Cohorts is probably a better term. There are better ways to do that, but birthyear is way to close to astrology for my taste.
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It’s a cycle because things keep happening, but if they are any closer together than that, they don’t mark separate generations. The hand of destiny at work!
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Yeah, it’s interesting. I remember my mom’s cohort used the example of the Kennedy assassination, as in, everyone of a certain age remembers where they were when they heard about it. But that applies to everyone not just college aged people at the time.
Like most of us here now probably remember where we were when we heard about that first plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Or, over a decade later, hearing T won the presidency. Or, 4 years later, watching the Capitol get trashed. And we’re sharing those life moments with people who def don’t qualify as “our” generation. Age wise. But we’re sharing them.
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… or Dungeons and Dragons 
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Yeah… my mother, my husband, myself, my BIL, my cousin, my great aunt: We all remember where we were to some extent on 9/11, and we all lived through the resulting social changes. But like only my husband and I share a generation. We were all impacted in some way by the housing crisis and banking crises too, albeit in different ways. Focusing precisely on age is probably necessary for some levels of analysis, but I think that often too much focus on one generation at the exclusion of others is the result which creates a very distorted sort of “folk history.”
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Exactly. It’s probably been said here before but I’m coming upon it for the first time now, the more I think of the arbitrary “generational” divisions the more I’m reminded of class divisions. How you experienced the housing crisis (that one) has far less to do with how old you were at the time and far more to do with your family’s financial cushion at the time.
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This is exactly right. I didn’t even think of including that on my list, my family enjoys enough privilege that we were never affected at all. So, yeah, “cohorts” is a much better way to think about this phenomenon. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as “plug in your birthday here,” so it will never catch on.
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A 20 year cycle makes a bit of sense when you consider that 20 years represents the passing of one generation to the next. Direct memories are forgotten, and only repeated histories remain. We got Trump after the greatest generation passed out of power, taking with them the horrors of a remembered fascist dictatorship, and leaving people in charge whose only memories of WW2 came from Hogan’s Heroes reruns.
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