# Why generations aren't necessary.



## Cupofjoe (Dec 2, 2013)

If you are a SpongeBuddy Mania user, you might have known be before (I am also Cupofjoe on SpongeBuddy Mania). Today I'm going to be talking about why generations aren't really that necessary. Honestly, I have a great feeling that it is unnecessary to have these "generation" labels. Even though I was born after 1995, I would like to talk about Generation Z starting in 1995. In the forum boards of this site, they said that Generation Z was people born 1995 onwards. I do not think that someone born in 1995 would have anything in common with someone born in 2013. Even 2004 and 2013 are very far apart. What happens if the "guy" born in 1995 has a best friend that was born in late 1994 and they were in school together for many years? Not that much of a difference, right? Really, for an imaginary label, saying that an 18 year old MAN/WOMAN is like a BABY/TODDLER compared to his 19 year old colleague, who is a member of "Generation Y"? I am just laughing about the fact that these imaginary labels exist. Why would we want to live with these imaginary "labels"? Just enjoy your life.


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## Glenda Gnome Starr (May 12, 2011)

You are absolutely right, @Cupofjoe. I don't think that you have much in common with my little great nieces, who are 22 months old and five weeks old. 
Welcome to Personality Cafe!


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## PowerShell (Feb 3, 2013)

walking tourist said:


> You are absolutely right, @_Cupofjoe_. I don't think that you have much in common with my little great nieces, who are 22 months old and five weeks old.
> Welcome to Personality Cafe!


But they will probably have more in common than someone who is 30 years older. The generation is more of a generalization than an absolute on how each age group is.

Beloit College has a good way of framing it with the mindset list: The Mindset List


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## Glenda Gnome Starr (May 12, 2011)

That's pretty cool! I especially enjoyed number 43: "Don Shula has always been a fine steak house."
OK, so that is funny to me because I am a Buffalo Bills fan and the Bills and the Miami Dolphins have had a rivalry that's lasted almost forever. For the coach of the Miami Dolphins to become a steak house just encourages me to become a vegetarian, lol.
Bills fans are known for saying, "Squish the fish."
But I digress.
Back to the original topic: generations.
Hmmm... 
Will the "generations" become smaller as technology's change becomes more fast? Are we really defining generations by technology? On the other hand, does it really matter?



PowerShell said:


> But they will probably have more in common than someone who is 30 years older. The generation is more of a generalization than an absolute on how each age group is.
> 
> Beloit College has a good way of framing it with the mindset list: The Mindset List


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## Thalassa (Jun 10, 2010)

Hmmm...well Strauss Howe doesn't start Gen Z until the 2000s, so it could be argued that the reason you don't relate is because you are actually Gen Y.

In terms of childhood attachments I have more in common with late Gen X and early early Gen Y in Strauss Howe. I tend to overall feel a kinship that is utterly irrational with people who know what Charles in Charge is...that is an artificial construct created by popular media, but popular.media is the barn dance and folk music of the.modern world. I also like to talk to people who remember the end of the Cold War. I remember a slightly less corporatized world. The population was between three and four billion people smaller when I was born. I owned roller skates.

On the other hand, sometimes I feel more kinship with Gen Y in terms of progressive social politics and Internet culture. My young adulthood has more memes in common with Gen Y than Gen X. I am a cusper, so my childhood feels a little more X, my young adulthood more Y.

I wouldn't say generation is unnecessary, it's just a general social trend, not an exact science.


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## athenian200 (Oct 13, 2008)

I don't really think it's needed either, but it is something that appeals to most people. It's sort of like eras of history... we refer specific periods as "The Enlightenment," or "The Renaissance," in retrospect. But at the time, no one likely feels that there's anything special about their time period, that there's a sharp cutoff. It's only later on that people want to categorize and sift history this way.

I think that trying to define a generation this early on is too soon. We're far enough from the "Baby Boomers" to define them as a generation (although doing so would be inaccurate), but Gen Y and Gen Z haven't distinguished themselves very much yet, so defining a cutoff is rather hard.

I think another issue is that the way we consume media has changed. We generally pick and choose what fashions and trends we follow now. There isn't necessarily one thing that everyone has seen or done, the different subcultures are more distinct from each other, more people draw on the past or create their own style. It's not like in the days of television and radio, or the days before that, when everyone was exposed to the same stuff whether they liked it or not.

This is the kind of stuff that can be true on a very broad, vague level... and totally wrong for an individual. We can say that people were conservative in the 1950s... but I'm sure some of those people were rebels or hated the establishment, etc. They just weren't typical, so their voices are drowned out.


