The concept of "generations" as defining peer groups is broken

In My Humble Opinion
1

Conversation started in another thread spawned this topic.

To me, the idea of generations is broken. I do see some value in looking at peer groups by age and comparing general traits of those groups in contrast to other groupings.

For example, take the zoomers’ attitude toward sexual identity versus prior cohorts like “gen x”. Or consider the differences of the helicopter parent age group versus the free range groups of take earlier days.

I mean, the folks who grew up in the aftermath of WWII have much different mindsets than the children of the 80s.

But for me, the biggest flaw of the “generation” label is that 20 years is too wide of a grouping. The social events that are in common for any cohort are perceived differently by ages 5 to 10 versus 13 to 20. And the groups may share one experience but not others, so the trend for the group will be less consistent across the whole.

Also, groupings might not have consistent size. Societal events have different strengths and different durations of impact.

In fact, social impacts aren’t so much phases of stability with discrete change incidents, but a constant transition. That’s why “edge” members of nominal generations don’t feel like they really fit.

I have also argued that the nominal groupings aren’t even all that accurate.

My example is the children in Biden’s (and my parents’) cohort - born during WWII.

Technically Boomers are defined as children born to parents in the aftermath of the war. But that puts children born during the war with the previous generation, the ones that fought the war.

My contention is that children born during the war came of age in the aftermath of the war. Their development and perspective is much closer to people born in the 50s than the children of enough to remember the experience of living during the war.

Similarly, there’s been an age cohort defined as “generation Jones”, because the later boomers feel less connected to the trends of the early ones.

So I think at the very least, we should stop looking at 20yr groupings and parse more finely at 10 years.

Or maybe the idea of “generations” should be abandoned, and discussions of cohorts should be more functionally defined, e.g. helicopter vs free range, or Challenger vs Columbia, or AIDS discovery.

What are your thoughts?

2

Human nature hasn’t significantly changed in the last 10,000 years, but the systems human live under are constantly changing. Class and culture are better markers. Shared experience.

3

I can tell you that in my family, my sisters and older cousins who were born during WW2 had distinctly different experiences than I, born in 1952, experienced. They spent their early years with absent fathers in the military, mothers who worked, often sharing cramped, multi-generational homes because of the housing shortage (my family lived with my grandparents until 1947, and my wife’s family lived with her grandparents until 1956), there was no television when they were young, and not much until they were teenagers.

By contrast, I grew up in a single-family home, with my own bedroom, I don’t remember a time without television (or rock and roll music, for that matter), my father came home from work every evening except when he was on the occasional business trip, and my mother had gone from working full-time and leaving her children with their grandparents, to being a stay at home mom. My grandparents had retired to Florida and I only saw them a handful of times. A few years later, my sisters were married and ready having their own families while I was in middle school…

4

I fall at the end of one of these groups. My experience and values aren’t those of the people almost 20 years older. On any quiz or survey characterizing membership in generational groups by values and preferences, I don’t get placed in my own generation or the one after it, but the one after that.

5

While I agree with your overall point, I don’t think this sentence is accurate. The generation that fought in the war is the one called the “Greatest Generation”. The generation that was born during the war is usually called the “Silent Generation”. That’s the generation before the Baby Boomers.

In other words, the Baby Boomers are two generations after the people who fought the war, not one.

6

“Boomers” are called that because they were born as part of the post-war Baby Boom, which means they were born and grew up with an unusually large number of age-mates. How much did this particular fact influence their outlook on life?

Within a family it makes sense to consider generations as defining peer groups. There’s your grandparents’ generation, your parents’ generation, your generation (which includes your siblings and cousins), your children’s/nieces’/nephews’ generation…

Within a whole society it is, of course, much less clear-cut. It’s definitely useful sometimes to refer to all the people who were born and grew up at roughly the same time (and therefore in roughly the same cultural context). Separating them into discrete generations is a problem, because the boundaries are so fuzzy—but then, lots of categorizations we make, in all kinds of areas, are fuzzy.

