Site icon Kairos – By Brian Niemeier

Lost Generations

Brian Niemeier

Identity politics has increasingly become a hot-button issue. The debate typically centers around matters of ethnicity or religion, but an often overlooked yet just as important factor in setting a person’s self-concept is generational identification.

Inter-generational conflict has become so ingrained in contemporary culture that it’s hard to imagine a time when people didn’t wear their generation as a badge in the political struggles and culture wars that are coming to a head today. But for members of one generation to bring their cohort-specific grievances into the sociopolitical arena as a plank against other entire generations is a relatively recent development that really only goes back to the 1960s.

You had disputes between elders and their offspring before, to be sure, but there had never been anything like the wholesale rebellion of the then-young against all the received wisdom, culture, and traditions of their parents that the West saw in the late 60s.

The generation that won the culture war and is now firmly entrenched in the halls of power, the Baby Boomers, have a general tendency to project their own peculiar attitudes and perceptions onto other generations en masse. They also run Hollywood, academia, and the media, so you get constant color commentary about nihilistic Gen Xers, Millennial snowflakes, and the stodgy, repressive Greatest Generation–who’ve become noble and heroic now that they’ve given the Boomers all their stuff.

Another curious phenomenon arising from the current obsession with age-based demographics is the cycle wherein a generational label will be defined and bandied about in the public discourse for a few years before the term is retired and the people it once described are lumped in with another generation–usually alternating between the preceding and succeeding cohorts, depending on the commentator.

Do you remember–or belong to–any of these lost generations?

The current tendency is to throw the Silents in with the Greats or the Boomers, meld the Jonesers with the Boomers or the Xers, and blur the lines between Gen-Y and the Xers and Millennials. But in terms of formative experiences, typical self-identification, and existing generational terminology, this muddying of the waters makes no sense.
Prime example: describing the current crop of youngsters as Generation Z makes no sense without a Generation Y.
To resolve this issue, I did a bit of demographic research. It occurred to me that the old standard definition of a generation lasting twenty years is less relevant considering the rapidly accelerating pace of cultural change. The last generation that this time scale works for is the Greats. After them, I found that categorizing the population by generational cohorts spanning ten years instead of twenty better described the average member of each category.
I based the following generational categories and timetables on likely formative experience, common cultural touchstones, likely parentage, and the general state of the culture when each cohort came of age.
  • 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
  • Generation Z: 2001-2011
By this reckoning, the Boomers are the children of the Greats. The Jonesers are, by and large, the Silents’ offspring, Xers are the children of the Boomers, Generation Jones begat Gen-Y, Gen-X spawned the Millennials, and Gen-Y birthed Gen-Z.
Food for thought.
Happy, hopeful and practical
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