7 ms·

We Need to Ditch Generational Labels

44 points by samclemens 11y ago

baldfat 11y ago
They showed a video 3 years ago at a all hands meeting about Generations. TL:DR VIDEO Generation X sucks and no one likes them. I made such a stink that the video was never seen again.
- ericd 11y ago
  I saw a poll somewhere in an article about managing millenials that showed how people polled felt about working with people in different generations. Gen Xers actually did really well on a lot of the most important attributes, way better than Gen Yers, and a bit better than the previous two generations.
ojbyrne 11y ago
They probably made some sense when a group went through some catastrophic event (plague, world war) so the demographics of some cohort was strikingly different from some previous cohort. Otherwise I say, yes please.
tempestn 11y ago
The cover picture of that article broke my brain for a bit. The dark-haired girl on the left blends in with the one behind her so I couldn't immediately tell where one ended and the other began. And on the right, you just see red hair without a face. Also, random arms poking out everywhere.
3pt14159 11y ago
I mostly disagree. I think that there is some fluidity to generational labels; and I much prefer "Gen Y" over "millennials" but the way of thinking that most baby boomers have can be succinctly described by referring to their generation. In Canada we have a magazine called "Zoomers" which is targeted at the baby boomers. It is the most perfect example of media circle jerking I've ever read. Every single article absolves the group from any responsibility that the baby boomers have had for the problems faced by today's Gen X and Gen Y people. And this needs to be called out. I need to be able to say: "Hey, the baby boomers fucked us. During a period of peace and large employment they increased the debt, decreased the amount of children per family, and increased senior based entitlement programs that are ultimately going to lead to severe economic harm."
- bgilroy26 11y ago
  But what about irony?
- amyjess 11y ago
  Finger-pointing and assigning blame has never been a useful way to solve any problem.
  - VLM 11y ago
    Agreed, we should let them keep doing it.
gojomo 11y ago
Generations are granfalloons.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Exactly.
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    Your mom was a kan-kan!
frozenport 11y ago
>>‘Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry.’ I disagree. It would be wacky to deny grouping societies into cohorts. Certainly, members of minorities groups might not have the same values as the majority but this doesn't mean the larger group doesn't exist, and that the grouping is not useful.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Well with the social discourse in the US of A being what it is, being called a bigot right now is a badge of honor. Also generational cohorts exist. People got shaped by the great Depression or WWII or Cold War or End of Cold War, 9/11 and Iraq and great recession ... They have/had different experiences, different outlooks, different values and so on ...
__Joker 11y ago
Labeling is human way of dealing with complexity. Obviously it has exception but it is good starting point for reasoning. The problem is if you don't update your belief system with more evidence you will get and or seek for.
- Dewie3 11y ago
  Great programmer-like answer - technically correct to a pedantic degree, misses any subtelety by reducing it to some heuristic for dealing with complexity, and ends with a point that isn't new or controversial to anyone on the subject. :-) I guess I labeled you as programmer-like there.
enraged_camel 11y ago
Sorry, typing from my phone so this will be short. Anyone who thinks generational labels and associated stereotypes are meaningless needs to read William Strauss and Neil Howe's excellent book, titled The Fourth Turning. It makes a very well-documented and compelling case that every generation is defined by the events of their era, and they take on the characteristics of one of four archetypes: prophet, nomad, hero and artist. Their theory is described in detail here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_the...
- morganvachon 11y ago
  Actually the article's author brings up another work by Strauss and Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069, and strongly denounces it as "pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo". I'm not saying I agree with that (I haven't read that book), I'm just pointing out that the article's author doesn't hold those writers in high regard. The article does go into detail about the four archetypes before denouncing the theory. I will say I can't deny that there are defining generational markers throughout my lifetime; if the author of the parent article is to be believed, I should be thinking and seeing the world more or less exactly the same way as my 18 year old nieces since we are in the same socioeconomic class. However, that's simply not the case; while I do connect with them on many levels (we're all into anime and retro gaming, for example), their outlook on the world was shaped by what they experienced growing up in the 00s and 10s, just as mine was growing up in the 80s and 90s. There are some things that I will never understand about their point of view on a certain topic, and vice versa. I believe this has more to do with a generational gap than anything else, no matter what the author of the parent article says about "generational mumbo jumbo", and I was born the same year as the author (1977).
