We Need to Ditch Generational Labels
aeon.co
aeon.co
The thing about generational cohorts are that they share a set of significant experiences at a common point in their growth to adulthood. So for me it was Jimmy Carter, Regan, "Stagflation" and the post Vietnam War mess. For teens today it will be around things like Yik Yak, internet lives, Ferguson riots, Snowden, and debt. The government is perceived in a "way" and the world is being wrenched by a particular set of issues, and your family is affected by various events, and your peers are passionate about various causes. They all add up to a generational "imprint" which is the poly miasmic tint that affects the perception of every future event. You break free from the crysalis that is childhood innocence and your eyes open up on a wider stage, and it is that first moment of perception that lays all sorts of groundwork in you about what is important and what isn't, what is right and what is wrong.
Oddly there is no way, really, to easily not get imprinted, and because of that imprinting you will recognize others who came of age at that same time as peers and people who came of age earlier or later as "different" (sometimes good different and sometimes bad different).
Because those groupings exist, they cannot help but exist, and as you get older you will see different groupings reacting to the same sorts of problems everyone deals with (dating, jobs, careers, families, politics) and you will recognize that different groups react differently from other groupings but similar to other members of the group, well you'll want to put a name to that. And you'll call them the "<nom de jeur> generation" or "our generation" or "my parents generation".
It would be good to ditch being sensitive about how folks of your generational cohort respond though. Getting past name calling is usually a good sign of maturing. Not that it won't bother you, just like getting stung by a bee often bothers you, except that you can see and accept the bee sting, and the name calling, for what it is, the last ditch response of an organism that is feeling threatened.
Of course, when I was in Chile things were very different. Because the culture is different. In Chile there's more of a pre-pinochet vs "grew up after pinochet" generation-- the divides are not the same as in the USA.
Looking at your 'imprints' (I like the term), you are probably a couple of years older than me, but me being born in europe, the list of imprints and experiences are totally different.
For example, people in my year were the first born in democracy in my country, my childhood is full of examples of people revelling in the new-found freedom with new genres of music and fashion coming and going, access to more than the state's tv channels and things like that.
However, you and I are labeled GenX, even though our imprints are totally different (for me, Reagan was a just a face on the tv screen). When I compare my 'imprint' with colleagues from other european countries, they are totally different too (some come from communist countries, others from established democracies).
So how come, if our imprints are all so different, we are all labeled with the same term and expected to have similar perceptions of anything?
Accurate, but also consider the idiom "divide and conqueror"
I suppose with GenX it's bicycles and Mountain Dew, which became ever related through all those ads.
Perhaps because it's the decent thing to do? Just as an older generation would see racism as poor behavior and the next would see sexist behavior as abhorrent, maybe we're on the right track here? When did the golden rule stop applying to those on a lower rung?
Millennials won’t buckle down and buy cars or houses
Millennials earning more than me can't afford my property - they'd have trouble paying rent for it. As for cars, if you live in the city they have a higher cost to the user than overall utility.
tweeting and texting and posting selfies and avoiding responsibility.
Looking around, I see a lot of older people doing the same. Perhaps because we hold the younger people in a different esteem we're just looking for a reason to judge them.
Nowadays you'd get a bitter laugh suggesting a millennial do either. But boomers still think it.
"They don't have a work ethic" - no shit, they don't. They've made the entirely rational decision that hard work doesn't pay. Rather, work is a painful subsistence deathmarch promising no future other than more of the same.
The idea of work ethic has been contorted.
I will work hard for years if I get a reasonable reward for it. 20 years of 40 hour weeks for a family home and reasonable life at the end? Sure.
40 hour weeks for zero increase in net worth and barely making the rent? Get outta here. Someone else can be your pawn. I'll find alternative ways to live, screw your little game.
The idea is deferred gratification, not total lack of gratification.
Not just youth of the boomers, but as an early gen-x I had no problem doing the same. Well, I had minor credit card debt but nothing much. The government didn't help much back then, which is why my tuition payments were like $2K instead of $30K like now.
