Us just-missed-it boomers are called “Generation Jones.” You should acquire your name for the GenX/Millenial bumper group.
Not what I said. I just didn’t put them into a generation, is all.
So what? I said that would be my definition. My definition is based on just as much evidence as everyone else’s. More, probably.
So can I just say “elderly” means age 18-30, even though no one else uses the term that way?
My wife does, and she is right in the middle of that range (will turn 32 soon). Like me, she is bemused by how her cohort was seen as the prime, up and coming exemplars of that generation when we met in 2007, but has subsequently somehow aged out, even though it’s not supposed to work that way.
Of course you can. Nobody’s stopping you.
However, your doing that won’t have the slightest relevance to anything I’ve done. These generational terms aren’t common words, they’re mostly invented proper nouns created by marketing teams, usually to describe demographics and/or to sell books about them. The only one which has gained anything like mainstream usage is Boomer, which pretty universally does include people who were old enough for Vietnam and/or Woodstock. Which was the criterion I used in my little gloss of the term above.
So… who here’s a member of the Pepsi Generation?
Since I remember, my generation (then called Gen Y), was always distinct from my siblings (firmly Gen X), at least based on birth year (1983 in my case). It wasn’t until I was almost in college that I stopped hearing Gen Y and then heard Millennial, but still I wasn’t ever considered Gen X. I refuse to be considered Gen X, and I’m a proud Millennial. I got into all the issues Millennials are facing now in the workforce.
They have been “aged out” not in the research areas or research centers who determine the “generation years”, but by some media who may want to keep edgy or refuse to see that Millennials do age and face different challenges as they age.
I’m on the edge of giving up, because your usage is so weird. But I can’t resist pointing out that there were SO many Boomers who were too young for either of those (unless in the case of Woodstock they came with their parents), and also plenty of people from the pre-Boomer “Silent” generation in both places. In fact, if there were any Boomer *musicians *at Woodstock, it was not many. And as I said, the kids born at the peak of the baby boom would have mostly been around 8-12 years old when that huge concert was held.
I’ll just throw out two more mainstream media cites for Boomers being born from 1946-1964, which is what I remember hearing ever since the '80s, when I first heard of the term:
And in response to those who scoff at the validity of talking about generations at all, I really like what the Pew Research Center had to say on the subject in their 2010 report on Millennials (which, BTW, they defined as being born after 1980; they defined GenX as '65-'80 and, again, Boomers as '46-'64):
Yes, that’s true. Good distinction, and I totally agree. It still drives me crazy when the media does it though. And for people born in the early '80s, they were definitely calling them GenX for a couple years there right around the turn of the millennium.
Not in my area, at least. And certainly when I was 12-ish or so, I remember my age group being considered gen Y, not Gen X. It was “Gen Y, Gen Y, Gen Y… oops, Millennials”. Perhaps it also depends on where you were born and what media you were exposed.
It does drive me crazy. It also makes me laugh when I’m the only Millennial in groups and faculty meetings and they go “This is how to teach Millennials”. Really, like me?
Yea, the media doesn’t seem to notice they have used the Millennial designation for young 20 something for the past 10 years. The research centers though, have, which is why some of the things they mention about Millennials (no job permanency, job security, student loans, social mores in regards to marriage and gender division) are things that concern late 20s/early 30s more than college-aged people who are, as the name says, still in college and not in the workforce (and not yet married).
It will be interesting to see how long it is before the media “rehabilitates” your age group back into the Millennial generation (where, as you say, the social science researchers will be safekeeping you the whole while). I’m gonna say at least another five years.
I’ve seen the very uncreative Generation XY used in a lot of places for the border folks.
Those words do have real meaning though, even if the scale is subjective. “Generations” aren’t real, nor do these labels have any meaning or importance. They’re just silly phrases for some media writers to fluff up their pieces with. I don’t understand why it’s so important to you and others to define and propagate these completely arbitrary, made-up generational designations.
I’m pretty sure naming generations never happened prior to 1945, when an actual real-world historical event led to an increase in births, which people decided to give a cute name to (some people may have gone and retroactively tried to name “generations” prior to that, but as far as I know it didn’t start until then). Can we just be the generation that stops making up cutesy names for arbitrary sets of birth years that nobody agrees on anyway?
Nah, they have a generation.
Thirtysomething is just the general age group that the media isn’t bitching about or lionizing. That’s when you’re supposed to STFU and get down to “real life”.
(Fortysomething Gen-X’er here. First the media hated us, then they ignored us, now we’re suddenly a sandwich generation taking care of Boomers and our kids.)
I was born in 1980 and I have more in common technologically with my 19-year-old co-worker than my 40-something sisters. Culturally, though I’m more Gen-X.
As with most things in life, it’s all a spectrum.
When I turned 31 this past September, I remarked that it’s an age where I’m too old to be young and too young to be old.
I think technically I’m considered an older millennial, but I don’t always feel particularly affiliated with that group.
I started a thread here once, when I was 29 and a coworker was 41, and my (older than both of us) boss said my coworker and I were of the same generation, even though I considered him quite a bit older than me.
And I loosely call anyone younger than me a “kid,” though I mean it in an affectionate, and not derogatory, way.
On one hand, there are watersheds in history, after which everything and everyone is significantly changed forever. But they don’t happen every 25 years. By coincidence, and uniquely in American history, they are spaced by single, long lifespans: Yorktown, Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor. (I don’t put 9/11 as one of them).
However, you get to be a “generation” starting when you have enough money to merit notice, and ending the moment your first child’s skull starts crowning. Every so often marketers recalibrate their products to whomever occupies this window. This policy started when Lee Iococca put a sporty body on a dowdy Falcon frame, and added a holder in the console for a jar of Dippidy-doo
Those of us currently in our thirties might be able to relate to these articles:
Generation Catalano - We’re Not Gen X. We’re Not Milennials.
Reasonable People Disagree about the Post-Gen X, Pre-Millennial Generation
The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before and After Mainstream Tech
I will check those links out, thanks.
I have really not paid much attention to this, but it did seem that, at one time, Gen X meant Kurt Cobain, and I was like at the tail end of Gen X where it didn’t really mean me. But if wikipedia says “early 1960s to the early 1980s” and I was born in the mid-70s, I guess I’m well in it now.
Yeah, I think the musicians in particular that are associated with a certain generation tend to be older than most of the members of the generation, or even all of them (take Jefferson Airplane, for example: all six of the original bandmembers were born from 1938-1944).
From the second piece at the middle link:
“Generation X, the last cohort to really enjoy the fruits of the golden age of American prosperity…”
This is pretty funny if you’ve actually read Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, the novel that gave the generation its name. Pretty much the central thesis or theme of the book is that GenXers are the opposite: the ones who arrived too late for those fruits and who resent Boomers as a result. This contemporaneous review gives some sense of that, although once again we have the curious definition at that time of GenX being 1961-1971.
And then I had to laugh at what a “get off my lawn” curmudgeon it is writing that last “Oregon Trail” link.* But it does hint at a division between my nearly 32-year-old wife and people slightly older:
My wife was totally into Facebook in college (although if this is accurate, not when she started college); when she and I met, she was in grad school and got me signed up as soon as it was available to non-college people.
*Yet when I get to the end, I discover the writer is “Director of Content and Social Media” at her company ?!? This is the same person who wrote “The importance of going through some of life’s toughest years without the toxic intrusion of social media really can’t be overstated.” Um, okay. Did this op-ed double as her “take this job and shove it” letter? LOL