This thread made me curious how other countries aside from the United States define the generations. I was going to ask here but decided to start my own thread since it is NOT what the OP asked about:
Globally sure. Germany was using child soldiers by the end.
I didn’t mean you were wrong you were just pushing the years a little bit. In the US, UK and Canada you had to be 18 to join with some exceptions. Those born in 1927 turned 18 in 1945. The military commitment in Europe was double what it was in the Pacific. The war in Europe was over 4 months into the year. The war was over in another 4 months: Given training time and transportation time relatively few men born in 1927 would have had the opportunity to be in combat.
“Millennials” became so defined because they came of age during the new millennium.
“Gen X” I recall being applied relatively early. Apparently the term “Generation X” was coined in the 50s to refer to a “lost generation” and that sort of fit. X often refers to an “unknown variable” and it has a lot of usage in popular culture (the film Malcom X was popular, the X Games (short for X-treme) were founded in the 90s, everyone knows the X-Men comics).
I don’t know what “Zoomer” means. I think marketers just tried using the next letters in the alphabet. “Y” didn’t stick so they just came up with “Zoomer” for “Z”. Unless it literally means they do all their interactions via Zoom or other videoconference software.
Not all, but a significant fraction, as Irishman already posted:
We’re going to be feeling the impact of that for decades to come.
I am at a complete loss of what possible purpose there would be by trying to identify characteristics of a “generation.” There is some value in noticing how many people are being born. For example, the baby boom was important population-wise. We needed more schools, and ultimately things like more housing. But I’ll assert that there is no common behavioral characteristic of anyone based on what year they were born. As one example, some people came of age after the events of 9/11/01. Some of them joined the military in response, while others decided to go to college and study the origins of Islamic terrorism (or whatever). The people who were born in 1961 as I was couldn’t be more different than each other. Some are MAGAs, some are Bernie Bros. Some are rich, some are poor. Some recycle, some throw garbage out their car window. Some drink, some smoke, some do drugs.
The whole thing is pointless at best and misleading at worst.
Huh, I’d always thought greasers were a small minority in the 1950s. And, of course, 1960 and 1970 were radically different in fashion and music.
I’d be interested in if teenagers of today perceive the same lack of difference that older people do.
Also, of course, we have way more access to old media - old music, old tv shows, old movies, etc. than people did in the pre-Internet (hey, I was taught the word as capitalized when I first learned it) or the further back pre-Cable days (continuing to produce things for the large Boomer audience was also a factor for decades). Cable stations and later the internet also contributed to a far more fragmented type of media consumption that is, itself, a major difference from the past. People may not notice all the differences because you don’t necessarily have something that a really large segment of an age-group is doing. And of course, so many of our perceptions only solidify years later and they sort filter out/forget non-trend-normie stuff that doesn’t fit into narrative for the generation or era.
And, of course, on generation titles - so far as I’m aware, the title “baby boomers” was first used in regards to a demographic phenomenon, rather than indicating any cultural phenomenon or meaningful commonality. Later used in marketing, I guess (though they started age-segmenting before those kids became consumers). I don’t know if any generation titles are older. Now, I sometimes think that some just think every generation has to have a title/theme and will keep trying to come with a catch-all even if it’s not meaningful.
When did we start doing that, anyway? That is, people have been complaining about Kids Nowadays probably since we became able to produce such a sentence (‘Kids Nowadays expect everybody to be able to talk! When I was a youngun we knew how to respect our elders even if they only knew a few words!’); but when did we start naming generations?
I think the Greatest and the Silent were named after the Boomers were, on the grounds that if the Boomers got a generation name so should our parents and grandparents, and the whole thing wasn’t done before then, but I’m not sure.
Tom Brokaw created the term “Greatest Generation” in 1998, or so Google tells me. I knew it was a newsman and rather recent (as in more than 30 years after WWII), but I was thinking Dan Rather for some reason and didn’t realize it was that recent. I guess I was thinking 1980s.
It’s a theoretical area of interest to sociologists. On the surface at least it’s an intriguing idea. Do shared experiences in youth shape an age cohort to have certain cultural predilections, either weak or strong? Maybe. The question is how deep can you take that and how much does it become an exercise in just-so stories.
How much utility does it have? Well, some folks have taken it pretty far into the predictive realm. Personally, I’m pretty dubious about that model.
But I don’t think the concept of sociological generations is stupid on the face of things. There might be something there. I’m just a bit inclined to regard it as a weaker rather than stronger unifying socio-cultural theme.
I would imagine that greasers, hippies, punk rockers, grunge hipsters and other youth subcultures always represent a small minority. But they do tend to influence the style and culture of the period.
I suppose that may be one of the effects of getting older in that we tend not to notice the various nuances of youth subcultures. But if a full grown adult was dressing like a teenager from the past 30 years (say, for Halloween), it would be difficult for me to identify them specifically as such, rather than a middle age startup CEO or some other thing,