"Generation L must study politics and war, that Generation M have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Generation M ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give Generation N a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” - John Adams
The real problem is the one you get to late in the article: "generations" are something that exists in families, not populations. The reality is everyone has their own age cohort that includes everyone within a few years of them younger and older.
You should have Neil Howe on for a discussion. He invented the term Millennial. He knows more about US history than anyone I’ve read. He can discuss the specific characteristics of every generation since 1600. Also he doesn’t use “Gen Z” he calls them homelanders.
I agree with the premise, but not all the concerns.
Gen Z or Alpha won't always carry the stigma of youth; as a 90's Millennial I recall all the think pieces about our naivete and destroying industries; the lens of "what are those kids doing" just moved on, and what it means to be a Millennial has evolved without the judgmental glare. Grievances are not merely a product of victim culture; there are material quality of life deficits faced by Millennials and onwards that older generations did not have. Should these trends be reversed, the 'poor me' mentality would evaporate.
Where I agree is that generations should have more leeway to determine who they are in themselves, not be scrutinized from the cradle about what they are like. It's fair to try to capture the values and trends of a rising cohort, but predicting what will matter most for it goes too far.
My issue with generational consciousness is how superficial it's become. Millennials and younger were most rigorously theorized by Neil Howe and William Strauss, who argued they were defined by the sociocultural conditions a generation's life cycle. They set the tone for the ~20 year generations, but since their ideas went mainstream, they have been truncated to 15 years due to a preference for analyzing through technological shifts, a premise that tries to predict where the cut-off should be, not based on what will define a generation, if a single cause can be pointed to.
Generational self-consciousness seems here to stay, but its popular conception remains weak. Does the rise of the internet in 1995, before Gen Z was born, define the generation? Or its relationship to Covid? Or will their role in the growing geopolitical crises set their tone? Of course all of it, but no single event can be used to prophesy the character of their life trajectory. At best, generational consciousness can tie a cohort of people into a sense of the common conditions they are facing together, and in retrospect as a way to understand the center of gravity of values for a group of people in history. It has become too easy another label for reducing people.
Boomers were defined by when the birth rate was high - which was more about the parents, then about the kids themselves. So the Boomers are sometimes to 1965, sometimes to 1964, but we are talking 18 or 19 years here, where the first Boomers might have had kids who were born in the last year of the Boom - and so both parent and child were Boomers!
Someone born in 1946 experienced the turmoil and civil rights movements etc. - someone born in 1964 never saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They turned 16 in 1980, after Punk Rock had peaked and Disco was ending or over too.
I was born in 1958 - so I turned 16 in 1974, the Glam Rock era had peaked as had Prog Rock. Nixon quit and OPEC crisis meant it was an age of scarcity and high unemployment.
Early Boomers often have nothing in common with Late Boomers - these labels have limited value because 10 years is probably a better measure of a new generation coming of age and sharing experiences and culture. Someone born in 2015 will have experienced COVID, someone born in 2025 will not.
I've noticed the "identifying as Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha" phenomenon for the first time irl recently, and find it very odd.
My neighbour's chronically online, mixed-nationality 12 year-old really likes being "Gen-Alpha" and using "Gen-Alpha slang", so I suspect this phenomenon is strongest among very international, very online people without a strong national/ethnic/class identity or a subculture to belong to.
I don't think she's got the "generational injustice" grievance narrative yet, thank heavens. But still, feels a bit sad. Hopefully in her teens she'll become a goth, a rationalist, or a hardcore French monarchist, and give up on the generational identity thing.
Excellent post. Your main point -- that naming a generation while it's still in its youth leads to the conflation of the characteristics of youth with the characteristics of that particular cohort -- is novel to me. I agree that there is a lot of us vs. them going on among the young vis-a-vis the old. It is common for people to overstate the differences, and I think this is because the generational framing gives them the preconception that they are so different.