  - k__ 11y ago
    I can understand that events shape people, but I don't think they shape them in the same way. Like the recent crisis. Here in Germany it was a thing 2009/2010 and it wasn't really "that" bad, but it made the people a little bit carefuller. In Greece the whole thing came smashing down and is still a huge problem for the people there. The whole crisis has formed people a lot differently in different parts of the world.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
That's just the kind of thing a GenX'er would say. Sort of kidding, sort of not, let me explain. The thing about generational cohorts are that they share a set of significant experiences at a common point in their growth to adulthood. So for me it was Jimmy Carter, Regan, "Stagflation" and the post Vietnam War mess. For teens today it will be around things like Yik Yak, internet lives, Ferguson riots, Snowden, and debt. The government is perceived in a "way" and the world is being wrenched by a particular set of issues, and your family is affected by various events, and your peers are passionate about various causes. They all add up to a generational "imprint" which is the poly miasmic tint that affects the perception of every future event. You break free from the crysalis that is childhood innocence and your eyes open up on a wider stage, and it is that first moment of perception that lays all sorts of groundwork in you about what is important and what isn't, what is right and what is wrong. Oddly there is no way, really, to easily not get imprinted, and because of that imprinting you will recognize others who came of age at that same time as peers and people who came of age earlier or later as "different" (sometimes good different and sometimes bad different). Because those groupings exist, they cannot help but exist, and as you get older you will see different groupings reacting to the same sorts of problems everyone deals with (dating, jobs, careers, families, politics) and you will recognize that different groups react differently from other groupings but similar to other members of the group, well you'll want to put a name to that. And you'll call them the "<nom de jeur> generation" or "our generation" or "my parents generation". It would be good to ditch being sensitive about how folks of your generational cohort respond though. Getting past name calling is usually a good sign of maturing. Not that it won't bother you, just like getting stung by a bee often bothers you, except that you can see and accept the bee sting, and the name calling, for what it is, the last ditch response of an organism that is feeling threatened.
- tsotha 11y ago
  I agree with everything you've written here. It's not unreasonable to look at large groups of people with something in common and draw statistical conclusions about them. What's unreasonable is to look and a single person and think "because he's from this generation he must think that".
  - 11y ago
chipsy 11y ago
Cyclical theories are popular precisely because they have some empirical backing in closely related fields. Consider the predator-prey model, for example: Some generations of predator will experience abundance, others will struggle to survive. The impact of this experience on future behavior is, most likely, non-zero. It doesn't determine everything, but neither is it a non-factor. The fallacy lies in overfitting the data towards the theory. At twenty years old, a human generation is defined by its parenting. By sixty, it's peaked in influence and started on its way out. It's relatively hard to say anything definite until late in the cycle. As well, people in the cohort are all dying along the way, year by year, and they largely don't get represented in "what the generation is." It's the people who make it near to retirement, and have the power to call the shots, who get in the final word.
icanhackit 11y ago
Millennials, consultants advise prospective employers, feel entitled to good treatment even in entry-level jobs Perhaps because it's the decent thing to do? Just as an older generation would see racism as poor behavior and the next would see sexist behavior as abhorrent, maybe we're on the right track here? When did the golden rule stop applying to those on a lower rung? Millennials won’t buckle down and buy cars or houses Millennials earning more than me can't afford my property - they'd have trouble paying rent for it. As for cars, if you live in the city they have a higher cost to the user than overall utility. tweeting and texting and posting selfies and avoiding responsibility. Looking around, I see a lot of older people doing the same. Perhaps because we hold the younger people in a different esteem we're just looking for a reason to judge them.
