Reminds me that the whole concept of generations is something manufactured of whole cloth and meant to divide us, but more than that, that real people are compassionate and understanding. All that stuff is just fake.
It gives me hope for unity.
something manufactured of whole cloth and meant to divide us
I’m not so sure about that.
My parents grew up in London during WWII. My father told me that, on any given day, at least one or two of the kids in his school had recently received a letter from the government telling them that their father, uncle or brother had died in the war. Not to mention other deaths from bombings that happen on and off for years. For the most part, the rest of the kids in school never knew who had just had someone killed in the war, although I suppose it eventually came out to become public knowledge. The point being that you could be playing ball with some kid who had just lost a family member, and you wouldn’t necessarily know it. He said that this shaped his attitude that death is just a part of life, and something that (in true British fashion) you accepted and moved on with.
This came up when my sister-in-law lost her adult daughter some years back and she was (and is) still struggling with it. My father has a hard time understanding her feelings. The two of them are just 22 years apart in age.
WWII is something that casts a pretty big shadow. But when I was born, it was less than 20 years later and its influence on my attitudes is several orders of magnitude smaller than on my parents.
At the other end. It’s hard for anyone much less than 25 years old today to remember life before modern smart phones (if you assume the start of that as the iPhone in 2008). It’s hard to deny that the smart phone has radically changed the way that we interact with each other and the world. Yes, old farts like me have adapted to it, but young people today have these things hard-wired in from the beginning.
So far, in this century, it’s changing technology that casts the big shadow.
The point being that, while society changes in a continuum, big things that cast big shadows tend to define “eras” that shape the way that young people develop. And those big shadows are what cause “generations” to tend to clump together in attitudes and behaviours. And, no, I don’t think this is made up just to divide us.
whole concept of generations is something manufactured of whole cloth
huh? generational metrics are key for all kinds of analysis and are rooted in the fact that the cadence we call human reproduction is generational.
you want to call out those that throw a fancy name on one and market it for monetary gain? go for it… but that doesnt make the quantification behind it ‘fake’.
There is something to be said about abandoning the generational lines though. Pew Research is doing it
As I understand it, only baby boomers are somewhat unified on things and every generation after that drifted more and more into being less distinct, demographically speaking, as a group. The cadence you reference was unified by the end of WWII and, naturally, diffused from there.
it feels like theres more to generational computation than just a temporally-similar social group.
ie, im sure geneticists have a differing view of ‘generation’ than the pew research group.
Yeah, but now we’re drifting into specialized fields and I would suspect that geneticists ignored all the traditional labels in the first place. I’d imagine they define things like that by the rise of a particular mutation, for example.
Generation, as a laymen term, is exactly that. A temporally similar social group.
They’re unified? When I look at history, it seems to me that they were quite a rebellious generation, with the hippie movement, and the creation of metal and hard rock. Now, if we look at how they’re generally represented, and if they are unified, something doesn’t add up.
Unified in that they were born around the same time. The baby boom was caused by soldiers coming home and fucking like bunnies.
I never understood the generation’s gap. Are there people of a certain age more frequent? Instead, I believe humans reproduce more or less at a yearly constant rate. I understand that having the categories are meaningful for many but to me it’s a ‘double-dipping’ statistical flaw.
There’s definitely differences in birth rates – it’s where Baby Boomer got the name. Here are the CDC numbers below, but in brief, the birth rate in 1950 across all races was 24.1, while in 2019, it was 11.4, meaning people in 1950 were squirting them out at over twice the rate as those just a few years ago.
Ah. I was speaking of planet earth, the world is big. Americans may have their trends. Similarly, between the different states you might see trends that are masked over when taking numbers “globally”.
Sort of. The second world war had a profound impact on demographics in Europe and North America. During the war birthrates were lower than average but during the postwar period there was a surge of births - the baby boom. Once everybody had a houseful if kids birthrates dropped off again - Generation X (that’s me).
You’re right in that every “generation” since then has gotten fuzzier - for exactly the reasons you mention - and is defined more by cultural events than demographics. But it’s also true that the baby boom and bust has had a profound impact on our society, including the invention of “teenager” as a distinct phase of life.
Other than baby boomers, people were reproducing at a near constant rate. There’s no “gap” between generations, just some arbitrary year where non-scientists decided to say “group A” is different from “group B”.
It’s basically astrology.