That said, if we are looking for a term for folks whose adolescence or young adulthood was profoundly shaped by COVID, you could do worse than "Zoomers" (because they spent so much time on Zoom)
I've also had this frustration with american generational framings, it seems to way overattribute to cohort effect what is usually an age effect. Add in the combletely arbitrary boundaries and it's hard not to feel like it's secular astrology. Politically, it also grants a veneer of respetability to complaining about 'old people' or 'kids these days'. Because ultimately, a lot of what people are saying about 'gen Z' now is what they would have been saying about 'boomers' in the 70's/80's.
Idk to what extent it drives behaviour though, my *guess* would be that it's not actually an identity people attribute a lot of importance to, but rather a framing people apply when "useful". There's not exactly a community here, unless you count nostalgia bait facebook groups.
It’s all to do with what Zodiac sign Pluto (a generational planet) is in when people are born. Most of the boomers had Pluto in Leo. If that doesn’t explain things, I don’t know what does! You are going to have entirely different leanings if you are born with Pluto in Scorpio, than if you are born with Pluto in Virgo, n’est pas?
> I want people to stop giving younger generations names. Except in articles like this where you deconstruct the concept, there is rarely any reason to use terms like “Generation Z” or (God help us) “Generation Alpha.” For cohort analysis, you can just split people up by the decade they were born and get all of the same benefits without the drawbacks.
Well... you can split people up by the decade they were born. You'll get all of the same benefits. You'll also get all of the same drawbacks; there's no difference at all. Being "born in the '80s" is just as permanent as being a "millenial" is, and everything you say about generational labels also applies to decade-of-birth labels.
China used to use generational labels, on a family-by-family basis. They were real generational labels: genealogy was tracked, your generation was embedded in your name and therefore obvious to anyone familiar with your family, and you could outrank someone much older than yourself by belonging to an earlier generation (because your branch of the family was slower to reproduce than theirs was).
(This was not a universal system; as in all cultures, extreme concern with genealogy was the domain of the higher classes.)
That's gone now; people have forgotten their generation poems and social commentary uses the exact system you advocate: if you were born in the 1990s, you are 90后; if you were born in the 2000s, you are 00后, and if you were born in the 2020s, you are 20后.
I would tend to agree, if someone proposed it, that this shift in how the structure of society is labeled reflects a shift in the organization of Chinese society. Confucian hierarchy and respect for age and generational superiority have taken a severe beating. But it's not obvious to me that it's related to any of the phenomena your essay discusses.
one of the problems is that we are using a term to define two different things. A generation can be defined as periods of high and low points within birth patterns. There is a huge birth explosion after ww2. For the boomers, half of the women were at the median point for child birth in 198x, and close to 0% of silent gen has any kids at that point, millennials are the children of the boomers and we see the are corresponding spikes in the 80s and 90s that pattern match to similar spikes a 25 years earlier. About 99% of boomer children are born by Jan 2001. Which is to say we can define generations as patterns of childbirth that emerge across time due to the fertility choices women make. When there are high points, it puts pressure on the system to commoditize the generational experience, you need bigger class rooms, and can target youth specifically with entertainment and branding. Women born in these booms will have children in a statistically recognizable pattern beginning 18 years later, and ending 45 years later, with a majority of births starting 25-27 years later. This will cause a similar rise as those women have children, and so forth. These patterns of rising and falling births are well defined and noticable in the demographic data and can be marked as generations.
The second definition is patterns of consumption, which is a marketing related definition. This doesn't make it bad, quite the contrary, there really is a neXt generation, the Pepsi generation, that was exposed to not just world events but different mass consumption and mass marketing from prior generations. We would be dumb to apply this to the far past, once you get further from television it gets hard to define "mass media". But it also falls apart as we move into the 21st century. The top selling bands of 1990 sold more cds than the top selling bands of 2026 and few people owned a CD player back then. 20 million people watched cheers weekly. Today a top show gets about 9-11 million, (plus streaming). Today there's a very very tiny number of mega stars, shows, and films and everything else is broken up into silos of media consumption.
