I think maybe this should be in GQ, but I’m embarrassed to put it next to “Correlating Sequences of Psuedo-Randon Numbers” or whatever. This is mundane and pretty pointless.
What are the years for the generations? When do the Baby Boomers, Gen X (Next), Pepsi, or whatever other generations start and end?
A friend and I are having a slight arguement over this.
Thanks!
Argument.
Am not.
Is this the five-minute argument or the full half-hour?
…you’re just contradicting me!..
Always nice to see progress being made 
But, anyway, “Am not!”
Ah, dammit! I didn’t see Ethilrist post. Now I’m going to have to dig it up and listen to it again to make sure I get it right. And trust me, I’m angry about it 
The “baby boom” was 1946 to 1964, inclusive. (Some dispute 1964 as the ending point but going solely by population records, it’s correct.)
Other generational markers I can’t help you with.
Neener, neener, and, as they say, neener.
Are too!
An eighteen year generation? Isn’t the usual definition given as twenty? I would think the Baby Boom would have been '45 to '65 or '46 to '66.
Funny. I just went to a presentation on this. According to the presenters, who took their information from the generational theories of William Strauss & Neil Howe, TeaElle is right–there’s some dispute, but overall Boomers were born from the mid 1940s to early 1960s, and Gen Xers from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.
For our purposes, the research went back (to people born in 1901) rather than forward (to people born from the early 80s onward), so I can’ t really help you with much else.
Dates I have encountered (all disputed):
Boom 1946 - 1964
Gen X 1965 - 1976
Gen Y 1977 - 1995
If you do a web search, however, you can find references to Gen X beginning as early as 1961 and ending as soon as 1975 or as late as 1981. Gen Y, following the amorphous Gen X, has even less stable dates.
As the phenomenon of naming the generations was coined, it was a specific reference to a particular event with serious ramifications for the infrastructure of the country. The Baby Boom was a real phenomenon–a population explosion not offset by war or disease–that seriously taxed the resources of school systems, housing, and all the other aspects of planning that go into creating places where people may live.
Once people began talking about the Baby Boomers as if they were more than simply a bubble on the population chart, we started getting silly creating “identities” for “generations” (whom we then had to name so that we could know about whom we were inventing beliefs).
Take the Boomers, themselves. At different times they have been “idealists” and other times “cynics.” Sometimes Boomers are identified with yuppies, yet when yuppie was coined and came into broad circulation, the people described were actually younger than Boomers. Boomers, of course, were unpatriotic and refused to “defend their country” from the assaults of North Vietnam–which is why the majority of the names on the wall in Washington are of Boomers.
The idea that someone born in 1948 automatically shares some serious outlook and system of values with someone who was born in 1962 is preposterous. The person born in '62 was only eleven years old when the US. involvement in Vietnam ended, while the person born in '48 was pretty much compelled to take sides on the issue of U.S. involvement. The person born in '48 grew up “knowing” that the U.S. was the greatest country in the history of the world, only to watch the assassination of President Kennedy, race riots, the police riot at the Chicago convention, Kent State, war protests, and Watergate change their world while the person born in '62 saw those as merely historical events. (Television, the space race, steel-belted radial tires, banking more than 25 miles from one’s home, and a host of other changes also would have changed from “current events” to “history” within that generation.)
And the different ways these events might shape world views are ascribed to only one of the generations mentioned in this thread.
I am not claiming that different “generations” are not shaped by their times; only noting that the arbitrary boxes into which we are shoehorning people according to invented generational boundaries are misleading.
Baby Boomers - 1946- early-to-mid 60s.
Gen X - (which was called the Baby Bust when I was very young, then we became interesting and cynical so got renamed) early-to-mid-60s to 75 or 76.
Gen Y - (people started having tons of kids again) is younger but ended before the millenium.
Depends on how you want to define a “generation”. Twenty is a generic length, but in the case of the baby boomers, the generation is based on a phenomenon (namely, the spike in births after WWII) and thus is going to be defined by when that phenomenon manifested, rather that an idealized number.
This page features a table that begins with the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900, fought in World War I) and continues through the Cyber Generation (born 2002-25 – perhaps John Titor provided the latter date).
Besides the population spike and the reversal of numbers ('46-'64), I was taught that the Baby Boom era incorporates, at its extremes, the first children conceived after World War II and the final group conceived before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yet many of the older boomers consider me (born in 1959) too young for their ranks, while my brother (born 1965) insists he’s too old to be a member of Generation X, because he remembers the Nixon administration.
I was born in 1958, making me a boomer. However, I have NEVER felt the slightest kinship with that generation. I dressed up as a hippie for halloween for christ sake. It wasn’t real to me. I didn’t understand Woodstock—a big howling mess in a field from my point of view—Mick Jagger has always been a creepy old guy to me, I never knew anyone near my age who served in the military, I was watching cartoons or something when Martin Luther King was assassinated…really, I fail to understand the whole generational nomenclature. What is the freaking point?
When Woodstock happened, I was toddling off to kindergarten. When I became–uh–serious about boyfriends, the AIDS epidemic was taking off. The Beatles broke up before I was old enough to listen to them. I was too young to do magic mushrooms and all the innocent fun stuff but old enough to see my city ridden with drug crime and have never tried anything besides pot (and I don’t smoke anyway, so that didn’t go too well either).
So, yeah, born in '64, but a true blue baby boomer? Nah.
I may have been born in 1977 but I am not a Gen X’er or Y’er.
And since we’re talking about generations, I just wanna reiterate my belief that my grandmother’s generation (she was born in 1918) is/was the greatest American generation ever, and probably always will be.
Don’t get me started on the Boomers, ugh.
I’m another who was born in the so called boomer years but I’m not a boomer. I’m a Joneser.