I’ll try to be different; consider cohorts, not generations. My paternal Appalachian Quaker farmer grandparents were of a certain circa-1900 cohort that moved west to infantile Los Angeles agri-burbs; maternal grandparents were of a Rust Belt cohort. My folks were Great Depression kids. I’m in a definite Korla Pandit / Wolfman Jack / Beach Boys gang. My daughter went from rural redneck Idaho to crazy San Francisco and qualifies as a post-punker. Her kids are now COVID cohort.
We didn’t all consume the same media to shape our minds. IMHO applying “generation” tags is lazy. Assholes and angels can maintain attitudes over many generations. Place drives results. The “where” and “how” we’re formed trump the “when”.
Very true. For example, my parents are technically in the Silent Generation but their experience is utterly unlike the typical American “Silenter”. They grew up in Eastern Europe where they experienced both the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain before escaping to the West as young adults.
With the Boomer/X divide, there’s two different things going on.
Demographically, the Baby Boom goes from 1946-1964. There’s absolutely no argument with this one. Here’s the numbers; if you’re going to draw a line and say, “here’s where the Baby Boom ended,” there’s no other place to put it that makes nearly as much sense.
Culturally, though, if you missed The Sixties because you were still being born in that decade, yeah, you’re an Xer.
I was born in 1954, and my wife was born in late 1964. I’m a Boomer every which way. She’s a Boomer from a demographer’s perspective, but culturally, she’s unquestionably Gen X. We grew up in two different worlds.
My classmates and I were born a few years before you, thus “boomers”, and we were exposed to the same schools, media, and smog, thus locals.
But kids in our varied groups lived in different worlds with the same geography but their own dynamics. Classmates in my two high schools next to a university town were not the same as those in the prison town or juvenile hall. (In juvy, TVs were cut off in the middle of Star Trek episodes so we never knew how they ended till we saw reruns years later.)
The “boomer” tag may apply to fairly middle-class white-ish (sub)urban USAnians from that era. It’s an absurdity for others. AMERICAN GRAFFITI was not a documentary.
Based on my birth date, I’m a member of Generation X, but the term has never resonated with me at all. It didn’t become a common phrase until about 1991, after I’d left college. Or at least I never heard it. In contrast, my older siblings were Baby Boomers and were familiar with that identifier before they even entered high school. Baby Buster is the term that was slightly familiar to me when I was in high school, though it was never very popular.
Maybe it’s just hard to identify with a label that was invented after you’ve grown up. Many of my parent’s generation are part of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” but I’ve never heard any of them describe themselves that way, and several have rejected the name vehemently in my hearing.
Hey, take it easy on GMAN. Not his fault he was born too early for Gen-erosity…
Ok, stupid pun. But it reminded me that no one can make predictions based on someone’s birthdate. Not in Astrology, not in Generational Labeling. I had a boss who used to refer to one of my staff as a *‘Gen-X Slacker’… *
Seriously, she’d say it right to his face: “Good work. I’ll admit I’m surprised a Gen-X Slacker like you can knuckle down when he has to.”
I can remember in high school or college reading a magazine article about sociologists or culture journalists or some people were pondering what label would be applied to my generation. That article used “thirteeners” because supposedly we were the thirteenth generation since 1776. Obviously, it didn’t stick, so GenX is is.
I’ve got no problem posting a question that has previously been discussed and answered when there is potentially new info to add, something may have changed or something isn’t clear since that OP, but there is nothing new here.
Have you been through the old thread? The OP’s question is the same question that was asked just this past January and the answers are almost verbatim identical.
I assumed that was why SDMB had a search function. Invest 5 seconds to learn how to do it. If there is some new twist to your question or something not clear, absolutely revive the Zombie and add your two cents to it. But at least make a token effort to read what was answered before.
Just to address this issue, I did use the SD search function in the past. But it didn’t work. I just assumed after that it would continue to not work. But you bring up a good point. I should try it again (maybe it’s been fixed since then). In the past, I always did a quick search first. I guess I could do a Google search too. But me I just don’t like pouring through thousands of pages.
I was making the distinction between the definition of the Baby Boom generation from a demographic POV versus from a cultural POV.
Feel free to say that there are other distinctions within generations that are a bigger deal than the distinctions between Silents, Boomers, Xers, Millennials. Gen Zers, etc. I’m not arguing against you. But that’s sideways to the distinction I’m drawing.
Do not tell others what they should or should not do. Leave the moderating to the moderators. No junior modding.
