Gen Z are dipping into their retirements, skipping meals and selling belongings | Hacker News Reader

Gen Z are dipping into their retirements, skipping meals and selling belongings

fortune.com

10 pointspaulpauper8 comments

Can we resume using regular bins - eg "18-25" - for grouping people by age? These generational labels are bullshit.

Wdym resume? Generation labels have been around for a very long time.

The meaning of the labels is pretty unclear to many people outside the US.

Boomer is often disparaging and used to mean anyone over middle-aged (and usually encompassing the silent generation too).

As a GenX New Zealander, it's a pain trying to learn what age range the labels apply to.

The cutoff dates are annoying to learn, and pigeon hole people (poorly if you're at end of a range).

I really hate the labels.

Also: They don't really work in other countries or demographics. Generational bins presume that shared experiences form a somewhat comparable outlook on life.

I am a Xennial. I grew up in Western Germany. Are my life experiences the same as someone who grew up in Eastern Germany, experienced the fall of the Wall and all the economic and political disruptions afterwards in their formative years or by witnessing their family's experiences? My life didn't change, the country got a little bit bigger. Theirs in many measurable and unmeasurable ways. Are we the same generation?

And that was a peaceful revolution. Other countries weren't/aren't such lucky.

I hadn't heard of "Xennial", but the existence of the word and defining yourself that way demonstrates the horror of generational labels.

> The meaning of the labels is pretty unclear to many people outside the US.

They're often unclear inside the US as well.

> Boomer is often disparaging and used to mean anyone over middle-aged

I learned this when a group of young engineers referred to me as a "boomer". I replied that my parents were boomers, not me. Their answer was "'boomer' doesn't really mean a particular generation, it just means 'old'".

Well-played, young snots, well-played.

That would be really nice. Related to this, I wish reporting would stop talking about these things as if there is only one age bracket experiencing them. Perhaps the "18-25" group, for instance, is the peak of the bell curve, but the area under the rest of that curve is still quite large.

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