared to previous years.

[MineralMan]

9. It's interesting, isn't it?

As I look at my alumni friends from my small California town, I see that I am not typical of them. Probably that was because I dropped out of college for four years and was in the USAF. When I returned to college in 1969, I seemed to fit in better with the group that was there at that time. It's like that lost four years made a big difference in people's outlooks.

The Vietnam war was a big deal. Civil rights were a big deal. While I was out of circulation in the USAF, the birth control pill changed many things, too.

When I dropped out in 1964, that year a 21-year-old Senior woman at my college was expelled just for being in the apartment of a guy overnight. She sued the school and won. That began the end of the whole in loco parentis attitude of colleges, at least in California. That seemed to me to symbolize the kinds of changes that were about to explode into reality.

I stepped out for four years and everything had changed when I stepped back in.

There was a turning point around that time, caused by many factors.

[PatSeg]

12. Yes, I know what you mean

There seemed to be a very major transformation in a short period of time. So many norms appeared to change overnight. I think it started to become obvious to me about 1968. It was like waking up to a very new world, one that I was more comfortable in. At the same time I suppose, it was a culture shock to many people.

Once again, it brings to mind how silly it is to put people in generational categories. A lot of the sixties rebels that I knew were older than me, whereas many hardcore traditionalists were younger.

[MineralMan]

13. There was a major transformation,

but it only affected some people. In my age group and a few years after, most of the people I knew or know stuck to the 50s mentality. Some, but a minority, climbed on the bandwagon of change. Those people are all still pretty much on the same path they took sometime in the 60s, it seems to me.

Like me, there were many people who took a break from normalcy, due to the Vietnam war. It seemed to me that those who did that, but rejoined the higher education system after their service, tended to alter their viewpoints toward a more liberal perspective when they returned to school. It's a minority, though, in that age group.

Really, I dropped out of college in my sophomore year, though, due to a growing dissatisfaction with traditional points of view. I was an engineering major. When I returned to college four years later, I became an English major and abandoned pretty much everything I had been aiming for earlier.

Everyone's path in those days was unique, but there were both traditional and non-traditional paths one could take. I went the non-traditional way.

[PatSeg]

14. I took a year off after I graduated from high school

and when I went back to school, I found most students to be shallow and immature. There was a young man in one of my classes who had served in the Army after high school and I could relate much better to him. Compared to the others, he seemed more adult and took his studies very seriously. For so many, college was just an extension of high school.

Yes, I found that many of my contemporaries were still stuck in 50s mode and I ended up gravitating more to the rebels and "free spirits", though I had a foot in both worlds.

[MineralMan]

17. I'm not surprised at that.

When I returned to college after my stint in the USAF, I took what I was doing more seriously than most of the younger students on campus. However, I was also very active in anti-war activities at that school. My age propelled me into leadership positions in those activities. I knew stuff, I guess.

Most of my fellow students, though, just ignored that stuff, in favor of typical undergraduate partying and avoiding doing the work of getting educated. I'm glad I dropped out, got a little older, and then came back.

[PatSeg]

19. Yes, being out of school for awhile

gave me a real hunger for learning. I found myself learning because I wanted to, not because I had to. It was quite a different experience when school became optional.

[Spazito]

10. I totally agree with this...

Identifying each generation differently with distinct difference builds wall between them instead of, like First Nations do, seeing each generation interconnected with each other sharing a mutual respect for each other.

The way each generation is looked at as separate is deliberately dividing them causing dissention instead of unity and understanding, imo.

[Klaralven]

11. These started as shorthand labels for audience segmentation in marketing and media

HR once had some consultants in for a management training session on dealing with employees of different ages. Their theme was "you are who you were when you were 10".

Mainly BS, but there is a grain of truth in that adult attitudes are heavily influenced by what is going on in their lives and in society when they are in late childhood to early teens.

Wonder what effect Trump will have on people born around 2000 to 2010?

[PatSeg]

15. Labels for marketing and media?

Okay, that makes perfect sense. There was a time when people rarely mentioned different generations aside from referring to "my father's generation" or "my grandmother's generation". Putting individuals into distinct generational categories is ridiculous, but I can see how such a concept appeals to marketing and even human resources.

[jalan48]

16. I've never identified as being of a generation (boomers). It's just a label that helps some from

feeling lost I guess.

[Zeitghost]

18. It's not scientific and nowhere close to perfect

It's not scientific and nowhere close to perfect and it certainly falls apart on the margins. But it's not astrology either. There are generational paradigm shifts that have widespread effects on culture. WWII, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the internet, 9/11 and the subsequent wars, mobile devices, etc. All these things shape the people who experience them and come after them.