Not only did baby boomers get their name from how their parents popped out babys twice as often as the generation before them but gen z has been populating way less often than their generation but it’s getting to a point that it’s becoming a world wide crisis I honestly hope people start having tons of kids pretty soon or else we might be facing extinction eventually
People are obviously influenced by the way things were during their lives, especially when they were young and impressionable. But, the idea that there’s some kind of magic dividing line between “boomer” and “gen X” is ridiculous. And, aside from the boomers, the rate of birth has been pretty constant. So, there are just as many people who are halfway between X and Boomer as there people who are exactly in the middle of the X generation.
In addition, “Millennial but grew up in a small rural town” probably has more in common with “Gen X” than “Millennial but grew up in New York City”. If you were in NYC you were almost certainly exposed to the dot-com boom, the first smartphones, etc. If you lived on a farm, that tech probably arrived years later.
Generations are useful for rough shorthand, and are more meaningful when there’s something generation-defining like a war. But, people act like the year you were born defines who you are.
I see the concept as wholly arbitrary and while grouping cohorts into time periods is surely helpful for all manner of statistically interesting analyses, the use of generations to other and divide is just another example of a tool of class warfare. Another distraction from the wealth divide between the working class and the owning class and the brutalities that come along with it.
I see the example that I posted as 2 humans seeing each other as humans instead of as labels that are used more often to sow division than anything else.
I may be cynical 😁
What galls me is that we have no means of recourse really.
The minimum wage has been stuck at $7 for almost two decades, and 2/3 of the states use that baseline. Unions have become stronger by necessity, which is great, as prices for everything from food, to gas, to rent have surged and our Federal Government has done nothing meaningful to stop it. Workers are cast as lazy or crybabies for wanting the most basic positive work-life balance. And, short of being a billionaire or being willing to commit a terrorist act (which I 100% do not endorse) the individual is stuck cutting themselves down to the bone in order to survive, even with a full-time job.
The worst part of this is that half the western world seems to be caught by right-wing media that has managed to convince them that the problem is gays, immigrants, muslims, jews, professors, doctors, scientists, teachers, etc. These people believe that the rich are their allies, and so when Jeff Bezos rides a penis rocket into “space”, they cheer instead of wanting to lynch him.
Democracy doesn’t work unless the voters are informed. The right-wing media system has brainwashed people so they can’t even accept basic facts – and that’s before you start diving into the whole conspiracy space with Jewish space lasers, a flat earth, chemtrails, crisis actors, etc.
Because these voters are so misinformed, they advocate against anything that might help them or their children to become more informed. So, the problem just gets worse generation by generation.
If you can’t get people to understand the basic facts of life, you definitely can’t get them to understand the problem. If you can’t get them to understand the problem, there’s no way to get them to advocate for a solution. And, even if it were possible to get a majority to advocate for a solution, the electoral systems of the world are so rigged that it would be really hard to pass the required laws.
We do have recourse, we just aren’t organized and don’t seem to really be that motivated to do anything about it. And a huge number are regularly falling for a massive propaganda machine.
I guess it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. If you’re the first to walk away from your job to protest you’re fucked.
Living in a very economically depressed and propagandized region of the U.S. I really feel this. Have often said, the big problem is that so few people have your back here should you wish to protest in any meaningful way. Ironically, it is a place that once fought hard and bloody battles for labor. If you bring this up, they reckon it is totally unrelated to our present crises.
And, short of being a billionaire or being willing to commit a terrorist act (which I 100% do not endorse)
In a society where healthcare and housing are purchased at market rather than a right, financial exploitation is an overt act of violence against each and every one of us.
Violence begets violence. However, a lack of a sufficiently violent response to an unjustified violent act begets repetition and escalation of that violent act.
What galls me is that we have no means of recourse really.
Guillotines.
Our means of recourse is the guillotine. That we haven’t hauled a guillotine to the door of a billionaire and demanded he reduce his wealth to $999,999,999 is a travesty.
The longer we refrain from using the figurative guillotines of law and order to bring these robber barons into line, the more likely we will need to resort to literal guillotines.
I too wish to have a million euros. Not so that I could buy what ever a million euros buys you, but so that I could invest them and live a normal middle class life (as I already do) but without having to work my youth away and worry about the future.
Honestly I see this post as a strong example of why generational labels are relevant. OP, the man OP’s talking about, and his mother are all from different generations, and they have wildly different perspectives of wealth because of that. We’ve grown up differently and have different expectations of life because of it creating generalities within generational groups.
Now, those generational differences have been politicized and spun to create divides between the generations, and I think that’s what you’re referring to here as “fake.” The whole boomer vs millennial “conflict” is totally manufactured, and the way OP and the man they reference interacts is a great example of why that kind of division between generations is stupid and harmful.
There are assholes everywhere; every generation, gender, race, country, etc. However, most people are not assholes, and assuming a person will be one because of the group they fall into? Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that will make you the asshole.