Where this gets to be a problem is that in the late 2000s, early 2010s marketers wanted to define why a cohort of younglings who had "grown up with" Facebook were special. These netZians where carved out of the late millennials and given a weird cutoff dates. Looking back, Facebook ended up not being that important, it's used by boomers. In hindsight had they kept to standard 18 year increments, you get a much nicer cutoff: everyone in gen z (born jan 2001 to dec 2019), attended high school in a world where a majority of teenagers has a smart phone, about 2014 onward. They also would have experienced COVID as a defining event of their childhood or early college experience, including remote learning. Finally, chat gpt 2.0 is released in 2019, - they will remember a time before ai ate the world.
As an early millennial it can definitely seem like you have more in common with people 45+ than 27 year olds, and that is the case if you focus too hard on early 90s stuff, but if you look at early 2000s media, including normal cell phones, internet 2.0, the start of streaming and cord cutting, the end of vulgar culture and rise of nerdcore. The rise of 3d and online video games. Even early adult workplace experiences of zirp and zero wage growth. You share Harry Potter, and pokemon- most gen xers were adults or late high school when that stuff first came out. Yes, you and the guy born in 1981 both saw the matrix, but he probably saw it in theaters and you watched it on dvd on a ps2.
My understanding is that many parts of the world go by birth decade. Which is surely less arbitrary.
The Baby Boom was a real thing, a massive anomaly on all the fertility/birth charts with reasonably clear beginning and end dates (even if the beginning is more tightly defined than the end). Being born in those years is as non-arbitrary and coherent as a nation-wide, 18-year "generation" can ever hope to be. The youth surge also produced real cultural effects.
Millennials and Gen X only make sense in reference to the Boomers: the Millennials as the Boomers' children, and Gen X as the generation that came between. As references one step removed from a coherent definition, they're not as coherent as the Boomers, but perhaps still coherent enough to warrant a name.
Beyond the Millennials, we're too far removed from the event that made the Boomers into a coherent generation; too diluted to be worth describing anything as a generation, until perhaps some future event renders the concept meaningful again.
You could use the decade label for this just as well but I definitely notice pronounced differences in my sister (4 years my senior, born 1982) and my husband (5 years my junior, born 1990) that have nothing to do with personality and everything to do with what kind of technology they grew up with.
The proactive generational labeling may be dumb, but I don't think it's dumb for people to immediately begin wondering what the internet, then smartphones, now AI, will mean for childhood. As it turned out, the internet and smartphones ended up mattering quite a bit.
I prefer to refer to myself as a "child of the 90's", but not because I was born then - I was actually born in the late 70's - but because the 90's (and late 80's) are when I came into cultural consciousness. I find the Gen-X label for myself to be problematic because (1) I have a lot more in common culturally with people born in the 80's than people born in the late 60's, and (2) the 16 year generations start here and seem to make no sense.
I think it would make much more sense for any "generations" to be full 20-year blocks:
Born in 40's & 50's - Baby Boomer
Born in 60's & 70's - Generation X
Born in 80's & 90's - Millenial
Born in 00's & 10's - "Zoomer"
Born in 20's & 30's - "Alpha"
But even this has the same limitations that RH spells out.
I think its best to identify with the decade you graduated High School (or turned 18). Because this is when you entered cultural consciousness, or rather maximum youth cultural consciousness.
The only problem with this is for people who were born in "rounded ten" years like 1990 or 2020. In that case you could argue that a kid born in 1990 was really a "child of the 80's", but then what about 1991 - only a year off? So that is the weakness of this approach, but I still think it's better than calling people Gen-X and Zoomer.
The 90's are interesting because in hindsight it seems that everyone agrees that it was the peak and everyone wants to be associated with it. If you were a child in the 90's, graduated high school in the 90's or were born in 1999 you claim to be a "90's kid", I really haven't seen many people claim the same for earlier or later decades.
I’m going to guess you had younger siblings which probably influenced you to feel closer to a ‘millennial’ than a Gen Xer. I’ve seen this with other people born close to the cusp, and being influenced by older or younger siblings. (A shuddering example but still solid: Kim & Kourtney Kardashian are actually in the Gen X cohort but due to the influence of their younger millennials sisters, grew up embracing more of a millennial viewpoint & outlook.)
