9 ms·

It's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world. There is no such idea of generations of people where

• potta_coffee 8y ago
  I was born in 1984. I had a curious upbringing, true, but I find I have very little in common with "kids" born in 1997, the last year of my "generation". In 1997, I was a freshman in highschool. Things changed dramatically between '97 and '10. For instance, kids my age didn't grow up with social media, we had land lines and dial up internet, and none of us had cell phones.
  • zoom6628 8y ago
    I was born in '63 and didnt see computers until 1976 (Apple IIe). The only form of telephone was a landline. WHen working in Hongkong in 1987 i saw first mobile - the Motorola brick.
• hkmurakami 8y ago
  There concept is widely used in Japan as well fwiw. "The sexless generation" etc.
• adamnemecek 8y ago
  It’s not set in stone but these generations exist everywhere. Say one generation had to fight in war and one didn’t. You’ll see major differences in their personalities.
• roymurdock 8y ago
  You don't work in marketing/advertising. Companies need to segment populations of consumers with similar characteristics to effectively advertise, tailor products, and sell to them. One of the most common demographic dividers is age. Different "generations" are grouped together because the members of their population exhibit similar income and expenditure patterns on average.
  • sdegutis 8y ago
    Generations has been a concept long before marketing. I do wonder about who draws the line for where a generation begins/ends, but the concept is pretty clear: you are one generation, your children another, your parents another, your grandparents another. Hence the base word "generate".
    • roymurdock 8y ago
      Market research agencies draw the line nowadays and their terms get picked up in general lingo Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy
      • hnaccy 8y ago
        Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z don't seem to have been coined by market research agencies.
        • yourapostasy 8y ago
          They rarely coin words into mainstream lingo. But they are uniquely positioned with their data streams to detect trends as they are happening. And they will happily co-opt a term and promote it, if the term makes it easier for consumers to self-identify as part of a group. That eliminates the marketing effort to convince a consumer that they are part of a particular group. Getting individuals to self-identify themselves as members of various groups is a highly effective advertising delivery channel. Convincing you to use groupings as a convenient, time-saving shorthand (like branding is a convenient shortcut) gets you to buy more, more frequently. Marketers and advertisers fear you insisting upon evaluating situations and people one-on-one, as they come up in your life, and using the marinating and revealing effects of time to judge value and character.
      • asdff 8y ago
        >Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy And they still do...
• whitepoplar 8y ago
  It's easier to make clickbait headlines when you pigeonhole people into a "generation."
• gerbilly 8y ago
  > Who draws a line between generations and why? Market research organizations I think. They segment people into generations (and smaller subcategories) in order to better understand how to sell them products and services. They are marketing buckets. The corporate mindset is so pervasive in north america, that we take on their concepts and discuss them even outside of their area of application. This is why we talk about which movie 'grossed' the most on the weekend, instead of comparing movies on their artistic or cultural merits.
  • gbear605 8y ago
    We talk about which movie grossed the most because it’s the best proxy we have for how many people saw it, not mainly because we care about how much the production company made.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    Movie reviews compare movies on their artistic and cultural merits, and they are quite pervasive. When I search for a movie, for example, the rating is the first thing that appears, along with a bunch of review sites. The box office is almost invisible.
  • dnautics 8y ago
    Generation x was coined by douglas coupland, an author (author of microserfs, incidentally)
• conistonwater 8y ago
  It's a convenient shorthand for talking about and summarizing continuous statistical distributions. Shorthands are okay. As to your question, if you draw the lines between differently, you only get slightly different results, because it's fundamentally measuring the dependence of various factors on age, and the exact way you draw those lines isn't important.
• beaconstudios 8y ago
  I think it's based on the trope that teenagers rebel against their parents' beliefs, mixed with the idea of generational progress. So each generation of teenagers rebels against their parents' ideas that they believe are "outdated", and then supposedly grow up retaining this new framework of belief. So what was cool becomes uncool, what was progressive becomes conservative, etc etc. I think it's mostly nonsense though. I think the underlying grouping that generation is a proxy for, is age group. 18-25 year olds behave differently from 25-35 or 35-50 (with some fuzziness at the edges). In other words it's loose grouping based on age/maturity.
