Last month a coworker of mine celebrated his 40th birthday, meaning he was born in 1973. I turned 29 earlier this year (I was born in 1984.) I usually think of this coworker as being a fair amount older than I am, but my boss said that he and I are from the same generation. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
So, are a person born in 1973 and a person born in 1984 of the same generation?
(Putting this in IMHO instead of GQ because I’m not sure there’s a single factual answer to this.)
No.
If you accept the definition offered at Generation - Wikipedia
then yes.
The context matters, because there are such things as Baby Boomers, GI Generation, Generation X, etc., that refer to rather specific spans of years. In that context, no.
Your choice, in other words.
No. He’s a younger Gen-Xer and you fail to make that cutoff by a few years, Millennial.
I was born in 1969 and my brother (same mom and dad) was born in 1979. We are the same familial generation. It is obvious to us we are from different social generations.
An excellent book on the subject is described at Strauss–Howe generational theory - Wikipedia) and there’s a chart you can refer to to see which of their generations you are a member of.
One way I like to think of my own “age group” is to think of those people who were seniors when I was a freshman up to the ones who were freshmen when I was a senior. Depending on how many classes your school had, that could be some number less than 10. But that group of people would have been exposed to the same social environment (more or less) and thus had similar life experiences and expectations.
I would say that it depends. If the two of you had been raised in the same household as siblings, your shared experiences would have bridged some of the cultural divide between you. I have an older sister who is 8 years older than me. We didn’t grow up under the same experiences. But always being underfoot meant that I was exposed to the cultural crumbs she was always dropping. Like, I remember when she went through her Madonna stage and then punk rock phase. I received her hand-me-downs. Likewise, she knew about the Smurfs and Punky Brewster because that’s what I always watched on TV…much to her irrtation. So I consider us to be in the same generation because of this shared cultural knowledge about each other.
But if my sister and I hadn’t been raised together, it probably would seem like we weren’t in the same cohorts, demographically.
Your boss is doing the opposite of what I do to people over a certain again. I can see enough differences between 20 and 30-something year-olds not to lump them together. But everyone between 55 and 75 are all the same to me. “Centrum Silver” people. Too young to be called old, but definitely “old school”.
1972/1979 here, and we’re not as far apart as you might think. My brother didn’t grow up with anything that was clearly different than I did; the things that were different were along the lines of “more so” than “radically different”. I mean, we had video games, computers, etc… from the time I was a child, and we had BBS systems, while he had the internet in high school (college for me).
As we get older the differences blur; we share several friends in common who were at one point, his friends or my friends exclusively.
OP here. I didn’t mention - my boss is in her 50s, I think, so maybe she sees my 40-year-old coworker and I as being somewhat of a similar age.
My husband is '72 and I’m '80, and we feel like we barely have an overlap. Actually, he’s sure I’m a Millennial while I’m positive I’m not… but I don’t know that I’m a Gen Xer either.
I’d say that 1984 would be well over whatever line I teeter on.
It’s hard to say. I’m the youngest of five children, I was born in '81 and the eldest was born in '72, there is huge overlap in the family as regards cultural touchstones. I have friends a decade or more younger than me and they get the lion’s share of cultural references that I do. I’m inclined to think that any strict delineation of generations is going to come up with as many counterpoints as points. 30 years seems too long to my mind but 15 or 20 seems to fit a lot of people.
Sadly I don’t really fit into any group. I was born in the early 60’s. Not a Baby Boomer that cuts off around 55.
I often get mixed up as a Boomer. But I was barely walking when JFK went to Dallas and I was starting kindergarten when the Stones couldn’t get any Satisfaction.
I missed out on the 60’s. Something I’ll always regret.
I think this is the closest thing there is to a consensus.
2000/2001 - Present - New Silent Generation or Generation Z
1980-2000 - Millennials or Generation Y
1965-1979 - Generation X
1946-1964 - Baby Boom
1925-1945 - Silent Generation
1900-1924 - G.I. Generation
Apparently I’m Gen-X according to the generation Wiki link that was posted earlier. That makes sense. The Boomers were influenced by their conservative 50’s childhoods and many rebelled against it.
You’re a young Boomer. It’s after the war +20 or something like that, because it seems like 20 is a generic generation number.
I was born in 1978 and I have friends who were born in '68, '72 and '73–I feel our experiences growing up (e.g. the pre-VCR days) are quite similar. OTOH, my two half-brothers, born in '83 and '86 seem to have been born into the Information Age and haven’t known anything different.
There’s definitely a dividing line in the early '80s. If you’re old enough to remember the Challenger disaster, for example, I’d say you’re in Generation X. If not, you’re probably from GenY.
Not so sure about that Millennials range. I find it hard to accept 13 year olds and 33 year olds as being in the same Generation.
Generational divides are completely arbitrary, and the length of a generation is very vaguely defined anyway. If two people are born within about 30 years of one another (give or take a few), whether or not you count them as being in the same generation or different ones depends on your polemical purposes of the moment.
The corollary, of course, is that practically all generalizations made about generations are complete bullshit (maybe there are a few that are only mostly bullshit). Generations don’t really exist.
Practically every unit of time is arbitrary, with the possible exception of the day. Subdivisions of the day are subjective. Multiples of the day are either just convenient counts of days or some other arbirtrary arrangement of them.
There is a wonderful book by Isaac Asimov that goes into great detail about the logic and the lore of The clock we live on. I heartily recommend it to anyone who obsesses over time and its manifestations.
I agree tech is a big divider between generations. Those of us that happily grew up with tv and rotary phones had a much different childhood than the VCR / video gamer generations.