I personally wouldn’t agree with the decade cut-off for generational distinctions. The cohorts are shaped by shared experiences within their formative years (combined teenage & young adulthood ) thus, the greatest generation shared the experience of WWII. Previously to 1998, that cohort was usually referred to as the ‘World War II generation’. Before the Silent generation, there was the Bright Young Things, a cohort who experienced the new freedoms of the 1920s (after the uncertainty of the first war) together as young adults. Cutting the generations into a two decade lump doesn’t work.
After those two/three cents, I agree with the article: stop naming the cohorts too early. It stunts their growth.
Yes, I totally have younger siblings. I also have a sort of youngish outlook for a dude pushing 50. I look younger than my age, I'm mostly in shape, I listen to music from recent years, stay on top of pop culture, I'm repulsed by brain-dead RW politics, etc. So that probably makes me seem more millenialish too.
Another problem with naming generations too early is also defining generations too early. There is only a WW2 generation because WW2 happened. You wouldn't have been able to even define that before 1945 or even decades later. How can anyone say people born from 1965-1980 are a distinct generation? What was distinct about being born in this time period? What was distinct about being born in 1980 versus 1981?
I can tell you haven’t really studied or have had much interest in generational cohorts before today. That’s fine. But you did prove my point about having younger siblings with or without the anecdotal evidence.
My point about the WWII generation is, before 1998 when the term ‘the Greatest Generation’ was coined, they were usually referred to as ‘the World War II generation’ thus, proving the point of the article—they were given a generational cohort name much later in life which is what the article is advocating.
Oh, an answer to your question: 1982 is when MTV was born. There are quite a few research centers which put the generational cutoff between Gen X and Millennials at 1982, However, the generational cutoff points aren’t an exact science—the existence of younger or older siblings can often influence the direction one leans when born close to the cutoff.
Personally, I avoid the whole mess simply by referring to those who are my juniors as Whiny Little B-----ds. Avoids jargon; has the merit of being accurate; and warns them that I'm a rebarbative old so-and-so.
"Generation L must study politics and war, that Generation M have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Generation M ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give Generation N a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” - John Adams
The real problem is the one you get to late in the article: "generations" are something that exists in families, not populations. The reality is everyone has their own age cohort that includes everyone within a few years of them younger and older.
You should have Neil Howe on for a discussion. He invented the term Millennial. He knows more about US history than anyone I’ve read. He can discuss the specific characteristics of every generation since 1600. Also he doesn’t use “Gen Z” he calls them homelanders.
I agree with the premise, but not all the concerns.
Gen Z or Alpha won't always carry the stigma of youth; as a 90's Millennial I recall all the think pieces about our naivete and destroying industries; the lens of "what are those kids doing" just moved on, and what it means to be a Millennial has evolved without the judgmental glare. Grievances are not merely a product of victim culture; there are material quality of life deficits faced by Millennials and onwards that older generations did not have. Should these trends be reversed, the 'poor me' mentality would evaporate.
Where I agree is that generations should have more leeway to determine who they are in themselves, not be scrutinized from the cradle about what they are like. It's fair to try to capture the values and trends of a rising cohort, but predicting what will matter most for it goes too far.
My issue with generational consciousness is how superficial it's become. Millennials and younger were most rigorously theorized by Neil Howe and William Strauss, who argued they were defined by the sociocultural conditions a generation's life cycle. They set the tone for the ~20 year generations, but since their ideas went mainstream, they have been truncated to 15 years due to a preference for analyzing through technological shifts, a premise that tries to predict where the cut-off should be, not based on what will define a generation, if a single cause can be pointed to.
Generational self-consciousness seems here to stay, but its popular conception remains weak. Does the rise of the internet in 1995, before Gen Z was born, define the generation? Or its relationship to Covid? Or will their role in the growing geopolitical crises set their tone? Of course all of it, but no single event can be used to prophesy the character of their life trajectory. At best, generational consciousness can tie a cohort of people into a sense of the common conditions they are facing together, and in retrospect as a way to understand the center of gravity of values for a group of people in history. It has become too easy another label for reducing people.
