For those of you who go on Reddit, this is r/generationology in a nutshell

[pbrower2a]

(12-16-2020, 01:35 PM)Cocoa_Puff Wrote: This is how the vast majority on r/generationology at Reddit act like:

Example Critic #1: "2000s babies can never be Millennials because I can't see a Tiktok star or somebody who was born after Y2K/graduated after Parkland and Fortnite as a Millennial. I would rather have 1970s babies as Millennials than 2000s babies ANYDAY!"

That is due to your own biases and it is not facts. Early 2000s babies can be Millennials due to where they were in history and even how they grew up. Putting a 70s born with Millennials makes even less sense than putting a 2000s baby there.

Obviously people can be ahead of their times. As an example from relating some generations that I notice: the Silent may have made their most lasting contribution to American culture in their comedy. Can Don Knotts (born 1924) have anything in common with Jerry Lewis (born 1926)? Sure, unless some traumatic event occurs that divides two generations neatly. Although Adaptive generations initially follow the lead of a preceding Civic generation in much, they eventually split. If COVID-19 does not eventually divide the lifecycles of of Millennial and Homeland generations, what will? I see COVID-19 interfering with the usual benchmarks of completing childhood among the Homeland generation but not among the Millennial generation.      

Quote:Example Critic #2 (this pertains to me as I was born in 2002): "Why do you wanna associate yourself with people older like a 1982 born instead of those younger than you and try to be a Millennial so bad? You are not a Millennial. You are Gen Z! Get over it."

No, I will not get over it because your statement is not facts. It is a pure heavily biased opinion because you are soft and get triggered when someone has a different opinion than you and when you see a person that so happens to place their birth year as the last then you cry "gatekeeping" like the boy who cried wolf and the feminist that cried "Rape!".

One may not be a choice. Time in which one lives is itself environment, and one thing that separates Boomers from X is that Boomers came of age with pop music which supposedly had some claim to intellectual insight and to pop music which offered no such claim. We also remember when there was much 'easy listening' music on FM radio... if you remember that (yuck!) you remember FM stations with the letters "EZ" in their call signs that offered an unending stream of music designed to tranquilize -- show melodies, pop tunes, TV themes, and old standards with quirky orchestration but minimal counterpoint and no musical development. It took little time to recognize how empty it was, the musical equivalent of cotton candy. If your parents listened to that tranquilizing music, then you were probably a Boomer. If your parents listened to something else , you are pro0bably something else.

Economic reality matters greatly. Late-wave Boomers expected prosperity to be widespread and easily accessible until the economic paradigm changed (lower your expectations so that the system can reward people for already being rich). X had no such delusions and knew that it would be divided between villains and victims in a heartless economy.    



  As I Boomer I can tell you that as that change happened I could not go with the 'newer' pop music. Some of us 'went Country'. Some went toward jazz, some toward rhythm-and-blues, some went to fossilized 'oldies', and some went toward classical. Not 'easy listening'. 

Quote:Example Critic #3: "Millennials are not that long and I can never see teenagers as a Millennial like those crackhead Boomers Strauss and Howe do who are so out of touch with reality and the current generations that it's cringe!" 

Just because old people call young people Millennials does not mean anything and it is more of an insult to young people like how we use Boomers to insult older people and more. Don't place personal hate towards Strauss and Howe towards me. That's displacement. 

There's a huge difference among Boomers between elites who could get away with practically anything and the not-so-elite types who became cannon fodder in the Vietnam War... or late-wave Boomers who found that they had to sell out their dreams cheaply to survive... let alone those who killed themselves with booze, dope, and AIDS.  

Quote:Example Critic #4: "Go find that 82 or 83 born lady that you love so much and confess your love to her. Simply for putting myself in the same generation as a 1982 or 1983 born. ??‍♂️"

Do I even need to explain this one?

People can marry across generational lines and be happy. There is typically a gradation between generations. Howe and Strauss related the reality of increasing pathologies among the Boom generation as birthdates get later... a trend that accelerates around 1955 in such things as crime, drug use, alcoholism, and educational non-achievement. Such may reflect the lax discipline of late-wave Silent parents and the tendency of early-wave Boomers to avoid giving up on the joys of childhood for the responsibilities of adulthood. (Once you have a child you can no longer act like a child if you are to be a competent parent). 