  • geggam 8y ago
    You say that but you can see it in many "verticals" the old Unix way being replaced by systemd and such Containers and such arent new. We have had FreeBSD jails for 2 decades plus What is new is the thinking that is a better way of doing things. Jury is still out on that :)
• jcadam 8y ago
  I was born in 1980, which means I don't fit neatly into either 'Gen X' or 'Millennial.' I grew up with computers, but I'm able to walk down the street and watch where I'm going rather than stare at my smartphone whilst walking into other people, lampposts, cars, etc. But really, it's all arbitrary and pointless, I agree.
  • lkitching 8y ago
    The term 'Xennial' was coined just for people in your demographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
    • jandrese 8y ago
      For some reason the Gen Y label never stuck. It was the thing back in the 90s and early 2000s, but then just faded away for no reason in particular.
      • dragonwriter 8y ago
        Because Millennial was catchier; Gen Y only made any kind of sense in relation to Gen X, not independently.
        • jandrese 8y ago
          But Gen Y wasn't the millenials. Millenials came after them. Gen Y is the kids who grew up with computers and early Internet/BBSes, but not the pervasive information brokers that millenials know. Back when the internet was pseudononymous by default and nobody really knew how anybody was going to make money with it. Theme song: Smells Like Teen Spirit. Maybe they should have been called the grunge generation.
• gondo 8y ago
  this was a great video about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ
• klodolph 8y ago
  > It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. It's just an arbitrary label for people born in a certain period of history. These people generally have shared experiences that are different from the experiences of other generations. > Who draws a line between generations and why? Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes. It's sometimes a useful distinction so people remember it and use it. > People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation. There is no sharp dividing line between lemons and limes, either. Fruits in the citrus family can be crossbred with each other and you will end up with hybrids that cannot easily be classified as lemons or limes. There's no sharp line between "tall" and "short", or "white" and "gray". That's just the way names generally work, outside of fields like mathematics where you can use more precise definitions.
  • lucisferre 8y ago
    > > Who draws a line between generations and why? > Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes I mean, I doubt it is really the exact same people who do this. At the very least it is a separate department that does the lemon-lime distincting.
    • klodolph 8y ago
      You might be surprised. Ernest Hemingway, an avid drinker, coined the term "lime" so he could distinguish it from other types of citrus in the Daiquiri, one of his favorite drinks. He also popularized the term Lost Generation, generally regarded as the first generational cohort with a name, although the term was originally coined by Gertrude Stein. (Ohyyfuvg.)
      • smnscu 8y ago
        Comment of the month edit: never mind, it's not actually true - gullible me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(fruit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(fruit)
        • 8y ago
• Vraxx 8y ago
  No it does not make sense, but I think what you may be missing is that it is not supposed to make logical sense as a concept, it's supposed to appeal to other parts of a person's psyche such as pride and belonging. So this contradiction and confusion that you observe is completely accurate, but that doesn't deteriorate the effectiveness of "generational thinking" at what it does. I think it's just a part of a bigger pattern that groups of humans tend to fall into where they pick arbitrary lines to divide them into groups so that they can justify condescending the other group. There is also the other component that people like to tell narratives with history, which is easier when you can condense the actions of millions of people into a number of categories you can count on your hand. Largely speaking, I think the world is just really complex and the ways we try to simplify it and comprehend it break down in some illogical ways because they were never superbly accurate models in the first place. It's good to know (I wasn't aware before) that this trend isn't present in all groups of humans, it gives me hope that it is able to be overcome collectively.
  • thfuran 8y ago
    >It's good to know (I wasn't aware before) that this trend isn't present in all groups of humans, it gives me hope that it is able to be overcome collectively. Did you just place yourself in the group of persons above such baseless group-defining behavior?
    • Vraxx 8y ago
      It seems like I did with my words, but I did not mean to. Thanks for pointing that out, I'm just as guilty of all of the behaviors I described which is part of what helps me recognize the pattern in the first place.
