"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 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.
COVID is a great example of a generation-defining event that we could only know separated cohorts of people from each other after it happened. It conveniently lined up pretty close with the Millennial/Gen Z divide but… that was total chance!
As someone on the very oldest side of “Gen Z,” I was only still in school for COVID because I went to grad school. A lot of people my own age who were already in the workforce had a much more “millennial” experience of the pandemic.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I agree with you. Naming generations is a bad idea unless you have some sensible reason for doing so. That said, gimme a buzz, it would be good to make your acquaintance, whether privately or publicly.
I don't understand you, and I understand most people. I very much enjoy making the acquaintance of people I do not understand. Unexplored territory n' all.
On which point, I am currently in Borneo. I'm legit about my curious nature.
You don't seem to have much space for worldwide cultural revolutions so you may want to skip straight to Part 2 for the Borneo stuff - still humanistic in tone and purpose, but anthropologically interesting to anyone gifted with curiosity.
Broadly agree, but I kind of think the school years spent taking Zoom classes at home will be a common experience defining a generation size age cohort. .
"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.
To paraphrase Dave Barry, the future will be an exciting time to look forward to. I plan to be dead.
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.
COVID is a great example of a generation-defining event that we could only know separated cohorts of people from each other after it happened. It conveniently lined up pretty close with the Millennial/Gen Z divide but… that was total chance!
As someone on the very oldest side of “Gen Z,” I was only still in school for COVID because I went to grad school. A lot of people my own age who were already in the workforce had a much more “millennial” experience of the pandemic.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I get the point and you might be right, but it'd be impossible to even prove.
I agree with you. Naming generations is a bad idea unless you have some sensible reason for doing so. That said, gimme a buzz, it would be good to make your acquaintance, whether privately or publicly.
https://ydydy.substack.com/about
I don't understand you, and I understand most people. I very much enjoy making the acquaintance of people I do not understand. Unexplored territory n' all.
On which point, I am currently in Borneo. I'm legit about my curious nature.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/dear-malysians
You don't seem to have much space for worldwide cultural revolutions so you may want to skip straight to Part 2 for the Borneo stuff - still humanistic in tone and purpose, but anthropologically interesting to anyone gifted with curiosity.
Broadly agree, but I kind of think the school years spent taking Zoom classes at home will be a common experience defining a generation size age cohort. .
Brilliant!