The Baby Boomer Boondoggle and the “Gen X” Lie

Can we have an intelligent conversation about generations?

(Source: Piqsels)

One of these things is not like the other. Can you guess which one?

• Baby Boomers
• Millennials
• Gen X
• Gen Z

Guess before my article is done.*

(Source: author)

Generations?

You are not of your parents’ generation. That seems pretty obvious. They perceive and think differently than you do, partially because they have more life experience than you but mostly because they grew up in a different time.

Being born in a particular set of cultural circumstances affects how you perceive the world. The times in which you grew up are formative of your values and expectations. My question is how are we to think about the different sets of values and expectations that different generations formed and often still have about the world.

We need to start by deconstructing the current memes defining generations. The corporate media loves simplifications. It enjoys painting with a broad brush and placing everything into tidy, constricting categories. One of the media’s simplifications is to label people as belonging to a generation. They claim you are a “baby boomer,” a “millennial,” a “Gen Xer,” or so on, defining you by the classification to which they have consigned you. Thinking in terms of generations isn’t completely silly, but the current pantheon of generations is largely meaningless. Mostly, the current generational labels are just lazy thinking.

The media-created generations are empty notions that tell us little about who people are or what their experiences may be. For concepts to be useful, they need to define tangible phenomena. Talking about people in terms of generations makes sense only if we avoid simplistic characterizations. We need to instead consider how different significant historical events differently affected people. Different experiences, especially during people’ formative years, lead people to perceive differently their world.