Today I could not possibly afford to buy the house I bought and live in around the turn of the century. Note that in the long term those prices always revert to the norm. One way or another the median property buyer eventually buys the median property. So either their wages go up (LOL as if that's ever going to happen without a revolution) or the prices go down (guaranteed, this is baked into the cake at this point). There is a famous saying about the market can afford to be irrational longer than you can afford to wait so its not like its going to be next week, but eventually the average dude is going to be able to afford the average domicile, and the only question is who's going to take the painful adjustment.
That's not to say I didn't take out any loans but when I graduated, I owed the equivalent of a Ford Focus rather than a good chunk of a home mortgage. Looking at the costs at the same state university, it's now up to around $13k for tuition, fees, and a dorm room for a full year. That's a decent $3k/yr bump from what I paid but I also didn't take advantage of cheap community college tuition for the first year or two so there are still ways to do it and not graduate with $50-100k in debt.
If anything, I think what's missing (and was missing for me as well) is a real focus on the value of degrees and the real cost of debt. Offers of loans and credit are thrown at students all the time and it's way too easy to accept when you haven't spent years of being truly broke and in debt. Likewise, there was so much focus on just going to college because that is what you did after high school. Just pick a major based on something you like and no mention is made of which fields are actually hiring and what they're paying.
The idea of just going to college and paying $40k or $60k to spend four years learning about something interesting just "because" really only works if you come from wealth and can just pay for it. As long as it costs that much, I think there should really be more focus on exactly what you're getting at the end. Too many young people think it's "college, then graduate, then get job in field, then use salary to pay off any loans while maybe saving up to buy a house somewhere down the line". I don't think you can really blame them because if I remember correctly, I was ignorant of much of reality at 17 when I was applying for this stuff.
Actually, I'd wager that there are a lot more money sinks now than in the 60s and early 70s when my parents were young. My parents had no personal computers, very little in the way of consumer electronics, no video games, no purchasable TV shows or movies, no massive ETEWAF collections of media. They had a TV, a stereo system, a bookshelf, and a record collection. While the latter two could grow, a good TV or stereo system would last you a very long time. There was little consumer-facing technological advancement, so there was no pressure to replace your electronics every two years like exists now.
We don't buy houses or cars because we're a bunch of gadget geeks.
Anyone who thinks generational labels and associated stereotypes are meaningless needs to read William Strauss and Neil Howe's excellent book, titled The Fourth Turning. It makes a very well-documented and compelling case that every generation is defined by the events of their era, and they take on the characteristics of one of four archetypes: prophet, nomad, hero and artist.
Their theory is described in detail here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_the...
I will say I can't deny that there are defining generational markers throughout my lifetime; if the author of the parent article is to be believed, I should be thinking and seeing the world more or less exactly the same way as my 18 year old nieces since we are in the same socioeconomic class. However, that's simply not the case; while I do connect with them on many levels (we're all into anime and retro gaming, for example), their outlook on the world was shaped by what they experienced growing up in the 00s and 10s, just as mine was growing up in the 80s and 90s. There are some things that I will never understand about their point of view on a certain topic, and vice versa. I believe this has more to do with a generational gap than anything else, no matter what the author of the parent article says about "generational mumbo jumbo", and I was born the same year as the author (1977).
Like the recent crisis.
Here in Germany it was a thing 2009/2010 and it wasn't really "that" bad, but it made the people a little bit carefuller.
In Greece the whole thing came smashing down and is still a huge problem for the people there.
The whole crisis has formed people a lot differently in different parts of the world.
The fallacy lies in overfitting the data towards the theory. At twenty years old, a human generation is defined by its parenting. By sixty, it's peaked in influence and started on its way out. It's relatively hard to say anything definite until late in the cycle. As well, people in the cohort are all dying along the way, year by year, and they largely don't get represented in "what the generation is." It's the people who make it near to retirement, and have the power to call the shots, who get in the final word.
I was born late 1981 which makes me part of either GenX or GenY (Millenials), depending on definition.
I'm old enough to remember "greatest generation" old timers giving "lazy" boomers a hassle because "so what if the factory laid everyone off, just work at the other factory". No old people, you don't get it, the world changed, those careers are gone and never coming back. Then the mythology of the "rust belt" developed. I don't think the greatest gen people EVER really got it.
