Am I missing something?
It's just an arbitrary label for people born in a certain period of history. These people generally have shared experiences that are different from the experiences of other generations.
> Who draws a line between generations and why?
Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes. It's sometimes a useful distinction so people remember it and use it.
> People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation.
There is no sharp dividing line between lemons and limes, either. Fruits in the citrus family can be crossbred with each other and you will end up with hybrids that cannot easily be classified as lemons or limes. There's no sharp line between "tall" and "short", or "white" and "gray". That's just the way names generally work, outside of fields like mathematics where you can use more precise definitions.
> Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes
I mean, I doubt it is really the exact same people who do this. At the very least it is a separate department that does the lemon-lime distincting.
(Ohyyfuvg.)
edit: never mind, it's not actually true - gullible me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(fruit)
There is, if you care about scurvy: http://nowiknow.com/dont-forget-the-lime/
The Age of Enlightenment prized composure and disparaged human emotion. The Romantics countered, to hell with composure! As William Blake wrote, "those who restrain desire do so because there's is weak enough to restrain." A life of love needed no guiding hand. Lord Byron wrote, "love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey."
Three generations later the pendulum swung back. The Dark Romantics underscored human fallibility. The Realists derided Romantic values and urged a return to everyday concerns and simplicity. Victorian culture prized moral strictness and Charles Darwin wrote, “the highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Then the pendulum swung again, culminating with the Roaring 20s, the rise of Flappers, drinking, spending, and (relative to the time prior) lots of sex. Americans valued optimism and prosperity.
That was until the Depression hit and war pulled us back to stricter social norms. Those too were repealed and replaced by 1970s "counter-culture," "if it feels good do it." That lasted till now, and many are suspecting that Gen Z is a reaction to Millenials. They've accepted the progress we've made but also reject the mistakes we've made. I won't mention surveys right now else this will become political, but basically every generation is a reaction to the one prior. And sometimes reactions take 2-3 generations, but it's always a cycle.
One big trend is a massive shift towards saving and financial responsibility, more risk-averse, less willing to take on debt. Far less substance abuse (2013, 66% of teenagers (older members of Generation Z) had tried alcohol, down from 82% in 1991). 40% drop in teen pregnancy, a 38% drop in drug and alcohol abuse, and a 28% drop in dropout rates.
Re: church attendance, 41% among Generation Z, compared to 18 percent for Millennials at the same ages, 21 percent of Generation X, and 26 percent of Baby Boomers
Whereas Millennials were largely just magnifications of earlier trends in Gen X and Baby Boomers, Gen Z seems to be a rebuttal. It's too complex to make bets, but if I had to make a bet, I imagine 2-3 generations of risk aversion / conservative values before those become overbearing and we have another counter-conservative shift.
Also feel free to share your disagreements. I love history but I'm certainly not an expert in cultural movements.
My personal theory is that it is just an artifact of US boomer navel-gazing and self-exceptionalism.
Also that it fits in nicely with peoples' tendency to want to drop other people into little buckets so that they don't have to think about them too hard. People do the same thing with race, believing these differences between us are discrete and fall into categories that define our essence, rather than continuous multivariate gradations.
Thinking about it further newspapers have always printed daily horoscopes, so obviously there's money to be made pandering to peoples self identity.
1. Age distribution is not uniform: the histogram of people's ages really is multimodal (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...) so talking about generations is a way to think about the "clusters" of ages.
2. Intuitively there is a certain zeitgeist that comes from being around for certain events or being affected by certain societal or economic forces. What did it mean to be a teenager or a college student in 1968? Do Americans who recall September 11, 2001 versus those too young to remember it think differently about things? How did the recession of 2007 affect those who were starting off their careers versus those who were about to retire? Generations are an attempt to generalize the answers to these questions.
In my experience, that's not true at all, to them it was merely an historical event, whereas I quite distinctively remember the shock, despite not even being an American.
Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy
That eliminates the marketing effort to convince a consumer that they are part of a particular group. Getting individuals to self-identify themselves as members of various groups is a highly effective advertising delivery channel. Convincing you to use groupings as a convenient, time-saving shorthand (like branding is a convenient shortcut) gets you to buy more, more frequently.