Boomers were defined by when the birth rate was high - which was more about the parents, then about the kids themselves. So the Boomers are sometimes to 1965, sometimes to 1964, but we are talking 18 or 19 years here, where the first Boomers might have had kids who were born in the last year of the Boom - and so both parent and child were Boomers!
Someone born in 1946 experienced the turmoil and civil rights movements etc. - someone born in 1964 never saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They turned 16 in 1980, after Punk Rock had peaked and Disco was ending or over too.
I was born in 1958 - so I turned 16 in 1974, the Glam Rock era had peaked as had Prog Rock. Nixon quit and OPEC crisis meant it was an age of scarcity and high unemployment.
Early Boomers often have nothing in common with Late Boomers - these labels have limited value because 10 years is probably a better measure of a new generation coming of age and sharing experiences and culture. Someone born in 2015 will have experienced COVID, someone born in 2025 will not.
I've noticed the "identifying as Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha" phenomenon for the first time irl recently, and find it very odd.
My neighbour's chronically online, mixed-nationality 12 year-old really likes being "Gen-Alpha" and using "Gen-Alpha slang", so I suspect this phenomenon is strongest among very international, very online people without a strong national/ethnic/class identity or a subculture to belong to.
I don't think she's got the "generational injustice" grievance narrative yet, thank heavens. But still, feels a bit sad. Hopefully in her teens she'll become a goth, a rationalist, or a hardcore French monarchist, and give up on the generational identity thing.
Gen Alpha is all the annoying kids that go "SIX-SEVEN!"
Fucking little punks...
Excellent post. Your main point -- that naming a generation while it's still in its youth leads to the conflation of the characteristics of youth with the characteristics of that particular cohort -- is novel to me. I agree that there is a lot of us vs. them going on among the young vis-a-vis the old. It is common for people to overstate the differences, and I think this is because the generational framing gives them the preconception that they are so different.
That said, if we are looking for a term for folks whose adolescence or young adulthood was profoundly shaped by COVID, you could do worse than "Zoomers" (because they spent so much time on Zoom)
I've also had this frustration with american generational framings, it seems to way overattribute to cohort effect what is usually an age effect. Add in the combletely arbitrary boundaries and it's hard not to feel like it's secular astrology. Politically, it also grants a veneer of respetability to complaining about 'old people' or 'kids these days'. Because ultimately, a lot of what people are saying about 'gen Z' now is what they would have been saying about 'boomers' in the 70's/80's.
Idk to what extent it drives behaviour though, my *guess* would be that it's not actually an identity people attribute a lot of importance to, but rather a framing people apply when "useful". There's not exactly a community here, unless you count nostalgia bait facebook groups.
It’s all to do with what Zodiac sign Pluto (a generational planet) is in when people are born. Most of the boomers had Pluto in Leo. If that doesn’t explain things, I don’t know what does! You are going to have entirely different leanings if you are born with Pluto in Scorpio, than if you are born with Pluto in Virgo, n’est pas?
> I want people to stop giving younger generations names. Except in articles like this where you deconstruct the concept, there is rarely any reason to use terms like “Generation Z” or (God help us) “Generation Alpha.” For cohort analysis, you can just split people up by the decade they were born and get all of the same benefits without the drawbacks.
Well... you can split people up by the decade they were born. You'll get all of the same benefits. You'll also get all of the same drawbacks; there's no difference at all. Being "born in the '80s" is just as permanent as being a "millenial" is, and everything you say about generational labels also applies to decade-of-birth labels.
China used to use generational labels, on a family-by-family basis. They were real generational labels: genealogy was tracked, your generation was embedded in your name and therefore obvious to anyone familiar with your family, and you could outrank someone much older than yourself by belonging to an earlier generation (because your branch of the family was slower to reproduce than theirs was).
(This was not a universal system; as in all cultures, extreme concern with genealogy was the domain of the higher classes.)
That's gone now; people have forgotten their generation poems and social commentary uses the exact system you advocate: if you were born in the 1990s, you are 90后; if you were born in the 2000s, you are 00后, and if you were born in the 2020s, you are 20后.
