"Generational" Definitions are like Astrology

[Kyle]

Let's get into it.

I don't believe in the generalizations made between different ages of people that define "generations." Baby boomers, Gen X, whatever. These are generally negative stereotypes that people like to apply to people they either don't understand or don't like. The stereotypes don't hold up and are normally just critical horseshit.

It's like astrology-- we're all born at the same time, so we all have the same traits! Garbage.

It also is an extremely American-narcissistic idea, right? You can try to argue that Gen X applies to French kids, or kids from the same era in Papua New Guinea, but that's crap too. It's really just Americans trying to put down other americans, or lay blame for things they think will make them feel better.

Certainly there are similarities shared by people born into an era: "People born during this time period all had internet." But then the sterotypes and generalizations that are applied to them fall apart.

[Mike]

100%.

[Tahlvin]

But c'mon, it's so easy to say that all Baby Boomers are greedy, and all Millennials are lazy! How else can we put down entire classes of people based on age if we don't have these convenient generalizations available to us?

[Kyle]

The identification of Baby Boomers is particularly troublesome- they were supposedly the generation that went from changing the world in the 60s and 70s to becoming greedy asses in the 80s and now are ruining the government today. Those guys have had a weird trip.

[Mike]

I am absolutely fascinated by the generational divisions and by the cultural perceptions of them. I think it's largely meaningless, but I love reading about it.

To be clear, there's some self-fulfilling stuff put on generations, and there is something to the idea of shared cultural points (my generation all grew up with Happy Days... everyone in the 80's knew the Huxtables... etc), and as Phoebe points out, there's some hard realities of history, like computer usage is second nature to people born in the 90's, but overall, it really is arbitrary. Why 20 year spans for the generations? Sure that's enough time for one generation to start having kids, but wouldn't a decade make more sense? Or maybe that generations aren't all roughly the same length?

But it still fascinates me.

[Zen]

And then there are the people born near the edges of them, as Mike pointed out in the other thread, who don't feel associated with either group and just dis everyone...

Hi!

[Phoebe]

I don't understand what is being objected to here. Of course claims about entire generations are big "generalizations" that aren't intended to describe all the individuals in a group, but refer to broad trends in the population in a given place. These trends are fact-based, however. It's not just stuff people pull from their asses in order to insult others. Don't you know any advertisers, marketers, etc? It's important for them to know what people are like and how to communicate to them.

For instance, as a group, millenials are far less involved in organized religion than any of the previous generations but simultaneously are more likely to report being "spiritual" and less likely to report being "atheist" as the Gen X group. These shifts in numbers represent only a smaller part of the whole generation, but this reality means our shared cultural life is a little different from one period to the next. If you want to communicate with these people, it's important to be aware of such trends even if they are generalizations that don't pertain to the entirety of that population.

When you say that the generalizations "fall apart", what does that mean? That they aren't universal? Well of course - they weren't meant to be universal claims in the first place! For every claim you want to make - kids nowadays are growing up with smartphones and native to technology blah blah blah - there will be pockets of kids all over who never were raised that way, for whom the experience is different. But even those kids are growing up in a world where a very large group of their peers has had a common and generationally-specific experience, and that affects cultural life, education, business, politics, and so on. Is the claim that these generalizations aren't fact supported? Well, the beauty is, there are facts to consult.

Our educational models in the US changed A LOT in the 70s and 80s - indeed, as more positions were filled by baby boomers who had different ideas and were influenced by different theorists and research. A lot of positive things may have come from that, but some negatives came too. It's very odd ostrich-like behavior to imagine that no broad effects occurred and that students who emerged from a different mode of education are basically the same as students from any other era, such that we can make no useful generalizations about their abilities or tendencies. The burden would definitely be on that claim, not the opposite.

[Mike]

To clarify: generational differences as they are described and referenced by popular culture, including every single one of them that appears in my social media feeds (yes, even the ones attributed to "studies", "polls", and "experts") are pretty much bullshit. Because the truth is that actual generational differences and trends that can be borne out by scientific study/analysis are simply not that exciting and world-changing.

In my opinion, which is based on reinforcing my opinion.