The Gen Y essay collection co-authored by David V. Stewart, JD Cowan, and me was recently reviewed on the Xennial Odyssey Podcast.
It’s cool of the hosts to review the book, and it’s good to know the word’s getting out. Thanks to XOP for giving the book some airtime.
The Gen Y host – his cohost is a Gen Xer – did a solid job defining the 20th century generations and listing their formative experiences. That’s a public service.
They both mentioned disagreeing with David, JD, and me. That’s good, too. Being able to defend our positions against counterarguments is important.
What’s a little disappointing is that the hosts didn’t put forth arguments against separating Generation Y from Millennials. They just said they didn’t like it.
One host, at least, admitted he didn’t read the whole book. That could explain why he didn’t address the rationale behind delineating Gen Y from the Millennials.
As an intro to the book’s generational theory for newcomers, and a reminder for oldheads, here’s how we break the 20th century generations down:
- The Greatest Generation: 1914-1934
- The Silent Generation: 1935-1945
- The Baby Boomers: 1946-1956
- Generation Jones: 1957-1967
- Generation X: 1968-1978
- Generation Y: 1979-1989
- The Millennials: 1990-2000
One part that threw the XOP hosts was the shortening of a generation from 15-20 years to 10 years after the Baby Boomers. Now, keep in mind that “generation” has different meanings depending on context. In strict demographic terms, it’s the rough time span between birth and attainment of childbearing age for a given cohort, which is indeed about 20 years. But in theological terms, a Biblical generation is 40 years. So there’s precedent for the figure changing.
I’ve always said that the generational progression above pertains to social and cultural attitudes. In that context, it makes sense for the time window to narrow. Because the rate of technological and societal change underwent drastic acceleration after WWII.
In other words, my generational theory gives categories for predicting and identifying cultural attitudes and dispositions. So a major reason for splitting Millennials from Gen Y is that a sociological model that lumps people who remember the pre-internet, pre-smartphone, pre-9/11 world in with people who don’t will not have useful predictive or descriptive power.
And we do see a divergence in attitudes and even spending patterns between people born in the 80s and those born in the 90s.
Ys have lower rates of home ownership than Millennials. They also drive the 80s and 90s pop culture nostalgia movement.
Then there’s the smoking gun. Thanks to JD, we have the ad industry trade mag article in which Madison Avenue types state outright that Gen Y and the Millennials are different generations. They even go on to explain that they memory-holed Gen Y for no longer being profitable.
One response I often get to this information – and it’s one the XOP hosts give – is that categorizing people by generation divides people.
What’s never made clear is why that’s immoral or even undesirable. People divide themselves into different families, clans, and nations too. Before the last 30 years or so, that diversity of peoples was considered a great good.
Mankind has organized itself into many nationalities while recognizing our membership in one human family. Those geographic categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
Neither are chronological categories.
I can know with a fair degree of accuracy that someone from Japan or Zimbabwe will have different perspectives on certain matters than me. By analogy, it’s not a stretch to suppose that someone who came of age during the Dustbowl will have different takes on religion or music than someone from the 70s.
The past is a different country, indeed.
Learn how to navigate the present while keeping your soul and having fun, too.
I would posit reading some Marshall McLuhan to understand how heavily modern media techniques have shaped how people think and act, and that since the increasing speed of changes has only exacerbated since the early 20th century, our entire world went from taking centuries to change to mere decades. Look at how every decade of the 20th century has a different look, feel, and even moral system to the rest. This was not the case beforehand, and it is not really the case now since Cultural Ground Zero.
We have to accept we were born and lived in an anomaly in time and history, where a bunch of individuals are all running around defining their own truth from vastly different principles and moral systems, and it is why alienation and depression is so prevalent today.
Unless we try and understand this division and how to work through it, we will just be repeating the same “You just don’t want to be labeled Millennials, but somehow you’re not Gen X, because a bunch of suits I disagree with about everything else are somehow right on this single issue” nonsense.
No one wants to admit that in the book, I only made up the name of one generation, and it’s the one that still hasn’t been given a title yet, the last generation after Zoomers who I believe are the end of the line of this insane modernity. There is no more to come after them. Every other generation mentioned IS A GENERATION THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE ALREADY CREATED YEARS AGO. This book exists to compile knowledge and observations about things that exist. Nothing in it was carved out thin air.
It’s a shame they disagree with the book, but I’m going to need more reasons it isn’t true beyond the Millennial Hate canard or Lumping People Into Groups Is Bad. Neither are arguments or refute anything said inside of it.
This actually reminds me of the criticism of the Last Fanatics that amounts to “Can you believe this guy thinks these guys are Fanatics? Isn’t that crazy?” which, yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy when the people who defined an industry are admitted Fanatics that were never questioned or confronted once over their aims. That’s why I wrote the book: to show you how crazy it is. To understand why everything went so wrong we have to reassess things we thought of as obvious truths for so long.
Otherwise we will just be trapped in a feedback loop of consuming product and new programming from our masters forever.
It was amusing to hear them joke about what the generation after Alpha will be called. I immediately thought of your observation that it won’t be called anything. Because Gen Alpha really is the Last Generation. The Lost -> Great -> Silent -> Boomer, etc. progression is a feature of Western civilization’s decline. The Zoomers will see it end, and their children will come up in whatever comes next.
I don’t think that the “20 year generation” concept existed until the work of Strauss of Howe. From what I’ve seen they didn’t have any impact whatsoever until the fourth turning (1997) but even then their definitions of generations weren’t standard (we’ve seen articles here that use other definitions throughout he 00’s, and even now absolutely nobody says “the Homeland Generation” or “the 13th generation.”) The people who made “standard” definitions were the Pew Research Center. Recently I’ve been trying to find without success when they decided on the starting point for the Millennial generation. But I did stumble across this article:
https://archive.ph/JJZPD
That establishes the definition for the END of the millennial generation being defined in 2019. Before that you could say that millennials persisted through the late 90’s and even into the 00’s without the “official” source saying that you were wrong.
Similarly, the term Generation X seems to come from the book “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” by Douglas Coupland, published in 1991. This is why Strauss and Howe use “the 13th generation” to refer to it in their 1991 “Generations” book rather than Generation X. Before that point you definitely had Baby Boomer as a term, and I’m sure that people were aware that people born in the 70’s couldn’t be called Baby Boomers, but there doesn’t seem to be a term for what they would be until the 90’s. And certainly no “Generation X was born exactly from this year to that year.”
All of this is to say that the more I dig into it the more it looks like every bit of the received wisdom about generations, from them being consistently 20 years, the cutoff dates, the names, etc. are all very recent; no more than 30 years old for any of it. And everything relating to millennials is even more recent than that, I doubt that any of the “official” stuff is more than 15 years old, with the Zoomer stuff only being settled on in the last couple of years.
With that in mind it’s pretty crazy how much resistance the idea of Gen Y being different from millennials gets. It’s treated as though we are disputing things settled for centuries, when at best its things that got a consensus a decade or so ago.
What that tells me is a lot of the pushback against Gen Y is coming from Millennials.
The resistance behind acknowledging even the possibility that a group which keeps coming up with strange labels to define itself (Geriatric Millennial, Xennial, Xillennial, etc.) might even exist, is outright NPC behavior. If it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t keep trying to assert its existence.
Simply screaming about appeals to authority from the people who defined said group, then erased them at their earliest convenience, is the epitome of Clown World behavior.