• AlphaSite 8y ago
  Its q uniquely american thing. It doesn't exist in the UK to the best of my knowledge.
  • maccard 8y ago
    Definitely not. Look at any UK based news paper, and you'll find articles comparing Millenials to Boomers - [0][1] are two articles I found within 30 seconds. Looking at places like /r/unitedkingdom, you'll find it full of people talking about other generations being selfish etc, where we're just trying to get by.. [0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/baby-boomers-v-millennials-take-both-tests-to-find-out-whos-smarter-gcfcmntr3 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/baby-boomers-v-millennial... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/29/millennials-struggling-is-it-fault-of-baby-boomers-intergenerational-fairness https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/29/millennials-...
    • mturmon 8y ago
      Agreed, and adding -- One can see the notion of epochal/generational change in earlier UK contexts. For instance, the post-WWI era ushered in a time of great social change and the "Bright Young Things" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_young_things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_young_things). And of course the "Swinging Sixties" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinging_Sixties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinging_Sixties) after the costs of WWII were paid. I don't think this is at all an American phenomenon. Another reference point: kids who always grew up with a smartphone, vs. slightly-older kids who got their first one, say, in college. Totally different thing.
• realbarack 8y ago
  A couple things: 1. Age distribution is not uniform: the histogram of people's ages really is multimodal (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/06/americas-age-profile-told-through-population-pyramids.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...) so talking about generations is a way to think about the "clusters" of ages. 2. Intuitively there is a certain zeitgeist that comes from being around for certain events or being affected by certain societal or economic forces. What did it mean to be a teenager or a college student in 1968? Do Americans who recall September 11, 2001 versus those too young to remember it think differently about things? How did the recession of 2007 affect those who were starting off their careers versus those who were about to retire? Generations are an attempt to generalize the answers to these questions.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    9/11 is an interesting example; the youngest Millennials (born '81-'96, according to Pew and others) were only five at the time, so do their experiences really match the teenagers and young adults at the time, who had enough context to understand what they were watching? In my experience, that's not true at all, to them it was merely an historical event, whereas I quite distinctively remember the shock, despite not even being an American.
    • mywittyname 8y ago
      But people of the same age also have very different experiences for the same event. A 15 year old in NYC would remember 9/11 way differently than one from Colorado.
• Ericson2314 8y ago
  Generations are a bullshit idea from the marketing/advertisement cesspool to give themselves makework. The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous, but this stuff has so pervaded pseudo-intellectional relms of media that, yes, real scientists at the real US government have stooped to using them. Are they the original "fake news"? *I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall. The rest is bullshit. There's no "boomlet" caused by them. "Greatest" is more senial Regan shit still haunting us. X, Y, is being too lazy to even find a bullshit name, and millennial is believing that the way we count years somehow matters—actually probably does in a bunch of ways completely unrelated to the things marketing cares about.
  • dnautics 8y ago
    Before you call gen x a bullshit name, I suggest you look up its origin.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Generations are a bullshit idea from the marketing/advertisement cesspool to give themselves makework No that's not where they originated from. > The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous Named generations don't have a constant period. (They tend to run between about 12 and 25 years.) > I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall. True. > There's no "boomlet" caused by them. Without attributing what caused it, there was a continuous nearly monotonic decline in US birthrates from the peak of the Baby Boom in 1954 through 1976 (Gen X is usually tagged as ending between 76 and 80, then a run up to a peak in 1990, followed by a drop back to the 1976 low in 1995, hovering around that point or slightly under through the end of the millennium, where it started dropping again. The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet.
    • Ericson2314 8y ago
      > 12 and 25 years Still a low spread. No overlap is also weird, insofar that generations are supposed to be real phenomena and not just an arbitrary division. > No that's not where they originated from. How much does their current incarnation owe to whatever came before? > The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet. You need to look at that children/potential mother rate. Constant means pure echo. Secondary crest further either shows we have more mothers and they mimick their own mothers in having more kids, a true cultural inheritance, or it shows that there is enough variation in maternity age that generations are sufficiently convolved such that no 1 generation begets the next. Those two can maybe be teased apart by combining the per-whole-population and per-potential-mother rates to get the mothering/potential mother rate. Has anyone actually done any of these statistics?