Marketers and advertisers fear you insisting upon evaluating situations and people one-on-one, as they come up in your life, and using the marinating and revealing effects of time to judge value and character.
And they still do...
It's not really fixed as far as I can tell. Around the actual turn of the millennium, millennials were said to start in 1980. Now it's more commonly pegged at 1982.
Generations are really a blunt and rather useless tool IMO. Besides "only 90's kids will remember this" memes.
Woodstock music festival happened in 1969 right when everybody was in the their 20s or about to hit 30.
Then they all had kids at roughly the same time, the 1970s and early 80s. Housing boom of the 1980s. Lots of new kids shows that happened in this time period as well.
Now all of those kids are buying houses and having kids. Another housing boom.
I think it's just a part of a bigger pattern that groups of humans tend to fall into where they pick arbitrary lines to divide them into groups so that they can justify condescending the other group.
There is also the other component that people like to tell narratives with history, which is easier when you can condense the actions of millions of people into a number of categories you can count on your hand. Largely speaking, I think the world is just really complex and the ways we try to simplify it and comprehend it break down in some illogical ways because they were never superbly accurate models in the first place.
It's good to know (I wasn't aware before) that this trend isn't present in all groups of humans, it gives me hope that it is able to be overcome collectively.
Did you just place yourself in the group of persons above such baseless group-defining behavior?
America since roughly the 1920s has been different. The invention of radio and television allowed a small set of companies to dictate culture across the whole nation (and later, the whole English-speaking world). Moreover, their incentive is always to seek the latest hot fad rather than broadcast the same messages over and over; stations that do the latter (eg. public radio, classical music) get eclipsed by ones that don't.
As a result, the cultural experience of people born at the same time will be roughly similar. You can talk to most early Millenials about Transformers and My Little Pony and Voltron and G.I. Joe and Punky Brewster and Full House and they'll know what you're talking about. You can talk to most baby boomers about Beatlemania and the Ed Sullivan Show and the JFK assassination and they'll know what you're talking about. You generally cannot talk to the former about the latter.
In other areas where mass-culture has been exported and widely adopted, you see generations arise as well. People have spoken about generations in Japan since the 1980s, and people are starting to talk about generations in China.
There's some evidence that the Internet is actually destroying mass culture and the concept of generations with it. Notice that the generation after Millenials hasn't even been named, and they also seem a lot more diverse in their cultural & musical tastes and a lot more accepting of diversity in general. But it'll take a while (a few generations, at least) before this really takes hold, assuming we don't get a major event that reverses it.
You mean like you just did?
Ergo, the generation thing is always there, just that it takes a different form in different countries.
Not really, am from a Slavic country and we definitely speak of generations as well.
I don’t think we ever had a name for it, but those generational differences were implied.
I'm in Gen X (and not at the very end). I used a computer at school in 4th grade, had my first computer at home within a year, had a PC clone at home (our third family computer) by the end of 6th grade, had a modem and CompuServe account in middle school.
Millennials may be distinguished by being likely to have had access to the Web before leaving high school, but not by having (personal) computers introduced while they were growing up.
Market research organizations I think.
They segment people into generations (and smaller subcategories) in order to better understand how to sell them products and services.
They are marketing buckets.
The corporate mindset is so pervasive in north america, that we take on their concepts and discuss them even outside of their area of application.
This is why we talk about which movie 'grossed' the most on the weekend, instead of comparing movies on their artistic or cultural merits.
Are they the original "fake news"?
*I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall. The rest is bullshit. There's no "boomlet" caused by them. "Greatest" is more senial Regan shit still haunting us. X, Y, is being too lazy to even find a bullshit name, and millennial is believing that the way we count years somehow matters—actually probably does in a bunch of ways completely unrelated to the things marketing cares about.
No that's not where they originated from.
> The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous
Named generations don't have a constant period. (They tend to run between about 12 and 25 years.)
> I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall.
True.
> There's no "boomlet" caused by them.
Without attributing what caused it, there was a continuous nearly monotonic decline in US birthrates from the peak of the Baby Boom in 1954 through 1976 (Gen X is usually tagged as ending between 76 and 80, then a run up to a peak in 1990, followed by a drop back to the 1976 low in 1995, hovering around that point or slightly under through the end of the millennium, where it started dropping again.