I would tend to agree, if someone proposed it, that this shift in how the structure of society is labeled reflects a shift in the organization of Chinese society. Confucian hierarchy and respect for age and generational superiority have taken a severe beating. But it's not obvious to me that it's related to any of the phenomena your essay discusses.
one of the problems is that we are using a term to define two different things. A generation can be defined as periods of high and low points within birth patterns. There is a huge birth explosion after ww2. For the boomers, half of the women were at the median point for child birth in 198x, and close to 0% of silent gen has any kids at that point, millennials are the children of the boomers and we see the are corresponding spikes in the 80s and 90s that pattern match to similar spikes a 25 years earlier. About 99% of boomer children are born by Jan 2001. Which is to say we can define generations as patterns of childbirth that emerge across time due to the fertility choices women make. When there are high points, it puts pressure on the system to commoditize the generational experience, you need bigger class rooms, and can target youth specifically with entertainment and branding. Women born in these booms will have children in a statistically recognizable pattern beginning 18 years later, and ending 45 years later, with a majority of births starting 25-27 years later. This will cause a similar rise as those women have children, and so forth. These patterns of rising and falling births are well defined and noticable in the demographic data and can be marked as generations.
The second definition is patterns of consumption, which is a marketing related definition. This doesn't make it bad, quite the contrary, there really is a neXt generation, the Pepsi generation, that was exposed to not just world events but different mass consumption and mass marketing from prior generations. We would be dumb to apply this to the far past, once you get further from television it gets hard to define "mass media". But it also falls apart as we move into the 21st century. The top selling bands of 1990 sold more cds than the top selling bands of 2026 and few people owned a CD player back then. 20 million people watched cheers weekly. Today a top show gets about 9-11 million, (plus streaming). Today there's a very very tiny number of mega stars, shows, and films and everything else is broken up into silos of media consumption.
Where this gets to be a problem is that in the late 2000s, early 2010s marketers wanted to define why a cohort of younglings who had "grown up with" Facebook were special. These netZians where carved out of the late millennials and given a weird cutoff dates. Looking back, Facebook ended up not being that important, it's used by boomers. In hindsight had they kept to standard 18 year increments, you get a much nicer cutoff: everyone in gen z (born jan 2001 to dec 2019), attended high school in a world where a majority of teenagers has a smart phone, about 2014 onward. They also would have experienced COVID as a defining event of their childhood or early college experience, including remote learning. Finally, chat gpt 2.0 is released in 2019, - they will remember a time before ai ate the world.
As an early millennial it can definitely seem like you have more in common with people 45+ than 27 year olds, and that is the case if you focus too hard on early 90s stuff, but if you look at early 2000s media, including normal cell phones, internet 2.0, the start of streaming and cord cutting, the end of vulgar culture and rise of nerdcore. The rise of 3d and online video games. Even early adult workplace experiences of zirp and zero wage growth. You share Harry Potter, and pokemon- most gen xers were adults or late high school when that stuff first came out. Yes, you and the guy born in 1981 both saw the matrix, but he probably saw it in theaters and you watched it on dvd on a ps2.
Good thoughts.
My understanding is that many parts of the world go by birth decade. Which is surely less arbitrary.
The Baby Boom was a real thing, a massive anomaly on all the fertility/birth charts with reasonably clear beginning and end dates (even if the beginning is more tightly defined than the end). Being born in those years is as non-arbitrary and coherent as a nation-wide, 18-year "generation" can ever hope to be. The youth surge also produced real cultural effects.
Millennials and Gen X only make sense in reference to the Boomers: the Millennials as the Boomers' children, and Gen X as the generation that came between. As references one step removed from a coherent definition, they're not as coherent as the Boomers, but perhaps still coherent enough to warrant a name.
Beyond the Millennials, we're too far removed from the event that made the Boomers into a coherent generation; too diluted to be worth describing anything as a generation, until perhaps some future event renders the concept meaningful again.
You could use the decade label for this just as well but I definitely notice pronounced differences in my sister (4 years my senior, born 1982) and my husband (5 years my junior, born 1990) that have nothing to do with personality and everything to do with what kind of technology they grew up with.
