I never thought I was “Gen X”, either. Even though I’m squarely in the middle of the age range. Gen X was always 10 years ahead of me, I thought.
Right, lets start our own little generation for people in their mid thirties.
We know that we’re a bit too young to be Gen X, and definitely too old to be millenials. We grew up with computers, but not with mobile phones. We can just about remember the Cold War but we didn’t get to see the original Star Wars at the cinema.
I’m not unhappy with Gen Y as a name, anyone got a better one?
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So what are they going to call the post-millennials? (Gen Z?)
And what happened to the ‘MTV Generation’?
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First, of course they want to be Gen Xer’s because we are obviously the bestest of generations! Pretty much all the cool culture and best teen films were made in the 80s… duh. Everyone knows that. We also go punk and hip hop…
Second, I do agree that market was largely the root of generational divides like that… in order to effectively market to a demographic, you first have to define it (see Teenage by Jon Savage for the process of creating a teenager in the first place). That being said, that doesn’t mean that such things can’t be appropriated for other things, that fall outside of consumption. For all their faults, the boomers had a major effect on the world, not all negative. Not all of our parents engaged in the counterculture, but those that did had some positive (and some negative) effects. Again, this was only a minority, but plenty of our parents (and their parents) worked for positive change on race, they tried to end the war in vietnam, they helped create the environmental movement, they imagined alternatives to the capitalist order of the day, and they helped to get popular culture into the position it is today (for better or worse). I’m happy to bash boomers as much as the next gen xer, but I’m also keen to give credit where credit is due.
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The amount of ~37 year olds here never ceases to amaze me. Are we linked?
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The Hoopiest Frood Generation.
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I feel like more-so than other named generations, Millennials are defined by negative attributes. Lazy, narcissistic, obsessed with meaningless rewards, whatever.
Is it any wonder that people reject the label?
This is completely silly. Or, better, it’s good evidence that defining people by generation labels is silly.
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I thought Millenials were defined by Boomers as “people who will never come into adulthood”
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The Oncoming Storm.
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I vote we get in early and call the post-2000 bunch the ‘scrotum-weevils’ or something while they’re still too young to put up much of a fight.
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“Because our lifestyles will have fucked the planet by the time that their adulthood looms”.
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Quick! Where’s your towel?
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No, that just proves the label is apt. Their stealth and low-profile is second only to the Ninja Generation.
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Whatever the validity of the survey about which label people people apply to themselves, the notion of “generation” labels is mostly silly. The WaPo article referenced here includes a link to an earlier piece that says it all: “Your generational identity is a lie.” The demographic bump that produced the baby-boomers was real (two of my younger siblings are part of it), and there is probably something demographically significant about those of us born during WW2, as I was. (Men mostly off fighting, lower birth rate.) The rest, particularly the psychologizing of whole cohorts, has always struck me as a parlor game. (BTW, why would anybody my age–70–arrogate to himself the “greatest generation” label? That’s our parents, and closer to a deserved cultural description than most of the rest, though before Tom Brokaw’s book, we generally called this cohort the “Depression generation.”)
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Proud of my fellow boomers for at least knowing who we are.
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I think that year or two period around the end of the 70’s should be its own generation.
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Packed in the car next to the sleeping bags, Irish cheddar, warm jackets, and books. (And IPAs for laters).
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What a young millennial you are. I’VE been throwing boomers under the bus since 1981.
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Get back in your derogatory box, you rascals! We made a big box with bad words on it like “lazy” and “selfie-stick”, and you have to get back in!
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I don’t think it surprises me… presumably, BB has things that our age group digs.
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