Now its the same thing with boomers telling millennials "get that degree (you'll never be able to pay off) then use it to get that great job (that doesn't exist anymore) then buy that house (that you'll never be able to afford)". And when they don't, because its not 1985 anymore so they can't, they get labeled as "lazy". I would be interested in the analogy of the "rust belt" phrase, what will people call the plight of the millennials in a decade or two?
Its interesting in an alternative fiction style to predict how millennials will hassle the generation after them. "hey kids get that social media presence out there so you can get that startup mobile apps job" and their kids rolling their eyes replying with stuff like "come on dad, its not 2010 again, nobody does that stuff anymore".
This is almost as bad as the myriad of hacks declaring how “our brains” work, usually to explain in some facile way what's wrong with the way some other people think.
I made such a stink that the video was never seen again.
My daughter is 21 and very politically active. She feels the Millennial line strongly as well. She once recounted a conversation she had about careers and job-hunting with her Boomer grandfather. He started giving advice, but realized he'd only ever done two job interviews in his life, from college to retirement. He had no clue what life was like for her generation.
I'm just doing my best to keep an open mind as my own children grow up; that their life experience will be vastly different. An easy one is the thought that they are growing up with cheap, fast computers with FIOS as a high-speed connection to a feature-rich Internet. None of which I had for easily half my lifetime. I could bore them to tears with the vast differences between our childhoods that I can easily identify and I can't imagine the differences I haven't recognized yet.
This course is not fundamentally different than the course of chefs 50 years ago. What is different is that she can learn so much over the internet - about what chefs are doing elsewhere, about new techniques. Meanwhile, she's developing a style of her own, based on 19th century techniques she learns from old cookbooks and the internet - ways of cuisine so old they feel new today.
And the difference you do see seems to only be how things are more easy/convenient for them.
Try googling a popular UK site e.g. "millennials site:www.bbc.co.uk" and you'll there's been plenty of articles over the years.
Time to join the internet generation :)
(although you'll also see generational articles in the UK's dead tree news)
But that seems a rather broad brush to be slapping around so I'm sure it's largely unfair.
It was also the most heavily propaganda-oriented thing in living memory. Y'know all them John Wayne war movies? Yep.
The classic propaganda movie is best exemplified by "Sergeant York". The scene where the dapper officer explains the conflict between "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Duty, Honor, Country" is exactly how propaganda works. "Well, it's not killing if they're Huns."
I always thought "The Best Years of Our Lives" exposed the more sinister aspects of the war experience ( it describes PTSD decades before the concept existed beyond "shell shock" or "battle fatigue" ) , and it's interesting that my favorite authors were either outsiders ( like Saul Bellow or Phillip Roth), pop historians ( Michener ) or those who went through the war as dogfaces ( Heller, Vonnnegut ).
I'm not sure where you're going with the propaganda films as compared to my point.
But I agree, the Great Depression would be a contributing factor to what I'm describing.
The propaganda made the Boomers uncomfortable. I've made somewhat of a study of Sixties literature; I don't think it would have been that way if it were not for WWII propaganda. The WWII propaganda is also quite out of character for Americans historically. Even with the curtailment of basic freedom of speech in the Civil War, plenty of people were on Lincoln heavily the whole time.
FDR was all but immune from even criticism.
This propaganda changed the American character a great deal. I had two grandmothers from the pre-WWII period and they thought differently than people do now.
I think the Depression was the principal cause of WWII.
I guess I labeled you as programmer-like there.
However, after ordering the book I realised that the series is a follow-on from his previous 'Nantucket series', which also sounds fantastic. So I have also ordered the first book in that series.
I have a terrible and debilitating disease that prevents me from reading things out of order.
There are a couple of small logical holes in the premises ( much less than the usual ) and the author steps around them nimbly. He may even make fun of some of them.
I disagree. It would be wacky to deny grouping societies into cohorts. Certainly, members of minorities groups might not have the same values as the majority but this doesn't mean the larger group doesn't exist, and that the grouping is not useful.
Also generational cohorts exist. People got shaped by the great Depression or WWII or Cold War or End of Cold War, 9/11 and Iraq and great recession ... They have/had different experiences, different outlooks, different values and so on ...