The Gen Y essay collection co-authored by David V. Stewart, JD Cowan, and me was recently reviewed on the Xennial Odyssey Podcast.
It’s cool of the hosts to review the book, and it’s good to know the word’s getting out. Thanks to XOP for giving the book some airtime.
The Gen Y host – his cohost is a Gen Xer – did a solid job defining the 20th century generations and listing their formative experiences. That’s a public service.
They both mentioned disagreeing with David, JD, and me. That’s good, too. Being able to defend our positions against counterarguments is important.
What’s a little disappointing is that the hosts didn’t put forth arguments against separating Generation Y from Millennials. They just said they didn’t like it.
One host, at least, admitted he didn’t read the whole book. That could explain why he didn’t address the rationale behind delineating Gen Y from the Millennials.
As an intro to the book’s generational theory for newcomers, and a reminder for oldheads, here’s how we break the 20th century generations down:
- 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
One part that threw the XOP hosts was the shortening of a generation from 15-20 years to 10 years after the Baby Boomers. Now, keep in mind that “generation” has different meanings depending on context. In strict demographic terms, it’s the rough time span between birth and attainment of childbearing age for a given cohort, which is indeed about 20 years. But in theological terms, a Biblical generation is 40 years. So there’s precedent for the figure changing.
I’ve always said that the generational progression above pertains to social and cultural attitudes. In that context, it makes sense for the time window to narrow. Because the rate of technological and societal change underwent drastic acceleration after WWII.
In other words, my generational theory gives categories for predicting and identifying cultural attitudes and dispositions. So a major reason for splitting Millennials from Gen Y is that a sociological model that lumps people who remember the pre-internet, pre-smartphone, pre-9/11 world in with people who don’t will not have useful predictive or descriptive power.
And we do see a divergence in attitudes and even spending patterns between people born in the 80s and those born in the 90s.
Ys have lower rates of home ownership than Millennials. They also drive the 80s and 90s pop culture nostalgia movement.
Then there’s the smoking gun. Thanks to JD, we have the ad industry trade mag article in which Madison Avenue types state outright that Gen Y and the Millennials are different generations. They even go on to explain that they memory-holed Gen Y for no longer being profitable.
One response I often get to this information – and it’s one the XOP hosts give – is that categorizing people by generation divides people.
What’s never made clear is why that’s immoral or even undesirable. People divide themselves into different families, clans, and nations too. Before the last 30 years or so, that diversity of peoples was considered a great good.
Mankind has organized itself into many nationalities while recognizing our membership in one human family. Those geographic categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
Neither are chronological categories.
I can know with a fair degree of accuracy that someone from Japan or Zimbabwe will have different perspectives on certain matters than me. By analogy, it’s not a stretch to suppose that someone who came of age during the Dustbowl will have different takes on religion or music than someone from the 70s.
The past is a different country, indeed.
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