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

[Notouchingmybhuna]

Or Z or a millenial or a boomer.

WTF is happening? I’ve just attended a professional study day where speakers introduced themselves with this bollocks as if it was relevant.

For full disclosure I have no clue which Gen I am actually supposed to be 😎

The boomers refers to a huge baby boom after the war. Its had to shape public policy ever since. So they were baby boomers from the day they were born. The services that age category need have to expand as they reach that age. Marketeer target them because they are a big market

So boomers is 'old' now as in 60 and over, ish, but they were young once. The term first started being used when schools had to expand to fit them all in.

Doesn’t this go back the First World War and the ‘lost generation’. I don’t think it’s a new phenomenon. Probably more relevant these days though because of more sophisticated marketing etc

Yeah boomers are politically quite meaningful because they were the largest generation (now overtaken by millennials) and as they age their pensions/healthcare needs (combined with insufficient working age adults) are going to make government budgets completely unworkable. Not the fault of any individual boomer of course.

You’re jumping the shark now.

Because a generation refers to when you were born. I was born early 80s so am a Millenial. While the way my generation was labeled has evolved - we were Gen Y once upon a time - I was part of this generation at birth and will be until I die. I won't age up to being Gen X or a Boomer.
There's a crap load online about all of this if you genuinely find it this confusing.

No but it seems I was one. It was originally called the Baby Boomer generation but it didn’t mean anything to us the way generation labels do today.

😂😂🤷‍♀️

Surely a professional can communicate in a way that everyone can understand regardless of their age? Offer in person training , written material and videos ? Without making reference to their or anyone else’s generation. If the justification for their style of delivery is their age, isn’t that really just an excuse for their own limitations or for using their preferred format regardless of their audience? I don’t even know what my preferred format would be. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. It depends on the quality of the info and its delivery.

I’ve just attended a professional study day where speakers introduced themselves with this bollocks as if it was relevant.

My eyes would have rolled out of my head and onto the floor if I had attended that meeting. Who gives a shit what generation somebody belongs to...I don't even care what generation I belong to TBH.

My mum described herself as a baby boomer during the 70s when there was a discussion about working cohorts and pensions. It’s not a new concept. A bulge in the birth rate poses significant challenges to society.

Gen X were the ones after that birth rate bubble ended and get their name from a Douglas Copeland novel - although I though MicroSerfs was his better one.

It’s not your age, you don’t age in and out of a generation, it’s merely the year you were born.

Certain assumptions are useful in planning, policy making and marketing. I remember Mondeo Man, White Van Man, Pink Van Woman and other target demographics during various election campaigns. GenX and Millennials are useful in the same broad stroke way.

Oh, dear.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation

When I was a child in the 80s, my parents bought a special edition of Trivial Pursuit which was called the baby boomer edition. I can remember asking my mum what it meant and she explained that it was the generation of people born after WW2. As part of this same conversation, she told me that I was generation X. So this is definitely not a new phenomenon.

It sounds like people have started using their generational status in place of their personality, which is a bit crap but I still like it as a useful shorthand. My kids are gen Z and gen alpha.

I know the cut off line has to be somewhere, but as someone born in 1981 I relate far more to Generation X than Millennials.

You’re a cusper; an Xennial, aka Oregon Trail Generation.

You seem very proud of your ignorance.

Had to Google the Oregan Trail, not a game I've heard of, although did grow up playing on the Commodore 64. Siblings were 10 years older so perhaps this as well makes me feel more like Gen X.

ok so the generation naming comes from sociology, before the turn of the 20th century changes happened quite slowly and so history and people were split into ‘ages’ but since the start of the 20th century there have been rapid changes in society and how people have responded and been shaped by them so it became more common to name generations who were born at similar points in societies development. It started with the Greatest Generation in 1900, a time of massive technological and societal change, then the silent generation, named as they were born around the times of the two world wars and basically just had to get on with things. Then baby boomers (which I remember references to from early childhood in the 80’s) and so on.
it’s certainly not a new thing in academic circles but I suppose it’s in the past 30 years that it has become much more common in everyday lexicon.
hth

I think that the ‘silent generation’ (my grandparents) and ‘baby boomer’ generation ( my parents) were very useful terms for framing different outlooks, behaviours, social norms, cultural values, aspirations and challenges within the social milieu of the two eras each generation lived through.
Now the terms as well as all the other new ones are largely used as a stick to beat with and serve little other purpose.
The generalisations can be comical if taken with a pick of salt and used in a light hearted way, but the ‘boomer’ hate is nothing more than ageist hatred and envy.

It has masses of relevance. For example millennial would for sure already know they’ve missed out on loads that Gen X took for granted. And secondly they would for sure just google it if they didn’t understand rather than ask a forum 🙄

It’s not an ID card😁

The blanket boomer hate is ridiculous. It would be like future generations hating on every Gen Z even though they just going about their business doing the best they can. I do think though there is a section of ‘boomers’ who are smug and self satisfied and show zero empathy or acknowledgement that younger generations are struggling and dealing with things they didn’t. I can only assume they don’t have grandchildren so don’t care what happens. I’m a boomer because of my age but I have a lot of sympathy for youngsters today who have to deal with house and rent prices, jobs taken over by AI, massive student debt etc.