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  There's also the shifting economics. In the youth of the boomers, working yourself through college was a thing, getting on the bottom rung of the property ladder with your entry level job was a thing. Nowadays you'd get a bitter laugh suggesting a millennial do either. But boomers still think it. "They don't have a work ethic" - no shit, they don't. They've made the entirely rational decision that hard work doesn't pay. Rather, work is a painful subsistence deathmarch promising no future other than more of the same.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    Agree. The idea of work ethic has been contorted. I will work hard for years if I get a reasonable reward for it. 20 years of 40 hour weeks for a family home and reasonable life at the end? Sure. 40 hour weeks for zero increase in net worth and barely making the rent? Get outta here. Someone else can be your pawn. I'll find alternative ways to live, screw your little game. The idea is deferred gratification, not total lack of gratification.
  - VLM 11y ago
    "working yourself through college was a thing" Not just youth of the boomers, but as an early gen-x I had no problem doing the same. Well, I had minor credit card debt but nothing much. The government didn't help much back then, which is why my tuition payments were like $2K instead of $30K like now. Today I could not possibly afford to buy the house I bought and live in around the turn of the century. Note that in the long term those prices always revert to the norm. One way or another the median property buyer eventually buys the median property. So either their wages go up (LOL as if that's ever going to happen without a revolution) or the prices go down (guaranteed, this is baked into the cake at this point). There is a famous saying about the market can afford to be irrational longer than you can afford to wait so its not like its going to be next week, but eventually the average dude is going to be able to afford the average domicile, and the only question is who's going to take the painful adjustment.
Alphasite_ 11y ago
Is this exclusively an American concept? Because ve never seen this in the UK or anywhere else in fact.
- Angostura 11y ago
  The hatred towards "Baby Boomers" appears much more prevalent in the U.S than the UK, certainly.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Really? The children of the "Great Generation?" The love for Baby Boomers in my work video shown to the whole company and a lot of the literature seems to always life them up as the best working generation who built the US Economy tot he power house of the 1980s and beyond.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Displaying more love isn't contradictory with displaying more hatred; often, the two are proportional. The UK is probably simply more indifferent.
    - talmand 11y ago
      I have no real scientific basis for this, but I always felt that the "Greatest Generation" came back from a horrific war, had large families to replace those lost, and had their life experience as a reason to spoil their children who grew up during a boom time that seemed to have no end in site with no regard for the future. But that seems a rather broad brush to be slapping around so I'm sure it's largely unfair.
      - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
        I suspect the Depression was more of a thing, because I'd asked about it. Most people did not do combat duty during the War. We won that war in the factories and oilfields. It was also the most heavily propaganda-oriented thing in living memory. Y'know all them John Wayne war movies? Yep. The classic propaganda movie is best exemplified by "Sergeant York". The scene where the dapper officer explains the conflict between "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Duty, Honor, Country" is exactly how propaganda works. "Well, it's not killing if they're Huns." I always thought "The Best Years of Our Lives" exposed the more sinister aspects of the war experience ( it describes PTSD decades before the concept existed beyond "shell shock" or "battle fatigue" ) , and it's interesting that my favorite authors were either outsiders ( like Saul Bellow or Phillip Roth), pop historians ( Michener ) or those who went through the war as dogfaces ( Heller, Vonnnegut ).
d_theorist 11y ago
The "Emberverse" sounds great. Just ordered the first book. Has anybody read it?
- jaegerpicker 11y ago
  Yes and I deeply enjoy it. That said it works best if you just accept that this is the story that the Author wants to tell and that there might be a few or more than a few logical conclusions that you disagree with. A lot of the decisions he makes seem over the top at first blush but on closer inspection the make a ton of sense.
  - d_theorist 11y ago