The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet.
Still a low spread. No overlap is also weird, insofar that generations are supposed to be real phenomena and not just an arbitrary division.
> No that's not where they originated from.
How much does their current incarnation owe to whatever came before?
> The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet.
You need to look at that children/potential mother rate. Constant means pure echo. Secondary crest further either shows we have more mothers and they mimick their own mothers in having more kids, a true cultural inheritance, or it shows that there is enough variation in maternity age that generations are sufficiently convolved such that no 1 generation begets the next. Those two can maybe be teased apart by combining the per-whole-population and per-potential-mother rates to get the mothering/potential mother rate.
Has anyone actually done any of these statistics?
Several generation labels have overlap (recently, the “Xennial” group overlapping Gen X and Millennials is an example), and the boundaries are recognized as fuzzy, anyway.
> You need to look at that children/potential mother rate.
For what end? The boomlet absolutely occurred (the attribution of it as an echo boom is occasionally made, but isn't really signficant or essential.)
First, there were actual population boom waves - one peaked after WW2, another peaked in the late 70s, another roughly after 2000. Also there was birth rate decline as an after shock from the transformation to the market economy. These waves seem to get generated by strong historical events or inadequate access to housing. In general, thanks to immigration and larger differences in the age of motherhood, these waves slowly disperse.
Second, because there was a lot of politically different historical periods in Czech Republic in the past 100 years, people born around the same time tend to have quite different experiences. So you have generation which was born in democratic Czechoslovakia after WW1, generation that grew up under Nazism, generation that grew during Communist purges in the 50s, generation that grew during a period of cultural renaissance in the 60s, generation that grew during a period of political tightening (normalization) in the 70s and 80s and generations born after the democratic revolution of 1989.
These different generations were largely learning a different language (German, Russian, English) and each was under influence of quite different culture than others.
I think it's mostly nonsense though. I think the underlying grouping that generation is a proxy for, is age group. 18-25 year olds behave differently from 25-35 or 35-50 (with some fuzziness at the edges). In other words it's loose grouping based on age/maturity.
Containers and such arent new. We have had FreeBSD jails for 2 decades plus
What is new is the thinking that is a better way of doing things. Jury is still out on that :)
Not sure if with "comming from" you are referring to Poland or Germany but regarding the latter I have to answer with a confident "Stimmt nicht!".
There is a big discussion in Germany regarding the so called "Generationenvertrag" which is about the young generation financing the older generation's retirement. Which is working worse every year.
Also there are public discussions about social injustice particularly impacting the current generation and with regard to retirement a bleak outlook compared to the previous generation (not really the current) of retired citizens.
Yes - you're missing the detail of the first of these generations - those returning to the United States from having served in World War 2, took full advantage of the economic preeminence of the US, and begat the "baby boom generation".
So of course you are correct - births happen continuously and there is not an obvious "banding" of "generations" ... but in this case there was a very clear and pronounced age band, and all of the subsequent "generations" (baby boomers, gen X, gen Y, Millenials, etc.) proceeded from there.
I don’t know what’s not clear — if you grew up in China during the cultural revolution, you will be different than if you were born before or after. Your basic assumptions about humanity and government will be affected by such experiences and it will carry with you thru life.
That said, I think "milleanials", "gen-X" etc. are arbitrary divisions - just a shorthand for talking about a specific age group.
Not really. People like to categorize things in attempt to draw any kind of conclusions from it. Sometimes it can be helpful and sometimes not.
The trends they are describing were most likely occurring consistently over time and not at any particular point, but if you take two points in time 30 years apart and compare them it might look like a drastic change.
In the States they use "baby boomers", "generation x", "millennials" more, but it's the same thing.
It's all based on the postwar period (WWII, generally).
People like to categorise and be categorised to justify their actions or lack of action.
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/baby-boomers-v-millennial... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/29/millennials-...
I don't think this is at all an American phenomenon.
Another reference point: kids who always grew up with a smartphone, vs. slightly-older kids who got their first one, say, in college. Totally different thing.
But really, it's all arbitrary and pointless, I agree.
Maybe they should have been called the grunge generation.