I’m born in 1969, very definitely a Generation Xer. When the book came out (and I was living in Vancouver then so Generation X was a huge conversational point) my friends were 6 and 7 years older and the discussion if someone was a baby boomer or Gen x was huge. My parents were born I 1941 and 1942, so they are definitely not boomers but they have more in common with Boomers than those born in the 1930s. (Especially Mom, she’s the oldest of 10 and her youngest sister was born in 1962. That sister could be a Gen X er but is definitely more of a boomer because she grew up with boomer siblings and a father who had been in WWII ) So yes the borders are pretty malleable.
I didn’ t have my son until my mid thirties. My son was born after 9/11. He is Going to be on the cusp of whatever they name his new generation. His peer group had parents who are Millenia, Gen X and a few very late baby boomers. No definition fits perfectly, neither do shirts in size S,M,L. But one is going to fit better than the next size up or down.
That may be the best analogy I’ve seen! I’m going to have to remember that the next time someone claims generations are meaningless because of the border cases.
Thanks SlakerInc! I spent a lot of time discussing the
outlier cases because so much of my family straddles generational lines. My dad has a cousin who is 7 years older than I am. (Born 1962) Her son was born in 2001. By genealogical definition the boy is the same generation as I am. We are second cousins; our grandparents were siblings. But of course we are very different, and I have more in common with the mom. (My dad walked his cousin down the aisle for her wedding, as she no longer had any male relatives living) She was raised a more as a baby boomer than Gen X, but her current life experience (married, working, has a teenage son) is more similar to mine than to my retired parents in their mid 70s.
No, they weren’t. People have been arguing about whether or not people born from 1977 to 1980ish were Gen-X since the term was invented when I was in middle school. No one ever widely considered those actually born in the early 80s to be part of Gen-X though you occasionally see an article with 81 or 82 as the cut off, just as you **still **occasionally see someone saying that the cut off is 1976.
This is what I don’t get about generational definitions. I can accept, as a rule, the above.
However, both my kids were born in 1989 or after. That makes them millennials. Fine, by that definition. But they’re my children, i.e., the generation directly after mine (and I’m a Boomer), but they’re not GenX. See my confusion?
On a family tree, they’d be next. On this generational tree, we skip a generation. I get the conventional wisdom, but that doesn’t seem right to me. (This is more rhetorical, as I’m just expressing my version of the “pointless” argument when it comes to definitions of generations. Maybe it’s the same as words have different meanings…doesn’t matter, it’s still confusing.)
I guess you could use the phrase “age cohort” or “sociological generation” , I guess
As far as generations, my older siblings are as much as 19 years different in age.
So, in my mind, my older siblings born during the Depression are a different generation than my sister born immediately post WWII and me born in the 50’s
“Generations” might not be the perfect word for grouping like “Baby Boomers” ( I think “cohort” might be better, but I’m not certain) but it’s not the same meaning as “generation” in a family tree -in part because generations on a family tree can be be so huge and overlapping that they defy any type of generalization.
For example, my mother has a lot of first cousins. Her oldest first cousin was born in 1927 and her youngest first cousin was born in about 1953. Go down to my generation, and my youngest first cousin on that side is 18 years younger than I am. That cousin of my mother’s who was born in 1927 would have had more in common with his aunts and uncles born between 1925 and 1930 than with his cousins born in the late 40’s and early 50’s. And the aunts and uncles who were born between 1925-1930 probably had little in common with their sibling born in 1906.* My 18 years younger cousin didn’t grow up in the same world as me - she grew up in much the same world as my nephew, who is five years younger than her but a familial generation behind her.
My great-grandparents had 12 children over about a 24 year span. This accounts for some of the overlapping as the oldest daughter began having children before her mother stopped.
Yes, they most certainly were, either because they took “GenX” to mean “people who are teens and twentysomethings now” even as “now” changes, or (somewhat understandably) because it’s awkward for their lifestyle piece about “kids these days” to explain that if you’re a senior, you’re GenX, but if you’re a freshman you are this new thing called “Millennial”.
BTW, the tennis player referred to on national TV this weekend as “Generation X” was not born in the '80s at all, but in 1995.
Gen Xers can’t remember a time without TV, and remember when payphones were plentiful
Gen Yers can’t remember a time without cable, videogames, and computers, remember payphones but probably only from 1-800-collect or 1-800-Call-ATT commercials
Millennials can’t remember a time without cellphones being ubiquitous.
I’m not sure what my take is on this (not that you asked me) but I can at least understand why some find it problematic.