The proactive generational labeling may be dumb, but I don't think it's dumb for people to immediately begin wondering what the internet, then smartphones, now AI, will mean for childhood. As it turned out, the internet and smartphones ended up mattering quite a bit.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I prefer to refer to myself as a "child of the 90's", but not because I was born then - I was actually born in the late 70's - but because the 90's (and late 80's) are when I came into cultural consciousness. I find the Gen-X label for myself to be problematic because (1) I have a lot more in common culturally with people born in the 80's than people born in the late 60's, and (2) the 16 year generations start here and seem to make no sense.
I think it would make much more sense for any "generations" to be full 20-year blocks:
Born in 40's & 50's - Baby Boomer
Born in 60's & 70's - Generation X
Born in 80's & 90's - Millenial
Born in 00's & 10's - "Zoomer"
Born in 20's & 30's - "Alpha"
But even this has the same limitations that RH spells out.
I think its best to identify with the decade you graduated High School (or turned 18). Because this is when you entered cultural consciousness, or rather maximum youth cultural consciousness.
The only problem with this is for people who were born in "rounded ten" years like 1990 or 2020. In that case you could argue that a kid born in 1990 was really a "child of the 80's", but then what about 1991 - only a year off? So that is the weakness of this approach, but I still think it's better than calling people Gen-X and Zoomer.
The 90's are interesting because in hindsight it seems that everyone agrees that it was the peak and everyone wants to be associated with it. If you were a child in the 90's, graduated high school in the 90's or were born in 1999 you claim to be a "90's kid", I really haven't seen many people claim the same for earlier or later decades.
I’m going to guess you had younger siblings which probably influenced you to feel closer to a ‘millennial’ than a Gen Xer. I’ve seen this with other people born close to the cusp, and being influenced by older or younger siblings. (A shuddering example but still solid: Kim & Kourtney Kardashian are actually in the Gen X cohort but due to the influence of their younger millennials sisters, grew up embracing more of a millennial viewpoint & outlook.)
I personally wouldn’t agree with the decade cut-off for generational distinctions. The cohorts are shaped by shared experiences within their formative years (combined teenage & young adulthood ) thus, the greatest generation shared the experience of WWII. Previously to 1998, that cohort was usually referred to as the ‘World War II generation’. Before the Silent generation, there was the Bright Young Things, a cohort who experienced the new freedoms of the 1920s (after the uncertainty of the first war) together as young adults. Cutting the generations into a two decade lump doesn’t work.
After those two/three cents, I agree with the article: stop naming the cohorts too early. It stunts their growth.
Yes, I totally have younger siblings. I also have a sort of youngish outlook for a dude pushing 50. I look younger than my age, I'm mostly in shape, I listen to music from recent years, stay on top of pop culture, I'm repulsed by brain-dead RW politics, etc. So that probably makes me seem more millenialish too.
Another problem with naming generations too early is also defining generations too early. There is only a WW2 generation because WW2 happened. You wouldn't have been able to even define that before 1945 or even decades later. How can anyone say people born from 1965-1980 are a distinct generation? What was distinct about being born in this time period? What was distinct about being born in 1980 versus 1981?
Not a lot.
I can tell you haven’t really studied or have had much interest in generational cohorts before today. That’s fine. But you did prove my point about having younger siblings with or without the anecdotal evidence.
My point about the WWII generation is, before 1998 when the term ‘the Greatest Generation’ was coined, they were usually referred to as ‘the World War II generation’ thus, proving the point of the article—they were given a generational cohort name much later in life which is what the article is advocating.
Oh, an answer to your question: 1982 is when MTV was born. There are quite a few research centers which put the generational cutoff between Gen X and Millennials at 1982, However, the generational cutoff points aren’t an exact science—the existence of younger or older siblings can often influence the direction one leans when born close to the cutoff.
Personally, I avoid the whole mess simply by referring to those who are my juniors as Whiny Little B-----ds. Avoids jargon; has the merit of being accurate; and warns them that I'm a rebarbative old so-and-so.