Choosing your generation?

[David Horn]

(03-26-2019, 06:40 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Is it ever an option?

I know it seems nonsensical, but for those born near the cusp, isn't choice a factor? I have been playing with the notion that generations overlap rather than having neat boundaries, so for people from these "grey areas" there must be some other factors apart from birth date.
Mark Zuckerberg and Amy Winehouse have been both born in 1984, but I see Zuckerberg as a millennial, while Amy as an Xer. From an older generation, we could point to Jimmy Carter who is more Silent-like despite being born in a supposed G.I. year.

I agree that, as a cusper, you can ally with one camp rather than the other, but that changes nothing.  If the theory holds, then the idea of a "generation" is based not on uniformity but preponderance.  

It's impossible for any generation to be pure, so all archetypes must be represented at all times.  What sets a particular generation apart from another is percentage of each architype present.  If the breakdown is Civic (40%), Artist (25%), Idealist (15%), Nomad (20%), then the generational makeup point squarely at Civic.  At the cusp, the balance between adjacent generations become much less pronounced.

Life is analog, not digital, after all.