I've been thinking about how generations are separated. Why? I don't know. I just have been.
My first thought is how artificial the generational divides are. In fact, the dates are different depending on which source you consult. One place says Gen X starts after Kennedy's assassination, another says 1964, and yet another one cites 1965. If the people labeling the generations can't agree on basic dates, I think it calls the entire construct into question.
Second, the generational stretches are far too long and they're inconsistent. Again, with the caveat that the actual years of a generation are fluid, the Boomer generation is 18 years, Gen X is 14 years wide, another generation is 10 years.
I can see a ten year swath of time for a generation, that seems reasonable, but 18 years? Really? Does someone born in 1964 have anything in common with someone born in 1946? They don't share the same cultural references, they don't share the same growing up experiences, in fact, I'd argue that they have so little in common that it's ridiculous to lump them together.
Maybe back in the 1800s when life changed slowly, an 18 year stretch of time would work for a generation, but in this time of technology, things change too fast to group that many years together. Just look at how life has changed since the advent of the smart phone.
While doing some research, I discovered that Japan does break generations every 10 years. That makes a lot more sense to me.
My third musing point was what it really means. Can a decade (or double that) swath of people really exude the same vibe? Are there that many similarities in behavior at a macro level to validate generation labels?
This one I'm less sure of. People are so individual and a lot depends on where they grew up, on how their parents raised them, on their life experiences.
I grew up in Minnesota, and while I was raised to be polite, using "sir" and "ma'am" are foreign to me. Now I live in Atlanta and I get ma'amed all the time. (I do not like it! Ma'ams in Minnesota would be like 120 years old.) But I keep hearing that it's a southern thing.
Another thing that's interesting is that I was raised by parents who were a generation older than the parents of my peers. (I was adopted.) My dad tells stories of people thinking they were my grandparents. Their style of parenting was definitely different than what my peers experienced. Believe it or not, my parents were more laid back, less strict, although there were definite lines and expectations.
Overall, I think the generations thing is interesting, but as a macro view of a large group of people, mostly useless except--maybe--for the people who are squarely in the middle five years of the generational divides. Still, I'll probably muse over this some more.