• throw_away2 8y ago
  The whole thing was invented by two boomers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... My personal theory is that it is just an artifact of US boomer navel-gazing and self-exceptionalism. Also that it fits in nicely with peoples' tendency to want to drop other people into little buckets so that they don't have to think about them too hard. People do the same thing with race, believing these differences between us are discrete and fall into categories that define our essence, rather than continuous multivariate gradations.
  • komali2 8y ago
    I feel you there, although I do think it can be useful to say things like "people born before 1980 will not experience climate change like those born after."
    • throw_away2 8y ago
      Fair enough, as this is something that will happen to a given person, not some intrinsic attribute of their personality. But consider, too, the arbitrariness of specifying 1980. As someone born in 1980, I feel this acutely, as I'm not really gen-x nor am I really millennial. People born just before and just after me will feel climate change about the same. The framing implies a discrete change, but there isn't one.
  • goto11 8y ago
    The post-war baby boom was not something exceptional to the US. There were baby booms in most of the western world.
    • asdff 8y ago
      Very true, but the life of a post war baby was very different than someone who grew up during the great depression, or during the roaring 20s, or any other time. It is useful to bin people into groups facing similar environmental and temporal situations, it makes comparisons and tracking a given bin of people through time easier.
• tomatotomato37 8y ago
  The large scale of deaths and later births that came from WWII affected age demographics in western countries enough that we have identifable "waves" in age groups and thus generations.
• microcolonel 8y ago
  I mean, not denying that these labels are most popular in their English form, but people do write about millennials in other languages. Most seem to call them Generation Y https://yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=Поколение%20Y https://yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=Поколение%20Y The common Chinese translations seem to treat it as an "era" more than a "generation", it's talked about reasonably frequently in ROC pop media it seems. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%E4%B8%96%E4%BB%A3 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%E4%B8%96%E4%BB%A3 Of course, at the end of the day it's just arbitrary BS, but it's not like the English speaking world is the only place people dare to split time into discrete chunks. And people generally know what you're talking about when you say "millennial", even if they couldn't tell you the "official" start and end years. I may be too young to be a millennial, by one year, according to some of those definitions.
• izzydata 8y ago
  "Am I missing something?" Not really. People like to categorize things in attempt to draw any kind of conclusions from it. Sometimes it can be helpful and sometimes not. The trends they are describing were most likely occurring consistently over time and not at any particular point, but if you take two points in time 30 years apart and compare them it might look like a drastic change.
• godelmachine 8y ago
  I am from India and I practically grew up listening how unfortunate my elders were. Every time I complained of the cable TV not working, the standard reply was - “When I was of your age, I had to look out a window”. Ergo, the generation thing is always there, just that it takes a different form in different countries.
  • newyankee 8y ago
    While i can say i had similar experiences, it is indeed true that middle class wealth and options are only showing up in the recent generation(s). A lot of these things are based in reality albeit personal experiences can differ a lot and some elders may just be exaggerating
• jdlyga 8y ago
  It's kind of like separating the 19th century from the 20th century at WW1. Millenials are separated from Gen X by having computers and the internet introduced at some point while they were growing up. Whereas Gen Z are the kids who have had iPads since they were babies.
  • gbear605 8y ago
    Gen Z starts around 1998 or so, so presumably many of them did not had iPads as babies.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Millenials are separated from Gen X by having computers and the internet introduced at some point while they were growing up. I'm in Gen X (and not at the very end). I used a computer at school in 4th grade, had my first computer at home within a year, had a PC clone at home (our third family computer) by the end of 6th grade, had a modem and CompuServe account in middle school. Millennials may be distinguished by being likely to have had access to the Web before leaving high school, but not by having (personal) computers introduced while they were growing up.