Also, our search engine has always been a bit wonky even at the best of times. Right now, with all of the timeouts and server errors, it’s not reasonable to expect anyone to even attempt to use it
I was born in 1959, as the Baby Boom was trailing off. I’m technically with them, but I was only ever their kid sister, not old enough to tag along. The Monkees and *Batman *were two examples of Sixties colorfulness filtered down to my age-appropriate level. I’m too old to share Gen X affinities: I’d given up watching Saturday morning cartoons by the time the 1970s dawned. So I don’t fit much with either generation concept—that’s all they are, is concepts—but I’m used to always falling into the cracks between things, a perpetual exception proving the rules of classifications.
I have never, in my life, heard of your generation being defined by how old your parents were. My dad was born in 30 and I was born in '71 and I have always identified as Gen-X.
I will admit though, that having an older dad has colored my perspective a bit. My wife has always said I seem to have come from an earlier age.
You’re really onto something with the demographic/cultural distinction.
I’m finding that Douglas Coupland, who had a lot to do with popularizing the term Generation X, seems to place the starting point several years before what many people would now call the end of the Boomer era. His characters in “Generation X” were born in the very early Sixties. Also this, from Coupland’s 1987 Vancouver Magazine article “Generation X”, which led to the book:
So there’s one way to define not-Boomer, anyway. As far as I’m concerned, Coupland assembled most of the original tropes that now go with the Generation X concept, so he gets to define the date range if he wants, but as you say, and as “Kev” says in the magazine piece, cultural associations are at least as important as birth years.
My bolding, and that’s what I said upthread. I include class, ethnicity, religion, and location as cultural associations. Folks in the same age cohort living in different groups and places started from varied traditions and consumed sometimes vastly different media and other products.
The US was not and still isn’t homogenized although national medial and transport networks blend us quite a bit. The South was a separate county till freeways eased access and TV opened a window on the world.* Closer to my Los Angeles home, I knew kids in strict religious households that banned all secular media. They sure didn’t “boom” like me.
I dropped out of the last of my several high schools and vagabonded awhile, then graduated from adult HS in San Francisco circa 1970. Many “boomer-age” students were immigrants learning American ways. A teacher asked students if Catholic priests were influential in their homelands. LatinXs said “Yes”; Asians said “Not really”; and a Hungarian said, “Of course not - they were all shot.” Baby baby, it’s a wide world!
__
Aha! A flash insight into mainstream US boomers’ common bond: We grew up in an America that was being wired together by Ike’s interstate highways, expanding media networks, and nationwide corporations, thus suffocating regionalism and shifting power and people to coastal metropolises. How many cities that in the 1950s hosted major sports teams (and maybe still do) are now depopulated regional backwaters? Mainstream US boomers witnessed the creation and degradation of “flyover country.”
I’ve always wanted to know what and when the different generations are. I know I’m a boomer, but when did that end? There has to be a Wikipedia page for that, and sure enough there is (are).
Some of these were mentioned upthread. I wanted to see them in an ordered list. I like lists.
— this is where it all started; the term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who credited the term to Gertrude Stein, who had heard it in a French garage — ”génération perdue”
† — or 1960 - 1977/1985
ª — roughly. See the Wiki page.
Methinks you are taking this too absolutely and too seriously. Each generation as a group has some broad, general trends, but that does not mean everyone born in that generation is that way. If a person’s formative years were during the Great Depression, or during one of the World Wars, or during the free love 1960s, those groups of people will share some broad general commonalities.
Much like different cultures or ethnicities tend to share some broad general commonalities.
E.g.-1 — “White men can’t jump.”
E.g.-2 — I am Asian (actually a mix of Russian and Asian), and I’m a good driver. But I hold a personal belief that many Asians are not — Again, a broad, rough, generalization of the group that does not define everyone in that group. In fact, probably does not define most in that group.
Does global location matter? Are those born 1946-1964 outside the US also boomers? Do they become boomers if they set foot in the US? Named generations ISTM are parochial, limited to US macro-culture, and primarily marketing tools - boomers or millennials or whatever as advert targets. Lower-class non-whites not included. Follow the money.
I think, of course global location matters. And if these “US-centric” views do not apply to other places, then they don’t apply.
But I would think that each ‘generation’ of people, in different places, would have their viewpoints formed by their local events and history and the times. So then of course I’d expect the names of those generations to be different.
Baby boomers, though, may apply to other countries because of the end of WWII and, well, the “boom” of babies after people returned home.
