worst generation

greatest generation is a really stupid term too, actually

Blame Brokaw.

i'm still in awe about the idiocy of the term 'silent generation', what on earth did the ppl born in those two decades think of being labeled with that

they kept schtum so we will never know

I voted millennials only for the reason that they're at that age when one begins publicly declaring one's gerneration exceptional. I don't actually have strong feelings about Gen Y, I just think discussions around generational taxonomy are insipid. Unfortunately, Gen Y are of the age that others are writing about them and they are writing about themselves.

i.e. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/generation-y-doesnt-exist-really-were-definitely-here/7106

this reminds me of this poll or article or something about 'the best footballers of the 2000s' which, unsurprisingly, was full of players born in the late 1970s who had their peak athletic years during the decade, but because of that happenstance they were especially great

the "silent generation" includes most of the countercultural artists the boomers think they're super revolutionary for having bought products by

Generation X/Y cusp here - October 1980. Most would probably put me in Y but I identify more with X. There's definitely a cultural/attitude shift in people only a year or two younger than me that I've noticed.

so i suppose this generational determinism is yet another boomer inanity -- by extrapolating from their own provenance in the immediate postwar, they force the young into procrustean categories even where no demographically epochal event exists

Generation Z (also known as Generation M (for multitasking), Generation C (for Connected Generation), the Net Generation, or the Internet Generation) is a common name in the US and other Western nations for the group of people born from the early to mid 1990s to 2010, with the earliest date starting in 1991.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]

― Ms Tum-Bla-Wi-Tee (nakhchivan), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:18 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i refuse to believe that any of these people exist

i object to the terminology "generation y" by the way

how long has this generation-naming business been in effect? this is a late-20th-century thing, right? there are thousands of generations that haven't been named yet.

Let's get to naming.

(obv, these are generations of americans we've been talking about, and the further back you go, the more divergent experiences become.)

i refuse to be labelled as "the generation after x"

'Silent generation' comes from Nixon referring to a silent majority who weren't screaming hippies or McGovernites.

so i suppose this generational determinism is yet another boomer inanity -- by extrapolating from their own provenance in the immediate postwar, they force the young into procrustean categories even where no demographically epochal event exists

― Ms Tum-Bla-Wi-Tee (nakhchivan), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:01 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

&

i refuse to believe that any of these people exist

― max, Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:04 AM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

there was once a time in history when generations lasted the length of a monarch's reign. much preferable imho.

i won't let you fall
what you got to lose?
what you got to prove?
who you gonna screw down here?

i hate all of the generations

they force the young into procrustean categories even where no demographically epochal event exists

Tbf, their generation, esp during the 60's was pretty epochal.

To what extent do you think you fit in/identify w/your generation?

For all of their excesses, I have tremendous respect/love for so much art of the '60s that I could never be dismissive of boomers (realizing, I guess, that some of that art was created by people of the previous generation or two). I'm biased towards my own sub-generation, the very end of that spectrum (I was born in '61): old enough to have fallen in love with the Beatles before they broke up, but young enough to be completely in sync with the stupider aspects of the '70s in a way that someone five or ten years older might not have been.

epochal event refers to their parents not themselves

yet more boomer arrogation

but yeah, lumping people into generations always seems really bizarre to me. we should vote on which of the chinese year/animals is the worst. rooster, rooster, rooster!

the actually machers of the 1960s were not some twenty yr olds from liverpool or haight in any case

Like others here, I always thought I was generation X, but I guess I'm generation Y? I don't really know what that means - at least I can pinpoint what the press thought generation X was, even if it didn't really apply to that many people I knew...

no one is more infatuated with boomers than a boomer

lol @ iatee's graphic

if I'd answered that survey, the Reagan/Bush diagram would have a little asterisk on it that said "one respondent wrote in his father"

i wonder what sort of epochal event might have occurred in the early 2000s that might have defined the generation coming of age during that era, hmmmm

also super lolz at ppl itt discovering to their horror that they are the attention craving special snowflake brats they hate

wtc meant shit to most ppl outside of america

it isnt, in any case, an event of /demographic/ importance

How about Internet / collapse of world economy / rise of animal collective?

I think the boomers did have a sense of generational solidarity, though, and as procrustean as it may be to impose that on subsequent generations, perhaps they're either blind to following generations' having less of it or they don't approve of such anti-social tendencies. I definitely got a vibe from my dad in the 70's/80's that things had been more hopeful in the 60's and that the 70's had too many ppl just looking out for themselves w/o enough committment to social justice. Then Reagan got elected.

those were mostly the same people

i guess animal collective concerts/listservs might be demographically important, search census for ppl called 'noah lennox _____' born 2k4-2k9 or whenever

uh... aren't we talking about america itt?

u cannot trust anything a boomer says about boomers. If they thought we'd believe it they'd claim that everyone in the sixties exclusively ate harmony flowers, stopped violence with soulful vibrations and everyone loved one another w the heat of a thousand life giving suns

I think one of the stereotypes of millenials is they like their parents. I find that kind of cute tbh.

yeah well hopefully not just america, else u can all go talk about the grateful dead and spiro agnew's toilet routine

those were mostly the same people

Oh, absolutely!