    Thanks. I am looking forward to it. However, after ordering the book I realised that the series is a follow-on from his previous 'Nantucket series', which also sounds fantastic. So I have also ordered the first book in that series. I have a terrible and debilitating disease that prevents me from reading things out of order.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Its not a follow-on in the sense of a sequel, its only a follow-on in that there is a nexus between the premises of the two series and the Emberverse series was written later.
      - d_theorist 11y ago
        Yes; thanks. I gathered that. My disease doesn't distinguish unfortunately. It's some weird form of OCD.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Yes; it's very well crafted. Marvelous characters and excellent storytelling. It's as if it were fantasy ( or at least counterfactual fiction) written by a military historian. There are a couple of small logical holes in the premises ( much less than the usual ) and the author steps around them nimbly. He may even make fun of some of them.
numeromancer 11y ago
We need to stop writing articles telling us what “we” “need” to do. This is almost as bad as the myriad of hacks declaring how “our brains” work, usually to explain in some facile way what's wrong with the way some other people think.
TrisMcC 11y ago
I don't enjoy the generational labels because it just makes me feel like I don't belong to yet another group. I was born late 1981 which makes me part of either GenX or GenY (Millenials), depending on definition.
- forthefuture 11y ago
  I agree, but it's more that Gen Y is kind of split in half between people who have ever not had a cellphone, and people whose first cellphone was an iPhone (not a dig at apple, the iPhone came out before Android did). Of which I am the former, and feel the latter is certainly ideologically different even if "generations" don't show it.
beat 11y ago
I'm early GenX (born 1965). I feel more cultural bond with people 15 years younger than I do with people 5 years older (Baby Boomers). The divide is really powerful for me. My daughter is 21 and very politically active. She feels the Millennial line strongly as well. She once recounted a conversation she had about careers and job-hunting with her Boomer grandfather. He started giving advice, but realized he'd only ever done two job interviews in his life, from college to retirement. He had no clue what life was like for her generation.
- talmand 11y ago
  It is amazing to watch when a member of an older generation comes to the sudden realization that the generations after them have had such a different experience. Especially when there's been big changes in what amounts to the normal aspects of everybody's day-to-day life. I'm just doing my best to keep an open mind as my own children grow up; that their life experience will be vastly different. An easy one is the thought that they are growing up with cheap, fast computers with FIOS as a high-speed connection to a feature-rich Internet. None of which I had for easily half my lifetime. I could bore them to tears with the vast differences between our childhoods that I can easily identify and I can't imagine the differences I haven't recognized yet.
  - beat 11y ago
    What's kind of interesting is how things can be the same, too. My daughter has committed herself to a career in food. She's not going to college. Instead, she managed to get a job as a prep and line cook under an internationally-known chef, mostly through luck. This job will teach her if she can deal with being a line cook. If she can hack that, she'll do this for a few years, then maybe head toward having her own restaurant, or something else. This course is not fundamentally different than the course of chefs 50 years ago. What is different is that she can learn so much over the internet - about what chefs are doing elsewhere, about new techniques. Meanwhile, she's developing a style of her own, based on 19th century techniques she learns from old cookbooks and the internet - ways of cuisine so old they feel new today.
  - Dewie3 11y ago
VLM 11y ago
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm old enough to remember "greatest generation" old timers giving "lazy" boomers a hassle because "so what if the factory laid everyone off, just work at the other factory". No old people, you don't get it, the world changed, those careers are gone and never coming back. Then the mythology of the "rust belt" developed. I don't think the greatest gen people EVER really got it. Now its the same thing with boomers telling millennials "get that degree (you'll never be able to pay off) then use it to get that great job (that doesn't exist anymore) then buy that house (that you'll never be able to afford)". And when they don't, because its not 1985 anymore so they can't, they get labeled as "lazy". I would be interested in the analogy of the "rust belt" phrase, what will people call the plight of the millennials in a decade or two? Its interesting in an alternative fiction style to predict how millennials will hassle the generation after them. "hey kids get that social media presence out there so you can get that startup mobile apps job" and their kids rolling their eyes replying with stuff like "come on dad, its not 2010 again, nobody does that stuff anymore".

