Apropos of recent and less recent discussion here about generations and generationalism, interested readers might like to know that there’s an interesting thread developing over at John Quiggin’s place.
Elsewhere: More on generations at Catallaxy.
4 Responses to “XYZ”
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Is there a Gen Z yet? Interesting how they used letters so late in the alphabet… seems to signify that we’re the last ones… almost as if the next generation will be the final capstone on civilization’s funereal obelisk. That’s just me and my melodramatic imagination however…
Another reason behind such labelling is perhaps our lack of knowledge of such generations… x and y generally symbolizing an unknown value in an algebraic equation, or an axis upon which any number of values can be found. But does that mean Generation y is somehow perpendicular to x? Again… my imagination is making unfounded analogies…
All I can say is from personal experience… which is what Mark wishes to transcend of course, but it’s all I’ve got to go on in this regard.
My elder step brother and half sister are both on the gen x/y cusp (1979/80), my mother and stepfather are baby boomers (stepfather in 1945, mother in 1954), and my father from the “silent generation” (1936). I myself am Gen Y (1984). I can’t really say that any of them fit the supposed models of their generation very well…. though I s’pose there are elements. E.g. associating baby boomers with the 60’s as a formative decade is mistaken. My mum was too young to identify with the decade and my stepfather didn’t really turn to alternative ways of living until the late 70’s and 80’s… and especially when he got cancer in the 80’s. Mum was quite conservative until she met my stepfather in ‘89. Maybe they’re “late-bloomer boomers”…. but it seems that every generation is far more heterogenous than we think.
As a child, and having older siblings as a formative influence (who themselves were influenced by older teenagers)… I was probably exposed more to latter day Gen X culture than incipient Gen Y culture. And when I myself became a teenager, I exposed myself more to baby boomer culture than Gen Y culture. The upshot of it is that my formative influences (as are most people I can think of) are far too complex to be sloganized. In fact, I think that it is a mark of Gen X and Y that they have become far more difficult to isolate as a discrete package of interconnected values. If anything we choose our influences far more, and from a larger basket.
This is to say nothing of economic influences… in which case Gen Y could arguably have had it easier, in the sense that we were only children during the last recession. Baby boomers of course were similar… in that they grew up during the 1950’s and 60’s. Maybe what they say about Gen-Xers being cynical and pessimistic has something to do with the fact that they are the first post-post-war-boom generation?
wikipedia gives a rundown of generations
just put in something like generation x and at the bottom it’ll link to gen y and subsequent ones and the baby boomers (who technically shouldn’t be a gen)
Just read some of the wiki entries.
Highly contested concepts, generations are. Furthermore… the XYZ formula seems to have been tailored to the USA. Of course, there will be similarities… but when speaking of defining national issues and economic development, we have followed different paths… and thus the underlying substructure defining our generations are different. A minor example is that following the dot com bust in the USA there was a recession. We didn’t have that, nor did we have a preceding dot com bubble.
Cliff, the way the pulp articles put it there is a gen Z and that generation is the children of the late Xs and some early Ys (I was an early 80s baby, which on consensus seems to be early Y — but with the median maternal age at first birth now at 30, children-of-Ys are still rareish), essentially, babies of mid-nineties on on. They don’t get to have generational characteristics yet, other than projected ones.
In the US they talk about children who are too young to remember the September 11 attacks, so 1995 or 1996 births onwards. And yes, that formula isn’t going to have such large meaning here: I can’t imagine that there’s really a bright line between what the early life experience of a 14 year old (born 1992) and a 9 year old (born 1997, 3 or 4 by 11/9/2001) would be like.
In some ways in Australia remembering 1996 might be a better line: remembering a government before the Howard government’s election in 1996 may have some small meaning in terms of political thoughts. I remember Hawke and Keating as prime ministers very clearly (I was 15 the year Howard was elected), but it’s possible that my youngest sister, born 1986, only really remembers the names from personal experience. There’s another line between early 80s and late 80s children too: the late 80s children are the first ones who can possibly think of the Internet as having been part of daily life basically forever.
I think the generation game is fun as a talking point (UNSW computing tutors get a mail at the beginning of each year saying things like “this is the first cohort who don’t remember command line interfaces”, “this is the first cohort in which you can expect everyone to have used email” and so on). But I’ve always basically agreed with John Q’s point re using it as anything other than a fluffy way of talking about “kids these days”.
And, while this is hardly unique to the generation game, it’s always seemed to be a way of talking about “rich kids these days” anyway. An increasingly sizable minority are indeed living at home rent free and putting the money saved in investment properties because they can’t bear the idea of ever living in an apartment themselves while at the same time changing careers and relationships constantly because they can’t bear the tedium. Of the my own twentysomething friends, there’s a bunch of homeowning (or at least mortgaged) married folk who have put nearly 10 years into a career track already. (In fact, one thing that early thirtysomethings do mention at wedding receptions is that they weren’t weddings to go to in their twenties but now they go weddings exclusively of younger friends.)