To say shoot me now if I ever refer to myself as Gen x

I’ve been using computers since they were the size of wardrobes and the internet when the main search engine was Yahoo. 😁

According to search results theorists Neil Howe and William Strauss were among the first to name different generations. Douglas Coupland wrote a novel and called it Gen X for his generation. Blame them. Boomers were named for the post war baby boom. Millenials were named as we were the young ones entering a new Millenium and some turned 18 in the first few years of this century.

I have no idea. I mean, the articles might not have been written by boomers at all but by millenials themselves or gen x. Or whoever was older than boomers.

Papers have always published rubbish.

I just was observing that these terms have been around a while as I can remember all the articles pitting generations against each other.

So I'm a boomer - born 1959. My experiences growing up were very different to those of people born in 1946 like your parents.
Not the same "era" at all. To me it just feels like lazy stereotyping either no basis in any kind of logic. I think you could assume people born over say a 5 year period would share similar experiences but otherwise it doesn't work.

Given the youngest Boomers are in their early 60s, hopefully not.

It seems I’m a boomer. I have no idea what years of birth qualify someone to be a millennial (or Gen Z or Gen X).

When I first started work 27 or so years ago, there were endless newspaper articles about boomers finding millennials awful in every way possible.

Neither a good or bad thing. Just a thing to place you in a wider cultural context.

It's immediately understandable in the contexts it's used in though to have the named brackets. There are 125 birth years between 1900-2025, but only seven generations.

Me too, and it sounds cooler than the others 😄

Omg. You are SO Gen X.

It's just indicative of when you were born and how much tech you have/had? I have Millennial, Gen z and Gen Alpha children, there's not a lot of difference between their upbringing/school etc apart from tech.

Agree. It seems to be a thing now to have to label oneself and others , but with things that are really boring so your generation, whether you prefer sex with men or women or both or nether and lots of other things that really are not in the slightest bit interesting to other people.

its going backwards I think, labels are very limiting.

I managed to spend my entite life until a few very short year’s ago not even realising I was a boomer. No one referred to themselves as a generational homogenous blob the way people do today.

I don't think it has suddenly "become" relevant, it has been relevant for at least 20 years probably more.

There's a thread at the moment where some people are absolutely aghast at the moral failings of anyone who would answer someone else's mobile phone. I think understanding that Gen X and baby boomers, for example, used to work in offices where you would pick up other people's phones as a matter of course; that we don't generally see mobiles in the same way as millennials and Gen Z because we didn't grow up with them, might be useful in understanding that societal norms are not the same to all generations. (Yes I am sure any number of BB and GX will be saying they also see it as a moral failing, it was just my thought while reading it)

That's just a tiny example I noticed today but of course there are all kinds of wider sociological insights to be drawn from, for example, how it might be to be part of a massive birth spike (baby boomers), or to grow up with fear of nuclear war (boomers and Gen X) or climate change (millennials and Gen Z) etc.

I don’t use it as my ‘identity’.

If look at the Gen X type threads on here they are full of stuff about the British Gen X experience. Hair gel, the miners’ strike, shoulder pads, Constance Carroll lip gloss, electronic music, Arctic Roll, NOT HAVING SMARTPHONES, watching Threads, sorting out university applications on your own, getting served in pubs at fourteen, Thatcher etc, etc. It’s shared cultural experience. It’s nostalgia.

I’ve just watched the Adam Curtis Shifty series with a side order of The Comic Strip on Netflix so feeling quite immersed.

They’re not meant to be a tool for calculating which era someone was born in, they’re just labels to describe the different cultural, societal and technological influences that shaped particular generations during their formative years. It’s not that deep.

I can see generations have a set of experiences that shape them, which is useful to know in some circumstances. Didnt it all arise from marketing?

But personally, i have more similar experiences to the generation officially below me than some of the older people in my generation. I was right towards the end of it. So I think my experience was much more similar to an older millennial than an older gen x as i am closer to them in age.

I agree that it’s a load of bollocks, OP. If someone’s age is vaguely relevant, or helpful I giving others an idea of the era in which they were born, surely people can make a reasonable guess how old someone is, and therefore roughly when they were born? I hate the use of stupid labels and abbreviations.