@Notouchingmybhuna I’m interested to hear why the terms were used- ie what sort of event was it. There are some ways where it can be relevant, i.e the style of how something is presented and therefore received, and what sort of communication styles work better in different cohorts.

Its all a load of bollocks though isn’t it?

Why are Generations Categorized by Years?

Shared Experiences:
Individuals born within a similar timeframe often experience major historical events, cultural trends, and technological advancements during their formative years, shaping their worldview.

Attitudinal and Behavioral Differences:
These shared experiences can lead to distinct attitudes and behaviors among generations, influencing their interactions with each other and with society.

Research Tool:
Categorizing by birth years provides a framework for researchers to study these differences, analyze trends, and understand how generations impact various aspects of life, from political views to consumer

In a nutshell it is used to group people together by shared experience in the world. It does help in context of experiences we have had to form connections. Not sure why it bothers you though. I'm GenX and it doesn't bother me at all, it is just a way to understand a population of people based on their age bracket. It is a classification system. It is very useful for research purposes.

In a professional context, it's probably not relevant, but in general terms, generations are marked by far more than simply "age."

It's about cultural experiences and how those unite certain groups of people who experienced it during their formative years. Things like current events, politics, music, movies, TV shows, books, fashion and in some cases, even food, can be unifying for groups of people who were coming of age within those time periods.

It's kind of a good way of understanding different generations of people and how popular culture can shape and form people. There are cultural experiences that a boomer will have experienced that I, as a millennial, will never experience and that may impact the type of people we are/become on some level.

Even down to things like how we speak-the slang/lingo used can be earmarked by the different generations. Obviously, it's not the only thing that defines people but it can be a useful framework to kind of understand different groups of people and understand how culture/popular culture can shape and form groups of people-with obvious scope for individuality.

Do you share that with everyone you meet?

Its simply a way of grouping people in to demographics.
Do you read your star sign?

The Silent Generation
This is the first defined generational group. It refers to those born between 1926 and 1945, so these are people who lived through World War Two. The name comes from an article in Time magazine from the 1950s, and alludes to the fact that the children of this generation were taught to be seen and not heard. According to Dr Abramson, this group are:

• disciplined
• value-oriented and loyal
• interested in direct communication, so enjoy speaking in person as opposed to via technology

Baby Boomers
This is the only generation that’s been defined by an official government body: The US Census Bureau (which is part of the country’s Department for Commerce and is responsible for collecting data from across the US). They’re so named because of the huge surge of births after World War Two. The group starts in 1946 and ends with those born around 1964, when the birthrate began to decline again. Dr Abramson says boomers are:
committed
self-sufficient
competitive (she thinks this may have something to do with how many of them there were)

Generation X
The Resolution Foundation thinktank defines Gen X as those born between 1966 and 1980. They grew up in a time when technology was advancing fast, but it wasn’t nearly as readily available as it is today. Because of this, this generation straddles both the digital and non-digital world, and understands the importance of both. Dr Abramson says these people are:
resourceful
logical
good problem-solvers

Millennials (Generation Y)
This is the cohort you’ve probably heard the most about. It’s not entirely certain where the generation starts and ends, but it’s approximately those born from 1980 to 1995. They’re often described as ‘lazy’ in the media and that they all the money they should be saving for a house on avocado toast, but th also the first generation to be “digital natives”, as Dr Abramson describes them. She thinks this makes them extremely self-sufficient, as they no longer have to rely on others to solve their problems or teach them things - they have the internet for that. Other defining characteristics include:
confident
curious
questioning authority -
Dr Abramson thinks that this can be perceived quite badly by some of the older generations, who would be less likely to do so

Generation Z
There are a few conflicting ideas about where this generation starts. Pew Statistics says 1997, Statistics Canada says 1993, and the Resolution foundation says 2000. Wherever it really begins though, we can safely say this group is young, and has never known a life without tech. That might be why their alternative name (coined by American psychologist Dr Jean Twenge) is iGen. Some of their characteristics include:
ambitious
digital-natives
confident

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zf8j92p

Same but different
The important thing to note according to Dr Abramson is that while these separations can be useful, at the end of the day we are individuals. It’s like with horoscopes: you may identify with one or two characteristics of being a Sagittarius or a Leo, but you won’t ever fit your star sign’s description exactly.

The same goes for cohorts, although as the stereotypes are given more prominence in the media, she notes that people in the different groups can “pigeon hole themselves into aligning themselves with those characteristics”.
What they can help us with, as Dr Abramson explains: is "so that we know how and when to work differently with a group.”
In other words, you wouldn’t treat a 60-year-old the same way would a teenager, so having these cohorts gives us a rough idea of what different age groups might want and need.