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That's just the kind of thing a GenX'er would say. Sort of kidding, sort of not, let me explain.
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.
The problem I see with these labels is when you try and apply them globally.
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?
Expanding a bit from this comment, any set of actors will exhibit certain emergent properties (culture etc, if you will) , which is strictly speaking independent from any of the actor themselves. Are we actually sure that the "imprint" becomes individual characteristics, or is everyone behaving similar just because the society/culture at large is making everyone to be acting that way.
Oh, I don't think they should be applied globally, but generational imprinting is extremely useful when applied within a society.
While generational groups may have similar experiences, and therefore similar worldviews based on those experiences, it seems to me that the labels themselves aren't used in that way. They're used more as labels of pride and prejudice, and much of their associated feelings and statements are based on personal beliefs rather than actual human interaction. Consider how many news articles are writing about the habits of Millenials these days with regards to work and life. Most, if not all, of them are written as rants looking to pin the author's dislike of modern culture on a younger generation. Even Boomers had their share of unfounded, ranting criticism from their predecessor generations when they were younger, and it's fair to assume that in the future we'll have articles written by Millennials about how Gen-Z is lazy and ungrateful. Generational cohorts have a place, but we often confuse them with the nature of our entire society rather than just those of a certain age.
"They're used more as labels of pride and prejudice"
Accurate, but also consider the idiom "divide and conqueror"
I agree with everything you've written here. It's not unreasonable to look at large groups of people with something in common and draw statistical conclusions about them. What's unreasonable is to look and a single person and think "because he's from this generation he must think that".
Absolutely. I had dinner last night with a Millennial (I'm Gen X) and he was telling me something about how people acted and I reacted surprised-- and it turns out he means people of his generation. He was an exception to that behavior, but he recognized how his generation was different from mine and he one between.
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.
Nicely put - as somebody who lived through similar imprinting. The imprinting is real, but I do get irked by crude marketing attempts to lump me in with my cohorts.
Millennials, consultants advise prospective employers, feel entitled to good treatment even in entry-level jobs
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.
There's also the shifting economics. In the youth of the boomers, working yourself through college was a thing, getting on the bottom rung of the property ladder with your entry level job was a thing.
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.
"working yourself through college was a thing"
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.
Agree.
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.
I haven't bought a car or a house because I have better things to spend my money on.
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.
I mostly disagree. I think that there is some fluidity to generational labels; and I much prefer "Gen Y" over "millennials" but the way of thinking that most baby boomers have can be succinctly described by referring to their generation. In Canada we have a magazine called "Zoomers" which is targeted at the baby boomers. It is the most perfect example of media circle jerking I've ever read. Every single article absolves the group from any responsibility that the baby boomers have had for the problems faced by today's Gen X and Gen Y people. And this needs to be called out. I need to be able to say: "Hey, the baby boomers fucked us. During a period of peace and large employment they increased the debt, decreased the amount of children per family, and increased senior based entitlement programs that are ultimately going to lead to severe economic harm."
Finger-pointing and assigning blame has never been a useful way to solve any problem.
Agreed, we should let them keep doing it.
But what about irony?
Sorry, typing from my phone so this will be short.
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...
Actually the article's author brings up another work by Strauss and Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069, and strongly denounces it as "pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo". I'm not saying I agree with that (I haven't read that book), I'm just pointing out that the article's author doesn't hold those writers in high regard. The article does go into detail about the four archetypes before denouncing the theory.
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).
I can understand that events shape people, but I don't think they shape them in the same way.
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.
Cyclical theories are popular precisely because they have some empirical backing in closely related fields. Consider the predator-prey model, for example: Some generations of predator will experience abundance, others will struggle to survive. The impact of this experience on future behavior is, most likely, non-zero. It doesn't determine everything, but neither is it a non-factor.
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 don't enjoy the generational labels because it just makes me feel like I don't belong to yet another group.
I was born late 1981 which makes me part of either GenX or GenY (Millenials), depending on definition.
I agree, but it's more that Gen Y is kind of split in half between people who have ever not had a cellphone, and people whose first cellphone was an iPhone (not a dig at apple, the iPhone came out before Android did). Of which I am the former, and feel the latter is certainly ideologically different even if "generations" don't show it.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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".
We need to stop writing articles telling us what “we” “need” to do.
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.
They showed a video 3 years ago at a all hands meeting about Generations. TL:DR VIDEO Generation X sucks and no one likes them.
I made such a stink that the video was never seen again.
I saw a poll somewhere in an article about managing millenials that showed how people polled felt about working with people in different generations. Gen Xers actually did really well on a lot of the most important attributes, way better than Gen Yers, and a bit better than the previous two generations.
They probably made some sense when a group went through some catastrophic event (plague, world war) so the demographics of some cohort was strikingly different from some previous cohort. Otherwise I say, yes please.
I'm early GenX (born 1965). I feel more cultural bond with people 15 years younger than I do with people 5 years older (Baby Boomers). The divide is really powerful for me.
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.
It is amazing to watch when a member of an older generation comes to the sudden realization that the generations after them have had such a different experience. Especially when there's been big changes in what amounts to the normal aspects of everybody's day-to-day life.
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.
What's kind of interesting is how things can be the same, too. My daughter has committed herself to a career in food. She's not going to college. Instead, she managed to get a job as a prep and line cook under an internationally-known chef, mostly through luck. This job will teach her if she can deal with being a line cook. If she can hack that, she'll do this for a few years, then maybe head toward having her own restaurant, or something else.
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.
> 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.
And the difference you do see seems to only be how things are more easy/convenient for them.
Is this exclusively an American concept? Because ve never seen this in the UK or anywhere else in fact.
Seriously?
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)
The hatred towards "Baby Boomers" appears much more prevalent in the U.S than the UK, certainly.
Really? The children of the "Great Generation?" The love for Baby Boomers in my work video shown to the whole company and a lot of the literature seems to always life them up as the best working generation who built the US Economy tot he power house of the 1980s and beyond.
The cover picture of that article broke my brain for a bit. The dark-haired girl on the left blends in with the one behind her so I couldn't immediately tell where one ended and the other began. And on the right, you just see red hair without a face. Also, random arms poking out everywhere.
Labeling is human way of dealing with complexity. Obviously it has exception but it is good starting point for reasoning. The problem is if you don't update your belief system with more evidence you will get and or seek for.
Great programmer-like answer - technically correct to a pedantic degree, misses any subtelety by reducing it to some heuristic for dealing with complexity, and ends with a point that isn't new or controversial to anyone on the subject. :-)
I guess I labeled you as programmer-like there.
Generations are granfalloons.
Exactly.
Your mom was a kan-kan!
The "Emberverse" sounds great. Just ordered the first book. Has anybody read it?
Yes and I deeply enjoy it. That said it works best if you just accept that this is the story that the Author wants to tell and that there might be a few or more than a few logical conclusions that you disagree with. A lot of the decisions he makes seem over the top at first blush but on closer inspection the make a ton of sense.
Thanks. I am looking forward to it.
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.
Yes; it's very well crafted. Marvelous characters and excellent storytelling. It's as if it were fantasy ( or at least counterfactual fiction) written by a military historian.
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.
>>‘Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry.’
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.
Well with the social discourse in the US of A being what it is, being called a bigot right now is a badge of honor.
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 ...