And that noise they listen to! Instead of real music, like we had!
And back when I used to have a lawn, the neighbor's kid went off to college, and I had to rake the thing myself instead of hiring him to do it!
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Pfffffft! Much better to be a general misanthrope. You donāt have to bother relating to anyone regardless of their age. This old guy has had a swell time complaining about everyone!
As a member of generation ābustā (born in the mid 70s) I think I hate the Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials about equally.
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Not exactly. The birth year is not a hard-and-fast rule on its own. It has to do with upbringing as much as anything else. Some people born in the early 1960s were born to parents who had lived through the depression and been adults during (and for some of the fathers, soldiers in) WWII. Those are Boomers. They were raised very differently than people born in those same few years to much-younger parents who were born around the time of WWII itself and thus grew up in the after-war boom. Those are the Gen-Xers.
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Notable that many of the hits that made Billy Idol famous were Generation X tunes.
Hipster statement. I like GenX before I really knew who Billy Idol was.
Oh this s#*% again.
Look, this concept of classifying a person based on demographics only makes sense if you are applying demographic concepts. Making broad generalizations on a specific demographic does not work if you donāt have anything solid to stand on. Especially on issues like culture, where there are plenty of people that experience it differently and live in different geographical areas where the population is different.
I also remember there were plenty of articles arguing how to market the generation after Generation X, calling Generation Y, Z, etc,. just before the turn of the century. This died out after the increase popularity of Web usage in the early 2000s, where it made somewhat of a sense to classified it as Millenials due to that. But for 20 years, 1980s to 2000s this demographic remained uncertained to be named or marketed.
You want to worry and gripe about demographics? Well apply demographic concepts with economic data. Look at what countries are doing with Boomer populations in comparison to countries that are facing a column or worst a reverse pyramid population. Countries that seeming have strong economic backing may not be as stable and solid as we generally thinkāIām looking at you Germany, etc,.
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Speaking as an epidemiologist: itās a hard and fast rule.
Speaking in terms of someone who appreciates that there are cultural currents and connotations that people of different ages may identify with, sure it can get fuzzy. But who on this forum has authority to speak for Obamaās brand identity?
I like cservantās comments about this also.
Yes, I have a copy of it.
Iām not so sure this is something unique at all. It seems to me that old people have always complained about younger generations. Itās kind of their thing.
Ahhh, thank you for that. My first real computer was an 8088 XT that I hacked and hacked and screwed with until its last days, and then, oh my, THEN I upgraded to a 386 with every last penny in my pocket. I also recall the wonderful day when I discovered a bit of code on an arbitrary BBS that would let me calculate an over-21 social security number that would allow me toā¦ahemā¦peruse the adult section of my local BBSās.
Considering these are cultural terms, and cultural identity varies by many factors (only one of which is age), it seems silly to me to try to be so definitive about what years one of these āgenerationsā covers.
I was born in late 1977. A lot of my formative experiences were pre-internet. But I also got into modems and BBSing and the net very early, around 1991/92. So I feel I straddle Gen X and Gen Y or whatever you want to call it.
If Gen Y grew up with the internet and cellphones and texting and such, has there really been a generation after that? Has there been any big shift since that, which is worthy of breaking out another classification?
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Just stop at āOld people complainā. Because they do. We get more cranky and cantankerous as we age; thatās a fact.
Millennials -- roughly speaking, people born since the late 1970s.Why, oh why? Will people stop trying to make me and people born in the late 70s a millennialā¦ I am a gen-Xer not a millennial. I was not raised with computers all over the place, I well remember the 80s and Reagan, and my first gaming system was an atari 2600. I remember subcultures of the old school (punk, post-punk, goth, industrial), back when that meant something, and had MTV when they played music videos. Millennials start in the early 80s and end about the year my kid was born.
NPR has completely forgotten that we Gen-X even exists. Whenever they talk about generation stuff like this, they say that millennialās is everyone born to Boomers. Theyāve completely ret-conned an entire generation out of existence.
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I just went on a very similar tear down below. Iām older than you (late 70s) and feel very unlike a millennial. I think Gen-X is just being written out of existence, for some weird reason.
I actually worked really hard on that, so thank you for saying that.
Itās been falsely attributed to Socrates for decades, but Freeman could have been clearer that this paraphrases āAristophanic diatribesā. See Aristophanesās Clouds (in Greek, if you like), especially the author filibuster through Better Argument, around lines 1200-1300 in Ian Johnstonās translation, beginning, āAll right, Iāll set out how we organized our education in the olden days.ā He even includes a note explaining the curious ācrossing their legsā complaint. And besides its Freeman-fodder, the playās significant as perhaps the only primary source on Socrates not written by his followers, and itās so bawdy that it might deserve a NSFW flag if it werenāt 2400 years old.
Word. Us late 70sers need to stand up and demand to be called Gen-Xers like we are.
Whatever happened to MTV Generation, anyway, is that not used as a generational description any more?
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Thanks.
I suppose that was my NERD RAGE you were reading. I see this as a constant abuse on statistics and applied pseudoscience. It drives me nuts.
Thereās a fine line dividing on what is appropriate use of this data. Itās easy for me to see it, it is unfortunate that most people donāt see it, cross that line, and make unfounded generalizations.
Preach it!
Probably went the same way as Gen-Xā¦ a weird historical blip that everyone forgot once MTV stopped being MUSIC Televisionā¦ I guess the Dead Kennedyās song is even more relevant now than it was when it came outā¦ MTV, get off the air indeedā¦
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Iāve never really understood these HUGE amounts of time as defining a generation. Iām another late-70ās born kid here, and like everyone else that falls into this category (at least, that has self-identified in this thread) I very much donāt consider myself a millennial. We didnāt get our first computer until 1991 or 1992, and even then it wasnāt necessarily a common thing for a computer to be in every house. I didnāt get my first cell phone till I was 19 or 20, and I was the first to get one among my friends by a good margin. I, along with most of my friends, moved out of the house as soon as humanly possible after finishing university (I can only think of one or 2 of my friends who lived at home after university for longer than a year). So yeah, these so-called āmillennialsā bear very little in common with me and my other friends born in the late 70ās. But then, I feel like that kinda goes for ANY group of people born a decade or more apart. We late-70ās folks had a MUCH different experience growing up from late-60ās folks, who had a much different experience from late-50ās folks. I feel like a generation should really be defined as, at most, people born within a 10 year periodā¦
