Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

That's just the kind of thing a GenX'er would say. Sort of kidding, sort of not, let me explain.

The thing about generational cohorts are that they share a set of significant experiences at a common point in their growth to adulthood. So for me it was Jimmy Carter, Regan, "Stagflation" and the post Vietnam War mess. For teens today it will be around things like Yik Yak, internet lives, Ferguson riots, Snowden, and debt. The government is perceived in a "way" and the world is being wrenched by a particular set of issues, and your family is affected by various events, and your peers are passionate about various causes. They all add up to a generational "imprint" which is the poly miasmic tint that affects the perception of every future event. You break free from the crysalis that is childhood innocence and your eyes open up on a wider stage, and it is that first moment of perception that lays all sorts of groundwork in you about what is important and what isn't, what is right and what is wrong.

Oddly there is no way, really, to easily not get imprinted, and because of that imprinting you will recognize others who came of age at that same time as peers and people who came of age earlier or later as "different" (sometimes good different and sometimes bad different).

Because those groupings exist, they cannot help but exist, and as you get older you will see different groupings reacting to the same sorts of problems everyone deals with (dating, jobs, careers, families, politics) and you will recognize that different groups react differently from other groupings but similar to other members of the group, well you'll want to put a name to that. And you'll call them the "<nom de jeur> generation" or "our generation" or "my parents generation".

It would be good to ditch being sensitive about how folks of your generational cohort respond though. Getting past name calling is usually a good sign of maturing. Not that it won't bother you, just like getting stung by a bee often bothers you, except that you can see and accept the bee sting, and the name calling, for what it is, the last ditch response of an organism that is feeling threatened.

The problem I see with these labels is when you try and apply them globally.

Looking at your 'imprints' (I like the term), you are probably a couple of years older than me, but me being born in europe, the list of imprints and experiences are totally different.

For example, people in my year were the first born in democracy in my country, my childhood is full of examples of people revelling in the new-found freedom with new genres of music and fashion coming and going, access to more than the state's tv channels and things like that.

However, you and I are labeled GenX, even though our imprints are totally different (for me, Reagan was a just a face on the tv screen). When I compare my 'imprint' with colleagues from other european countries, they are totally different too (some come from communist countries, others from established democracies).

So how come, if our imprints are all so different, we are all labeled with the same term and expected to have similar perceptions of anything?

Expanding a bit from this comment, any set of actors will exhibit certain emergent properties (culture etc, if you will) , which is strictly speaking independent from any of the actor themselves. Are we actually sure that the "imprint" becomes individual characteristics, or is everyone behaving similar just because the society/culture at large is making everyone to be acting that way.

Oh, I don't think they should be applied globally, but generational imprinting is extremely useful when applied within a society.

While generational groups may have similar experiences, and therefore similar worldviews based on those experiences, it seems to me that the labels themselves aren't used in that way. They're used more as labels of pride and prejudice, and much of their associated feelings and statements are based on personal beliefs rather than actual human interaction. Consider how many news articles are writing about the habits of Millenials these days with regards to work and life. Most, if not all, of them are written as rants looking to pin the author's dislike of modern culture on a younger generation. Even Boomers had their share of unfounded, ranting criticism from their predecessor generations when they were younger, and it's fair to assume that in the future we'll have articles written by Millennials about how Gen-Z is lazy and ungrateful. Generational cohorts have a place, but we often confuse them with the nature of our entire society rather than just those of a certain age.

"They're used more as labels of pride and prejudice"

Accurate, but also consider the idiom "divide and conqueror"

"Baby boomer" became a thing when advertisers needed to hawk advertising. If advertising was pointed at the "youth market", then you would have forty years of sales of Marlboros to that person, so invest more.

I suppose with GenX it's bicycles and Mountain Dew, which became ever related through all those ads.

I agree with everything you've written here. It's not unreasonable to look at large groups of people with something in common and draw statistical conclusions about them. What's unreasonable is to look and a single person and think "because he's from this generation he must think that".

Absolutely. I had dinner last night with a Millennial (I'm Gen X) and he was telling me something about how people acted and I reacted surprised-- and it turns out he means people of his generation. He was an exception to that behavior, but he recognized how his generation was different from mine and he one between.

Of course, when I was in Chile things were very different. Because the culture is different. In Chile there's more of a pre-pinochet vs "grew up after pinochet" generation-- the divides are not the same as in the USA.

Nicely put - as somebody who lived through similar imprinting. The imprinting is real, but I do get irked by crude marketing attempts to lump me in with my cohorts.

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