I don't think the 20-year generations thing is going to work at all from the 1990s onward (and was obv problematic before). Kids born five years apart seem like they're going to have vastly different experiences.

I was born in '81 and I feel like while we were around the first to 'grow up with the Internet,' the technological pace was relatively slow and we had a lot of culture in common with people a few years older (esp. if we had older siblings or friends). Whereas now I'd be lumped into Gen Y and I am just utterly, massively confused by the experiences of anyone 5 years younger than me, much less 10-20.

The other 20 year problem is that ppl aren't having their kids at 20 in the same numbers they used to.

As a teenager I wrote and drew for the 'teen' section of the local paper (called ATTITUDE, a word that took up half the page like a WWII "WAR!" headline because they could never generate enough content). One of my teenaged peers, a redheaded Wiccan, wrote a column called THE VOICE OF X. This was 1998 or so, and she kept having to rebuff letters to the editor alleging she was too young to be a gen X'er. Seriously, half her columns were about trying to define generations in a way that justified the name of her column. It was pretty silly.

the 'president when you were eighteen' infogram is stupid, because (since we lack indisputable proof that eighteen is the year when political convictions were irrevocably formed, and has been this way the entire time anyone of voting age now has been alive) you could tell an entirely different story by shifting the goalposts - just take 'president when you were sixteen' or 'when you were twenty-one' as determining it instead

nah there is evidence that youthful political convictions generally stick but even if there weren't, the point is to observe a set group over time

To what extent do you think you fit in/identify w/your generation?

I straddle the line between fitting the stereotype and heavily relating to this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61AMJNM5BWL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Really, though, I don't know that any of this generational labeling is particularly meaningful in anything but the broadest sense (e.g. there are a lot of boomers, generation "text" or whatevs is probably gonna be more tech-savvy). If you think you've adequately summed up and/or are the voice of a particular generation, you're probably doing it wrong.

it occurs to me that the easiest way to read the top row is 'old people are racist'

xp

instead of being concerned with generations of the past I think we should think about generations of the future

for example:
the spacefaring generation
the exoplanet terraforming generation

i mean, i think the graph is interesting but i think that the goalposts are pretty arbitrary: they're assuming the weight of political consciousness falls the same way upon someone who turns eighteen the day of the new frontier speech as it does someone who turns eighteen the day they join a march yelling 'hey hey lbj etc'

i voted millenials haha suck it millenials

and i think the results for
'not yet eighteen when kennedy was shot'
'not yet eighteen during watergate'
'not yet eighteen during the iran hostage crisis'
'not yet eighteen when the berlin war fell'
'not yet eighteen for gulf war ii'
would probably confirm our biases just as effectively and yet they'd tell a pretty different story about 'generations'

oy, spot the error

http://workexposed.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/gen-y-10-charachteristics.jpg

when they came for the boomers, etc.

Hah Greatest Generation still the greatest! I did my part to do them in. Thanks for the 50 years of nuclear terror & anti-socialist propoganda, guys.

xp - there were lots of horror movies on the subject

Hah Greatest Generation still the greatest! I did my part to do them in. Thanks for the 50 years of nuclear terror & anti-socialist propoganda, guys.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, May 17, 2012 9:18 PM Bookmark

To be fair, wasn't most of this the work of Lost Generation or older? eg:

MacArthur born 1880
J. Edgar Hoover born 1895
Dulles brothers born 1888, 1893
Dean Rusk born 1909
Ronald Reagan born 1911
McNamara born 1916
JFK born 1917
Alexander Haig born 1924
etc., etc.

Not sure about Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, or Joe DiMaggio.

eh, it's not so much the people in power as much as the giant group that kept them in place

ehh, i dunno - - "It's not so much the people who systematically misled the population, as it was the population that was systematically misled"

oh, sure, if you want to act like trusting authority is a good norm

There are always assholes in power and they are probably from a generation. Everybody will get their chance!

My theory of boomer resentment is that the children of boomers hate the boomers because the boomers raised them with expectations of a boomer life -- just do what you love and somehow magically make a great living doing it. It's the crushing disappointment that led to the bitterness.

my dad somehow has the anxious "most work hard at your job, must always have a job, must keep shit together" mentality despite being a boomer. I don't know that this necessarily served me well, since... well, that mentality works well in 2012 but I think I actually was taught an even more paranoid mentality than our time requires?

http://www.aarp.org/work/retirement-planning/info-02-2011/many_boomers_report_no_savings_at_all.html

well, enjoy paying for their retirement:

"A poll released Wednesday found that a whopping 25 percent of people ages 46 to 64 say they have no retirement savings — and 26 percent have no personal savings."

and being continually underemployed b/c the boomers are too broke to retire.

wtff

The time is ripe for Generation Banaka

― Banaka™ (banaka), Wednesday, May 2, 2012 3:40 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so u say u want banakalution / well, you know, we all want to be uploaded into the singularity

fulled formed adult banaka units

AV CLUB: FX may split itself into two networks—one for the millennials, one for the olds

boomers.

FXX is just asking for lols

i guess my children will be watching FXXX some day

and their web channel FXXX YOU

the relatable, eternally depressing existence of the aged

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/millennials_will_save_us/