44 points by samclemens 11y ago

They showed a video 3 years ago at a all hands meeting about Generations. TL:DR VIDEO Generation X sucks and no one likes them. I made such a stink that the video was never seen again.

ericd 11y ago
I saw a poll somewhere in an article about managing millenials that showed how people polled felt about working with people in different generations. Gen Xers actually did really well on a lot of the most important attributes, way better than Gen Yers, and a bit better than the previous two generations.

ojbyrne 11y ago

They probably made some sense when a group went through some catastrophic event (plague, world war) so the demographics of some cohort was strikingly different from some previous cohort. Otherwise I say, yes please.

tempestn 11y ago

The cover picture of that article broke my brain for a bit. The dark-haired girl on the left blends in with the one behind her so I couldn't immediately tell where one ended and the other began. And on the right, you just see red hair without a face. Also, random arms poking out everywhere.

3pt14159 11y ago

I mostly disagree. I think that there is some fluidity to generational labels; and I much prefer "Gen Y" over "millennials" but the way of thinking that most baby boomers have can be succinctly described by referring to their generation. In Canada we have a magazine called "Zoomers" which is targeted at the baby boomers. It is the most perfect example of media circle jerking I've ever read. Every single article absolves the group from any responsibility that the baby boomers have had for the problems faced by today's Gen X and Gen Y people. And this needs to be called out. I need to be able to say: "Hey, the baby boomers fucked us. During a period of peace and large employment they increased the debt, decreased the amount of children per family, and increased senior based entitlement programs that are ultimately going to lead to severe economic harm."

bgilroy26 11y ago
But what about irony?
amyjess 11y ago
Finger-pointing and assigning blame has never been a useful way to solve any problem.
- VLM 11y ago
  Agreed, we should let them keep doing it.

gojomo 11y ago

Generations are granfalloons.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Exactly.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  Your mom was a kan-kan!

frozenport 11y ago

>>‘Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry.’ I disagree. It would be wacky to deny grouping societies into cohorts. Certainly, members of minorities groups might not have the same values as the majority but this doesn't mean the larger group doesn't exist, and that the grouping is not useful.

venomsnake 11y ago
Well with the social discourse in the US of A being what it is, being called a bigot right now is a badge of honor. Also generational cohorts exist. People got shaped by the great Depression or WWII or Cold War or End of Cold War, 9/11 and Iraq and great recession ... They have/had different experiences, different outlooks, different values and so on ...

__Joker 11y ago

Labeling is human way of dealing with complexity. Obviously it has exception but it is good starting point for reasoning. The problem is if you don't update your belief system with more evidence you will get and or seek for.

Dewie3 11y ago
Great programmer-like answer - technically correct to a pedantic degree, misses any subtelety by reducing it to some heuristic for dealing with complexity, and ends with a point that isn't new or controversial to anyone on the subject. :-) I guess I labeled you as programmer-like there.

enraged_camel 11y ago

Sorry, typing from my phone so this will be short. Anyone who thinks generational labels and associated stereotypes are meaningless needs to read William Strauss and Neil Howe's excellent book, titled The Fourth Turning. It makes a very well-documented and compelling case that every generation is defined by the events of their era, and they take on the characteristics of one of four archetypes: prophet, nomad, hero and artist. Their theory is described in detail here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_the...