I do remember when Generation Y was beginning to get used in the media. I’d say that it felt like there was broad cultural agreement that “Generation Y” was just a placeholder name until a proper reading could be made of what the generation’s defining influences would be. Basically, media found a need to begin referring to this generation and panicked at not having a term, so they just went with Generation X +1.
Going by sense memory, not research, I feel like there was at least a five year stretch when people were unenthusiastically throwing around the term Generation Y before the term Millennial really took hold (does anyone else recall about a three month stretch when some were trying to get the term “The DIY Generation” to gain footing?). If a person graduated highschool while the term Generation Y was being floated around and then graduated college before Millennial came to be in use, I can imagine that person holding onto the term Generation Y while resisting the term Millennial.
Personally, I think a big part of the trouble is the broad disagreement about the end of Generation X- some cutting it at 1975, others as late as 1982.
I think 1982 is way too late and I even think 1980 is too late. I was born in 1975. I recall a conversation I had in 1997 or so with friends who would all be latest years Generation X or earliest years “whatever came next”.
The question was “Do you feel like you are culturally more a product of the 80s or a product of the 90s?”
With about a 4 or 5 year spread in the ages of the people in the discussion, everyone my age or a couple years older said we were a product of the 80s. But people just two years younger than me said they were definitely a product of the 90s.
Ever since then, I’ve considered 1976 or 1977 (at the latest) the cut-off for Generation X, with my personal definition being “Kennedy Assassination to the end of the Ford Administration”.
IF one accepts 1977 as the cut-off for Generation X, then it seems like another generation ought to start getting counted in the early 90s. We’d be looking at:
Generation X
Generation born 1977-1992
Generation born 1992-2005
There’s of course a problem that this math of mine has no real connection to how the term Millennial has ever been used in popular media.
I’d think that anyone born in '77, '78, or '79 would absolutely balk at the idea of being called a Millennial but when the term Generation Y was first being used, they probably felt like it was a good fit.
On to the next problem. Even if you favor a late cut-off date for Millennials, say, 1996 or 1997. The following generation is in college already and we don’t have a name for them yet!!!
All very well observed, bienville! I think you are right about the brief heyday of GenY (and I do vaguely remember that “DIY” thing, LOL).
The issue of where to put the late '70s crowd has been a thorny one for a while now. Dan Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter has complained repeatedly of not feeling at home in either GenX or Millennials (even less in the latter now that they are being aged down, of course). He was pleased when I informed him he was a Generation Catalano.
ETA: I think it’s safe to extend the millennials to roughly 2000 birthdates, so I’m not sure the next group is quite in college yet.
This season of Survivor is “Millennials vs. GenX”. The “GenX” contestants range from 33 to 52; the “Millennials” are 18 to 31. This is obviously bogus, but I was actually shocked that they let the 31 year old go on the Millennial tribe.
Huh, didn’t know the definitions were so vague. I was 18 in 2000, which I was told at the time (though the only source was my parents) means I’m in Generation X. Which confused me a first as I wasn’t aware of being a comic book superhero.
Bastion of absolute non-refuted and well verified fact Wikipedia says:
So at least by that definition it puts me at Gen X.
My inclination is to go by family tree generations. As their son I’m Gen X. If I had a kid, they’d be Gen Y (which wiki suggests is the same thing as a Millennial). But that means say I had a kid at 45, there are still Millennials being born in 2027, so maybe that doesn’t work so well.
Like many other things (such as “liberal”), I think they all just get lumped into vague and broad definitions nowadays. In recent years I’ve mostly seen rather resentful economical definitions: “Boomers” as the generation that spent the western world into crippling debt (and also grabbing all the houses, at least in UK terms), and “Millennials” as the generation that’s having to pay it off (and not being able to afford houses, in UK terms).
It’s funny how terms change meaning. And I’m seeing in this thread “Millennials don’t remember 9/11” as a definition, too. And it’s strange to me, because I first heard the term “Millennials” used before 9/11 happened. I share this story a lot, but it was the mid-to-late '90s when I heard “millennials”, and it was applied specifically to start with the birth cohort that generally was going to graduate high school in 2000 (I know, 2001 was the new millennium, but almost nobody uses it that way).
I suspect the term will always be fuzzy, and won’t have even much of an agreed-upon definition until it stops getting used for young people of the day.
'73 here. I don’t remember a time without videogames (watching relatives play Pong when I was less than 5 and then of course seeing first 2 or 3 popular arcade games when I was a couple years older). Cable and computers, not so much.
I was born in '78 and I identify much more with Gen X. Probably because the internet and cell phones didn’t become ubiquitous until I was in college.
But if you ask me if I’m more a product of the 80s or 90s, it’s very much both. My childhood was the 80s, but my adolescence/coming of age was in the 90s.