7

Sorta.

Back when everybody got married at 16 and was done reproducing by 25, most of the sibs and cousins would be roughly the same age, and from that cohort’s POV most of their aunts, uncles, and their parents would also be about the same age.

Fast forward to today and between late age of first birth, second marriages producing second broods, and all the rest, it is not uncommon to be older than one of your aunts or uncles, or have cousins older than your own parents.

The idea of neat generations within a family tree has been thoroughly blurred to nothingness in many, many family trees.


Back to the OP:
As I said in that other thread, the entire notion of “generations” is and always has been nonsense, once you move beyond individual nuclear family parents and their immediate offspring.

Society changes continuously; it doesn’t do 19-11/12ths years of stasis followed by 1 month of big jumping change.

A kindred concept is “decadeology”, the specious notion you can identify distinct social characteristics to blocks of time that just happen to correspond to 10-year intervals on our calendar.

We’ve had some entertaining debunks of that over the years too.


A thought related to both of these ideas:
When a society suffers a large cataclysm many things go on hold. Including reproduction. As conditions ease up, reproduction resumes en masse. Which has a synchronizing effect across the society as that fresh cohort grows up into a void of people immediately older than they are.

Over time, the vagaries of timing as this first cohort reproduces, then their offspring in turn reproduce, etc., will blur the synchronization until 2 or 3 familial generations later there’s no longer any perceptible cadence to society at large; babies just pop out continuously.

I submit that WWI and WWII, and their nearly coincidental timing one natural generation apart was a gigantic forcing function that synchronized US, Russian, and European reproduction restarting abruptly in the US in 1945 and more gradually in e.g. WAG 1947-1952 in those other countries.

So we have the rise of mass media at a historically unusual time when bio- and social- generations were an unusually strong and clear signal. That signal has since degraded to mere noise. But we persist, as humans do, in trying to see patterns where none exists.

8

While I agree that the whole generational concept is screwed up, and that being an infant or young child during WWII is hardly the same thing as having fought in it: my sisters were born in the early 1940’s. Which meant that they were in their late teens in the late 1950’s and in their 20’s by the first couple of years of the 60’s. I was born in 1951, and I turned 18 in 1969. I can guarantee you that in terms of generational experiences my sisters and I might as well have been in different generations.

– on second reading, I may be mostly agreeing with you, except for the bit about the experience of children born in the first part of the 40’s being similar to that of children born in even the early 1950’s.

Didn’t happen.

In some families, maybe everybody got married at 16; but in the society as a whole, most married at least somewhat older than that; more commonly in their 20’s. And people who married at 16 weren’t all done reproducing by 25 (or for that matter people who married at 20 all done by 30) – many of them kept right on having kids, if only due to lack of easy access to good birth control.

Aunts and uncles who weren’t 16 yet themselves were pretty common.

9

The fact that “boomers” officially run until 1964 is, and has always been, stupid. I, born in 1961, have nothing in common with people born 1945-c1955 like my brother. I can imagine it is even more so for those born in 1964. Is VP Harris a “boomer”? Nope!

And decadeology, well, I say the “50’s” ran until 1964 when the Beatles arrived, the “60s” ran from 64-74, and the “70s” ran from 74-79.

10

I was born in 1977, and my sister was born in 1974. When I was in college, my sister forwarded me an email listing a bunch of cultural touchstones for people our age, which ended by declaring that we weren’t Generation X, we were a new generation, which that email called “Millennials”.

Nowadays, the end of “Generation X” is usually counted to be 1980 or so, and my sister is fond of complaining about how “those millennials” are ruining everything, and the people she’s complaining about were mostly born in the late 90s or early 00s.

11

Personally, I feel too young to be a boomer, too old to be Gen-x. I think the 1962-68 babies are their own thing, and don’t really belong to either of the sandwiching generations.