morganvachon 11y ago
Actually the article's author brings up another work by Strauss and Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069, and strongly denounces it as "pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo". I'm not saying I agree with that (I haven't read that book), I'm just pointing out that the article's author doesn't hold those writers in high regard. The article does go into detail about the four archetypes before denouncing the theory. I will say I can't deny that there are defining generational markers throughout my lifetime; if the author of the parent article is to be believed, I should be thinking and seeing the world more or less exactly the same way as my 18 year old nieces since we are in the same socioeconomic class. However, that's simply not the case; while I do connect with them on many levels (we're all into anime and retro gaming, for example), their outlook on the world was shaped by what they experienced growing up in the 00s and 10s, just as mine was growing up in the 80s and 90s. There are some things that I will never understand about their point of view on a certain topic, and vice versa. I believe this has more to do with a generational gap than anything else, no matter what the author of the parent article says about "generational mumbo jumbo", and I was born the same year as the author (1977).
- k__ 11y ago
  I can understand that events shape people, but I don't think they shape them in the same way. Like the recent crisis. Here in Germany it was a thing 2009/2010 and it wasn't really "that" bad, but it made the people a little bit carefuller. In Greece the whole thing came smashing down and is still a huge problem for the people there. The whole crisis has formed people a lot differently in different parts of the world.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

That's just the kind of thing a GenX'er would say. Sort of kidding, sort of not, let me explain. The thing about generational cohorts are that they share a set of significant experiences at a common point in their growth to adulthood. So for me it was Jimmy Carter, Regan, "Stagflation" and the post Vietnam War mess. For teens today it will be around things like Yik Yak, internet lives, Ferguson riots, Snowden, and debt. The government is perceived in a "way" and the world is being wrenched by a particular set of issues, and your family is affected by various events, and your peers are passionate about various causes. They all add up to a generational "imprint" which is the poly miasmic tint that affects the perception of every future event. You break free from the crysalis that is childhood innocence and your eyes open up on a wider stage, and it is that first moment of perception that lays all sorts of groundwork in you about what is important and what isn't, what is right and what is wrong. Oddly there is no way, really, to easily not get imprinted, and because of that imprinting you will recognize others who came of age at that same time as peers and people who came of age earlier or later as "different" (sometimes good different and sometimes bad different). Because those groupings exist, they cannot help but exist, and as you get older you will see different groupings reacting to the same sorts of problems everyone deals with (dating, jobs, careers, families, politics) and you will recognize that different groups react differently from other groupings but similar to other members of the group, well you'll want to put a name to that. And you'll call them the "<nom de jeur> generation" or "our generation" or "my parents generation". It would be good to ditch being sensitive about how folks of your generational cohort respond though. Getting past name calling is usually a good sign of maturing. Not that it won't bother you, just like getting stung by a bee often bothers you, except that you can see and accept the bee sting, and the name calling, for what it is, the last ditch response of an organism that is feeling threatened.

tsotha 11y ago
I agree with everything you've written here. It's not unreasonable to look at large groups of people with something in common and draw statistical conclusions about them. What's unreasonable is to look and a single person and think "because he's from this generation he must think that".
- 11y ago

chipsy 11y ago

Cyclical theories are popular precisely because they have some empirical backing in closely related fields. Consider the predator-prey model, for example: Some generations of predator will experience abundance, others will struggle to survive. The impact of this experience on future behavior is, most likely, non-zero. It doesn't determine everything, but neither is it a non-factor. The fallacy lies in overfitting the data towards the theory. At twenty years old, a human generation is defined by its parenting. By sixty, it's peaked in influence and started on its way out. It's relatively hard to say anything definite until late in the cycle. As well, people in the cohort are all dying along the way, year by year, and they largely don't get represented in "what the generation is." It's the people who make it near to retirement, and have the power to call the shots, who get in the final word.

icanhackit 11y ago

Millennials, consultants advise prospective employers, feel entitled to good treatment even in entry-level jobs Perhaps because it's the decent thing to do? Just as an older generation would see racism as poor behavior and the next would see sexist behavior as abhorrent, maybe we're on the right track here? When did the golden rule stop applying to those on a lower rung? Millennials won’t buckle down and buy cars or houses Millennials earning more than me can't afford my property - they'd have trouble paying rent for it. As for cars, if you live in the city they have a higher cost to the user than overall utility. tweeting and texting and posting selfies and avoiding responsibility. Looking around, I see a lot of older people doing the same. Perhaps because we hold the younger people in a different esteem we're just looking for a reason to judge them.