• js8 8y ago
  In Czech Republic, this "generation of something" is also sometimes used, because of two reasons: First, there were actual population boom waves - one peaked after WW2, another peaked in the late 70s, another roughly after 2000. Also there was birth rate decline as an after shock from the transformation to the market economy. These waves seem to get generated by strong historical events or inadequate access to housing. In general, thanks to immigration and larger differences in the age of motherhood, these waves slowly disperse. Second, because there was a lot of politically different historical periods in Czech Republic in the past 100 years, people born around the same time tend to have quite different experiences. So you have generation which was born in democratic Czechoslovakia after WW1, generation that grew up under Nazism, generation that grew during Communist purges in the 50s, generation that grew during a period of cultural renaissance in the 60s, generation that grew during a period of political tightening (normalization) in the 70s and 80s and generations born after the democratic revolution of 1989. These different generations were largely learning a different language (German, Russian, English) and each was under influence of quite different culture than others.
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  It's a very American thing. They like to categorize people and then assign attributes to that group. "Conservative", "Liberal", "Gen X", ""Millenial", "Baby Boomers" and so on. I also find it pretty unhelpful to think about society that way. I think Clinton for example thought that "women" would vote for her because they are "women" and all "women" have the same opinions.
  • wuliwong 8y ago
    >They like to categorize people and then assign attributes to that group You mean like you just did?
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      Exactly!
• rsync 8y ago
  "Am I missing something?" Yes - you're missing the detail of the first of these generations - those returning to the United States from having served in World War 2, took full advantage of the economic preeminence of the US, and begat the "baby boom generation". So of course you are correct - births happen continuously and there is not an obvious "banding" of "generations" ... but in this case there was a very clear and pronounced age band, and all of the subsequent "generations" (baby boomers, gen X, gen Y, Millenials, etc.) proceeded from there.
  • azinman2 8y ago
    Not to mention general shifts in population sizes, methods of upbringing, shared cultural watershed moments, shared childhood information sources, cultural norms and expectations at a given time, experiences of war or famine or financial crisis, etc etc. Essentially all your priors from a Bayesian point of view. I don’t know what’s not clear — if you grew up in China during the cultural revolution, you will be different than if you were born before or after. Your basic assumptions about humanity and government will be affected by such experiences and it will carry with you thru life.
• mymythisisthis 8y ago
  WWII. There was such a large group of people born between 1945 and 1950, after the war ended, that they all push through the system at the same time. Woodstock music festival happened in 1969 right when everybody was in the their 20s or about to hit 30. Then they all had kids at roughly the same time, the 1970s and early 80s. Housing boom of the 1980s. Lots of new kids shows that happened in this time period as well. Now all of those kids are buying houses and having kids. Another housing boom.
  • gpvos 8y ago
    In the Netherlands, this effect is even stronger. We also speak of the baby boomer generation. Can't speak for the rest of Europe though.
• AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > It's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world. Not really, am from a Slavic country and we definitely speak of generations as well.
  • oblio 8y ago
    That's a bit different though. Most Slavic countries were part of the Eastern Bloc. Hard to have a bigger generation gap than the fall of the Iron Curtain.
    • heavenlyblue 8y ago
      Well, my grandma lived through Petersburg’s blockade (she were about 5 at the time). My parents lived through the fall if the Iron Curtain. I don’t think we ever had a name for it, but those generational differences were implied.
• cafard 8y ago
  America does have a notable weakness for pop demography. However termed, though, I do think the phenomenon has been seen elsewhere. Google for "Young Ireland" or "Young Italy"--those go back a long way, even if the expression "generation" wasn't used in them.
• lumberjack 8y ago
  It's like the "class war", except directed at your own parents. I find it quite funny how people fall for this crap.