12

You and I ('78) are the older part of the micro-generation now called “Xenennials,” and sometimes known as the “Oregon Trail Generation.” Analog childhood, digital adolescence. We have more shared experiences with “Elder Millennials” than with the bulk of Gen-X who actually remember growing up in the 70s.

13

The concept of “generations” has always been deeply flawed.

It’s a sloppy and inaccurate tool to stereotype people (usually negatively) and put them into convenient boxes, only far too many can’t be crammed into those boxes.

Good for clickbait and attacking others for personal/political gain, but otherwise of minimal value.

14

This is true. The “OK Boomer” has some validity in that many middle class boomers do vote selfishly, but much of it is resentment at an era when wealth was more fairly distributed. We didn’t all pull up the ladder when we reached the top. And that resentment might be better directed at the real culprits of income inequality, including the Forbes 30-Under-30-Under-Indictment set.

It’s like having your home burglarized but instead of blaming the burglar, blame your neighbors he skipped.

15

How long is that “generational” group?

Yes, that’s an alternate use, but I would argue is just as problematic.

My mother’s family had 8 siblings (plus two that died early). The oldest just died at age 93. The youngest is almost 20 years younger.

Then it comes to their children, see her fuzzier. Children of the oldest sibs were old enough to have their own kids contemporary in age with the youngest sibs’ kids.

Having children can occur over such a wide span of time that it’s possible to have an uncle or aunt that’s younger than you are. One of my friends growing up had that.

Using “generations” as a measure of time is flawed for that reason.

When was that? Women can be fertile without medical intervention into their 40s, and men can into their 70s. At least.

Before birth control, families tended to be large with the mother getting pregnant not long after giving birth. And if childbirth had a fatal outcome for the mother, father could always remarry.

Well, that kinda fits my point about the length of generations not making sense.

You may be right. If I take into account the Silent Generation, that makes a lot more sense.

“Ok, Boomer” is largely resentment at being taken advantage of and dismissed as “millennials”. The attitude that these old people think they know everything and tell the younger set so. It’s basically a counter- dismissal.

16

These are the “standard” definitions, based on birth years:

  • The Greatest Generation – born 1901-1924. — adults during WWII
  • The Silent Generation – born 1925-1945. — children during WWII
  • The Baby Boomer Generation – born 1946-1964.
  • Generation X – born 1965-1979.
  • Millennials – born 1980-1994.
  • Generation Z – born 1995-2012.
  • Gen Alpha – born 2013 – 2025.
17

That’s why the term ‘Generation Jones’ was coined:

18

Never heard that one!

I always called my group “tweeners”.

Mine was the other way. My cousins are all 20-30 years older, and it was my second cousins I went to school with. My dad was a late starter, breeding-wise.

19

As I noted in the other thread, I’d not heard the term until a year or so (and that was here on the SDMB), and I work with demographics for a living. It’s an idea that makes some sense, but it’s not gained a large amount of traction so far in public consciousness.

As per the OP, I agree, generational names are an easy shorthand for age cohorts, but they also lend themselves to lazy over-generalization: “Boomers are self-centered, Gen X are slackers, Millennials are entitled, etc.”

20

I think 1965-1980 is more standard. That’s how Pew defines it, and that’s mostly what I get when I look it up. Millennials I see as 1981-1996. Z I see as 1997-2012.

Yes, and “generational theory” (such as that by sociologists Strauss and Howe) point this out and say generations are continuums. They refer to edges of generations as “cuspers” and even separate out, for one example, Generation X into “Atari-Wavers” and “Nintendo-wavers” depending on when in the generation you were born. And that’s also why we have terms like “Xennials” to cover these cuspers.

I don’t take generational theory too seriously, but I do think there is validity in it when applied to large populations of people and not individuals. The differences in growing up 20 (or whatever) years apart are enough for there to be marked differences between generations and how they perceive and interact with the world.