JulianMorrison 11y ago
There's also the shifting economics. In the youth of the boomers, working yourself through college was a thing, getting on the bottom rung of the property ladder with your entry level job was a thing. Nowadays you'd get a bitter laugh suggesting a millennial do either. But boomers still think it. "They don't have a work ethic" - no shit, they don't. They've made the entirely rational decision that hard work doesn't pay. Rather, work is a painful subsistence deathmarch promising no future other than more of the same.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  Agree. The idea of work ethic has been contorted. I will work hard for years if I get a reasonable reward for it. 20 years of 40 hour weeks for a family home and reasonable life at the end? Sure. 40 hour weeks for zero increase in net worth and barely making the rent? Get outta here. Someone else can be your pawn. I'll find alternative ways to live, screw your little game. The idea is deferred gratification, not total lack of gratification.
- VLM 11y ago
  "working yourself through college was a thing" Not just youth of the boomers, but as an early gen-x I had no problem doing the same. Well, I had minor credit card debt but nothing much. The government didn't help much back then, which is why my tuition payments were like $2K instead of $30K like now. Today I could not possibly afford to buy the house I bought and live in around the turn of the century. Note that in the long term those prices always revert to the norm. One way or another the median property buyer eventually buys the median property. So either their wages go up (LOL as if that's ever going to happen without a revolution) or the prices go down (guaranteed, this is baked into the cake at this point). There is a famous saying about the market can afford to be irrational longer than you can afford to wait so its not like its going to be next week, but eventually the average dude is going to be able to afford the average domicile, and the only question is who's going to take the painful adjustment.

Alphasite_ 11y ago

Is this exclusively an American concept? Because ve never seen this in the UK or anywhere else in fact.

Angostura 11y ago
The hatred towards "Baby Boomers" appears much more prevalent in the U.S than the UK, certainly.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Really? The children of the "Great Generation?" The love for Baby Boomers in my work video shown to the whole company and a lot of the literature seems to always life them up as the best working generation who built the US Economy tot he power house of the 1980s and beyond.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Displaying more love isn't contradictory with displaying more hatred; often, the two are proportional. The UK is probably simply more indifferent.
  - talmand 11y ago
    I have no real scientific basis for this, but I always felt that the "Greatest Generation" came back from a horrific war, had large families to replace those lost, and had their life experience as a reason to spoil their children who grew up during a boom time that seemed to have no end in site with no regard for the future. But that seems a rather broad brush to be slapping around so I'm sure it's largely unfair.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      I suspect the Depression was more of a thing, because I'd asked about it. Most people did not do combat duty during the War. We won that war in the factories and oilfields. It was also the most heavily propaganda-oriented thing in living memory. Y'know all them John Wayne war movies? Yep. The classic propaganda movie is best exemplified by "Sergeant York". The scene where the dapper officer explains the conflict between "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Duty, Honor, Country" is exactly how propaganda works. "Well, it's not killing if they're Huns." I always thought "The Best Years of Our Lives" exposed the more sinister aspects of the war experience ( it describes PTSD decades before the concept existed beyond "shell shock" or "battle fatigue" ) , and it's interesting that my favorite authors were either outsiders ( like Saul Bellow or Phillip Roth), pop historians ( Michener ) or those who went through the war as dogfaces ( Heller, Vonnnegut ).

d_theorist 11y ago

The "Emberverse" sounds great. Just ordered the first book. Has anybody read it?