Quote:Example Critic #5: "Gen Z is 1997-2012 and that's not gonna change. Period. Stop trying to squeeze into being a Millennial because you are not. Just accept the Gen Z label. Embrace it."

That will definitely change as most generation definitions do. And it will evolve to look more like Strauss and Howe's ranges and other sociological ranges as pop culture will be looked at as something that can't define generations once the younger Gen Z group come of age. It's not facts that 1997-2012 are Gen Z and I will not embrace it. I am not even trying to squeeze myself as a Millennial.

See above. 2002 cohorts are the oldest kids in K-12 education, the ages in which most people have shared experiences with their peers before they split economically (career), education (college or not), and geographically (stay in Oxycontin Valley or go to Greater Chicago).   

Quote:Example Critic #6: "I found one thing in your comment that I disagree with and I am just gonna attack you for it even if I am in the wrong here."

There are so many people like that on there.

I hope that I avoid doing that. There are people completely and arrogantly wrong.

Quote:Example Critic #7: "Generations are not long. They are super short. For them to be over 16-18 and even worse 20 years is unacceptable."

People wanna make generations so short for no reason just because they cannot group themselves with people much younger/older than them even if they still had similar characteristics to be in the same generation.

The length is typically that between the first wave being born and that first wave being born to adult members of that generation. With this one ignores teen pregnancies... but as a general rule the sub-adult males, the teenage mothers, and their offspring almost never become leaders of any kind. Of course there are exceptions of a generation just long enough that an elite woman (Dorothy Walker Bush, born 1901) giving birth to a son with all the advantages (George Herbert Walker Bush, born 1924)... the mother and son are both GI's.   

Quote:Example Critic #8: "How can 2000 be in the same generation as 1982? Yet group people born in 1997 in the same generation as a 2012 or 2014 born when there is a much bigger generation gap there."

People on there might be Millennial purists/haters on there tbh. You never know. They would Gen Z much earlier rather than later.

It is fairly easy to see a line between the Lost and GI's (1900/1901) between having had the chance to participate in World War I and come back to a society that crushed much freedom among young adults without offering any benefits (WWI vets did not get the benefits of preferences in jobs, cheap loans for housing, or subsidized education, but legislated such for surviving WWII and later Korea and Vietnam vets). Add to this, the Spanish influenza ravaged the Lost Generation. The Lost were likely to be warehoused inexpensively in nursing homes if they could not cope with the large numbers of cross-country moves that adults made in the 1960's and 1970's; the GI Generation put that off as long as possible by staying intellectually and physically active as long as possible.  

Quote:Example Critic #9: "Most sources and researchers on Google/Wikipedia say that Gen Z starts between 1995-1997 so it has to be objectively true."

These are the people that don't do intensive research and the thing that pops out to them first is the only evidence they need.

I wouldn't trust predictions on what Japan was going to do from 1931 to 1945 based on the general wisdom of what Japan was in the 1920's.

Quote:Example Critic #10

Quote::

Quote: "Billie Eilish was born in 2001 and acts stereotypically Gen Z so that means that everybody born in the early 2000s, let alone 2001, can never be Millennials."

I honestly cannot take people who base generations off of celebrities seriously for obvious reasons.

There are more but I will just point out the main 10 example critic responses. These people don't understand what generations are and just take the word of pop pundits over people like Strauss and Howe, doing the same thing that they criticize, if not worse. They act very self-righteous when it comes to these and are big hypocrites. Some completely write off generations as capitalist marketing, yet use that same "capitalist marketing" to fit their agenda. You have no idea what I deal with constantly on that sub. Now that I think of it, these people can be worse than the trolls that come on there too.

Howe and Strauss suggest that pop stars and sports stars... and maybe such people as actors and writers give hints, based upon what they get away with before others could. The late Michael Jackson (1959-1999) showed many X characteristics and few Boom characteristics. Sports stars, music stars, and the best-compensated actors can do largely what they want no matter what the norms are of the time... and this is often something ahead of the time. These people have crazy money early, if for a short time, and most young adults must accommodate the economic realities of the time. In a 3T that means for most people that one must find some vicarious delight in the very rich being celebrated for being rich while others are overworked and underpaid while being deeply in debt for the dubious privilege of being overworked and underpaid.