Complex Numbers

Meh. Whatever.

Yesterday, I managed to score a vaccine booster on a walk-in. Consequently, my arm is sore and I don't much feel like typing. So of course this one comes up at random. Now, I could cheat and just link to something fluffy instead, but no, I'll just present the link and try to keep my comments short.

It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”  

Oh, I don't know, I thought the chemistry between Kirk and Picard in that movie was... oh, you mean like the demographic concept. Never mind.

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

Contrary to The New Yorker's usual meandering style, the lede is actually useful and relevant. I think some people might be under the impression that high school has always been a big thing, that the way things are now is generally the way they've always been, at least since the Industrial Revolution.

Why is it relevant? Because the concept of naming generational cohorts is primarily a marketing tool.

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one.

Incidentally, a part of me rebels against the categorization of teenagers as "young adults" (again, for the purpose of marketing). I see "young adult," and I think very late teens, early 20s. But apparently they mean like 13 year olds. This only leads to more confusion. But I digress.

To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

Like I said. And I've been trying to say stuff like this for years, to not much effect, mostly because I don't have the bones to express it properly. That's why TNY writers get paid and I don't, I guess.

The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Change, as I've noted, is generally a continuum. Though of course that continuum is punctuated by defining events.

The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64).

Which I've been freakin' saying.

Anyway, the article is long but worth a read if you care about this sort of thing. I try not to, but it's hard when all I see around me are assumptions made based on highly questionable generational stereotypes.

Fortunately, as a Gen-Xer, I can turn to the rallying cry of my cohort:

"Meh. Whatever."