jaegerpicker 11y ago
Yes and I deeply enjoy it. That said it works best if you just accept that this is the story that the Author wants to tell and that there might be a few or more than a few logical conclusions that you disagree with. A lot of the decisions he makes seem over the top at first blush but on closer inspection the make a ton of sense.
- d_theorist 11y ago
  Thanks. I am looking forward to it. However, after ordering the book I realised that the series is a follow-on from his previous 'Nantucket series', which also sounds fantastic. So I have also ordered the first book in that series. I have a terrible and debilitating disease that prevents me from reading things out of order.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Its not a follow-on in the sense of a sequel, its only a follow-on in that there is a nexus between the premises of the two series and the Emberverse series was written later.
    - d_theorist 11y ago
      Yes; thanks. I gathered that. My disease doesn't distinguish unfortunately. It's some weird form of OCD.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Yes; it's very well crafted. Marvelous characters and excellent storytelling. It's as if it were fantasy ( or at least counterfactual fiction) written by a military historian. There are a couple of small logical holes in the premises ( much less than the usual ) and the author steps around them nimbly. He may even make fun of some of them.

numeromancer 11y ago

We need to stop writing articles telling us what “we” “need” to do. This is almost as bad as the myriad of hacks declaring how “our brains” work, usually to explain in some facile way what's wrong with the way some other people think.

TrisMcC 11y ago

I don't enjoy the generational labels because it just makes me feel like I don't belong to yet another group. I was born late 1981 which makes me part of either GenX or GenY (Millenials), depending on definition.

forthefuture 11y ago
I agree, but it's more that Gen Y is kind of split in half between people who have ever not had a cellphone, and people whose first cellphone was an iPhone (not a dig at apple, the iPhone came out before Android did). Of which I am the former, and feel the latter is certainly ideologically different even if "generations" don't show it.

beat 11y ago

I'm early GenX (born 1965). I feel more cultural bond with people 15 years younger than I do with people 5 years older (Baby Boomers). The divide is really powerful for me. My daughter is 21 and very politically active. She feels the Millennial line strongly as well. She once recounted a conversation she had about careers and job-hunting with her Boomer grandfather. He started giving advice, but realized he'd only ever done two job interviews in his life, from college to retirement. He had no clue what life was like for her generation.

talmand 11y ago
It is amazing to watch when a member of an older generation comes to the sudden realization that the generations after them have had such a different experience. Especially when there's been big changes in what amounts to the normal aspects of everybody's day-to-day life. I'm just doing my best to keep an open mind as my own children grow up; that their life experience will be vastly different. An easy one is the thought that they are growing up with cheap, fast computers with FIOS as a high-speed connection to a feature-rich Internet. None of which I had for easily half my lifetime. I could bore them to tears with the vast differences between our childhoods that I can easily identify and I can't imagine the differences I haven't recognized yet.
- beat 11y ago
  What's kind of interesting is how things can be the same, too. My daughter has committed herself to a career in food. She's not going to college. Instead, she managed to get a job as a prep and line cook under an internationally-known chef, mostly through luck. This job will teach her if she can deal with being a line cook. If she can hack that, she'll do this for a few years, then maybe head toward having her own restaurant, or something else. This course is not fundamentally different than the course of chefs 50 years ago. What is different is that she can learn so much over the internet - about what chefs are doing elsewhere, about new techniques. Meanwhile, she's developing a style of her own, based on 19th century techniques she learns from old cookbooks and the internet - ways of cuisine so old they feel new today.
- Dewie3 11y ago

VLM 11y ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm old enough to remember "greatest generation" old timers giving "lazy" boomers a hassle because "so what if the factory laid everyone off, just work at the other factory". No old people, you don't get it, the world changed, those careers are gone and never coming back. Then the mythology of the "rust belt" developed. I don't think the greatest gen people EVER really got it. Now its the same thing with boomers telling millennials "get that degree (you'll never be able to pay off) then use it to get that great job (that doesn't exist anymore) then buy that house (that you'll never be able to afford)". And when they don't, because its not 1985 anymore so they can't, they get labeled as "lazy". I would be interested in the analogy of the "rust belt" phrase, what will people call the plight of the millennials in a decade or two? Its interesting in an alternative fiction style to predict how millennials will hassle the generation after them. "hey kids get that social media presence out there so you can get that startup mobile apps job" and their kids rolling their eyes replying with stuff like "come on dad, its not 2010 again, nobody does that stuff anymore".