• nostrademons 8y ago
  The main driver of "generations" is mass culture. In most of the world, culture is local, transmitted from parent -> child and from village -> child, based on a relatively stable set of people that the child comes in contact with. As a result, culture doesn't change significantly between children born at different times, though it may differ significantly between children born in different places. America since roughly the 1920s has been different. The invention of radio and television allowed a small set of companies to dictate culture across the whole nation (and later, the whole English-speaking world). Moreover, their incentive is always to seek the latest hot fad rather than broadcast the same messages over and over; stations that do the latter (eg. public radio, classical music) get eclipsed by ones that don't. As a result, the cultural experience of people born at the same time will be roughly similar. You can talk to most early Millenials about Transformers and My Little Pony and Voltron and G.I. Joe and Punky Brewster and Full House and they'll know what you're talking about. You can talk to most baby boomers about Beatlemania and the Ed Sullivan Show and the JFK assassination and they'll know what you're talking about. You generally cannot talk to the former about the latter. In other areas where mass-culture has been exported and widely adopted, you see generations arise as well. People have spoken about generations in Japan since the 1980s, and people are starting to talk about generations in China. There's some evidence that the Internet is actually destroying mass culture and the concept of generations with it. Notice that the generation after Millenials hasn't even been named, and they also seem a lot more diverse in their cultural & musical tastes and a lot more accepting of diversity in general. But it'll take a while (a few generations, at least) before this really takes hold, assuming we don't get a major event that reverses it.
• toasterlovin 8y ago
  My personal hypothesis is that this is related to the fact that the people who drive cultural output in the U.S. (the Left, basically) take a hands-off approach to transmitting culture to the next generation. As a result, each new generation in this sub-population of culture creators has had to engage in a high degree of cultural re-invention to fill in the gaps.
• empath75 8y ago
  It’s an artifact of the wwii baby boom which did create a distinct generation. It’s starting to become fuzzier though.
• benj111 8y ago
  I think it is useful to group people by age. But yeah I'm not sure if the 'generation' distinction is helpful. I was born in the early 80s so apparently am a millenial. (although I was gen Y before someone coined the term). I'm not sure that my life thus far has been closer to someone born in the 90s versus the 70s. I grew up without the internet or mobile phones which are supposed millenial things.
• rv-de 8y ago
  > There is no such idea of generations of people where I come from. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. Who draws a line between generations and why? Not sure if with "comming from" you are referring to Poland or Germany but regarding the latter I have to answer with a confident "Stimmt nicht!". There is a big discussion in Germany regarding the so called "Generationenvertrag" which is about the young generation financing the older generation's retirement. Which is working worse every year. Also there are public discussions about social injustice particularly impacting the current generation and with regard to retirement a bleak outlook compared to the previous generation (not really the current) of retired citizens.
• sharadov 8y ago
  America as a whole is obsessed with labels and categorization, and an obsession with making things fit neatly in buckets, which is ridiculous. The media especially loves it, look at all the new acronyms they concoct on a daily basis.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• goto11 8y ago
  It is not just the English-speaking world. Most of Europe experienced a baby-boom in the years after WWII (Germany a decade later). This had very real social consequences, for example the impact of the youth culture in the late 60's. So at least the baby-boom generation is not an arbitrary distinction but a very real social phenomenon. That said, I think "milleanials", "gen-X" etc. are arbitrary divisions - just a shorthand for talking about a specific age group.
• nkkollaw 8y ago
  Assuming you're in Europe, we go by decades. Ex., we say "in the 60s", "in the 90s", etc. In the States they use "baby boomers", "generation x", "millennials" more, but it's the same thing. It's all based on the postwar period (WWII, generally).
• dolzenko 8y ago
  E.g. regime change in Russia, there is no "line" but people born in Soviet Union are very different from the ones born in modern day Russia
• vfulco2 8y ago
  Chinese talk about generations classified in decades by when they were born too.
  • dwd 8y ago
    For perspective there is also the chinese zodiac where you will exhibit particular traits depending on which part of a 12 year cycle you belong. People like to categorise and be categorised to justify their actions or lack of action.
• garfieldnate 8y ago
  I think I've only heard generations specifically named in our North American English-speaking culture, but I think it is a very useful idea anywhere in the modern world where everything is completely different every 20 years. One very obvious generational divide that applies to much of the world is between those that remember WWII and those that don't. Those involved in the Vietnam War (or the American War, as it is known in Vietnam) also share a (horrifying but bonding) experience that they do not share with later generations.