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## Thalassa (Jun 10, 2010)

PowerShell said:


> But they will probably have more in common than someone who is 30 years older. The generation is more of a generalization than an absolute on how each age group is.
> 
> Beloit College has a good way of framing it with the mindset list: The Mindset List


Who are these brain damaged retards they interviewed for the Beloit list of those born in 1980 who never feared nuclear war, don't remember the Challenger blowing up and can't remember stamps were 25 cents? Do that many people shelter their children from the adult world? Or do they not remember their own lives? I find it staggering. Do not relate. I remember seeing the Challenger blow up on a tv at school.


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## Thalassa (Jun 10, 2010)

Seriously, these cretins never went to the post office or mailed a Christmas card until they were 15? None of them had a record player or played Pac Man? My family had a huge stereo cabinet with a turn table well until the 90s, despite also having cassette tapes. I played my old Atari in the basement and I think it was still around the house until I was in high school. Every pizza parlor had Ms.Pac Man. WHO ARE THESE DEPRAVED INDIVIDUALS??

I really really don't like those lists. I find them bizarre, like people can't remember anything that happened before they were teens or they are such sheltered rich kids that they had CDs in 1981 and sent the maid to buy postage.

I know I have a good memory for details, but I am not THAT exceptional. I had a pair of bright white four wheel roller skates with hot pink wheels in the late 80s. They still had roller skates then. Roller rinks even, I had my birthday party in one.

I just did quick research and I am right. Beige M&Ms and 25 cent stamps were both around til 1995.

These lists are theoretical and bogus. I very seriously doubt they interviewed real people of a significant and diverse sample size born in 1980.

By their estimates, people are drooling morons oblivious to their surroundings until they are 15, or have the vague non detailed memory of N doms. 

My sister said she doesn't remember anything before age eight and my family thinks she's a freak. She's a disturbed drug addict. Normal people remember details of their lives before their sophomore year of high school.

I am offended by these theoretical Beloit lists, probably designed by older people.


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## PowerShell (Feb 3, 2013)

fourtines said:


> I am offended by these theoretical Beloit lists, probably designed by older people.


It was designed by older people (the professor) for older people based upon and older point of reference looking at the younger people with a newer point or reference. It's obviously going to be skewed a bit.


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## Thalassa (Jun 10, 2010)

PowerShell said:


> It was designed by older people (the professor) for older people based upon and older point of reference looking at the younger people with a newer point or reference. It's obviously going to be skewed a bit.


It's a lot skewed. It's wildly inaccurate. Yes, I remember a lot of detail, but most kids are sensors, and most people probably remember eating beige M&Ms as kids, at least those born up until 87, conservatively, because kids like candy.

Pen pals and letters were big before the Internet, which is part of why the postage stamp thing is bizarre.

I have seen more accurate Facebook Buzz Feed memes about children of the 80s.

I am appalled. This book was made at a university. They should interview people. They should do historical market research. They pulled this out of their ass...

In 2014, a university is cranking out false history, and peddling lies to be eaten up by the ignorant masses. It's so wildly inaccurate and generalized, I picture a nineteen year old Ne dom cranking out one an hour ...

It's the opposite of anecdotal, it's a bunch of stab in the dark speculation based loosely on things like the year CDs were invented.

I mean to say it actually strikes me as STUPID, like made up by a panel of experts in the Wal Mart break room.


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## Glenda Gnome Starr (May 12, 2011)

I thought that it was just satire. I laughed non stop but didn't take it seriously at all...



fourtines said:


> It's a lot skewed. It's wildly inaccurate. Yes, I remember a lot of detail, but most kids are sensors, and most people probably remember eating beige M&Ms as kids, at least those born up until 87, conservatively, because kids like candy.
> 
> Pen pals and letters were big before the Internet, which is part of why the postage stamp thing is bizarre.
> 
> ...


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## Thalassa (Jun 10, 2010)

walking tourist said:


> I thought that it was just satire. I laughed non stop but didn't take it seriously at all...


I took it too seriously. I just don't like an "authoritative" source like a college propagating ridiculous misinformation under the guise of it being some awesome fifteen year project. To me it appears they didn't interview people, factor in social trends of the time period (like pen pals and letters), account for socioeconomic level or gaming systems and other electronic devices being passed down by older relatives or slightly out of date toys or games being acquired by well meaning parents or grandparents who don't purchase the brandnew expensive latest gadgets.

I think what set me off was the lack of knowledge of ability of children to pay attention and remember basic things, yeah it's so bad it's like a satire.

Incidentally, I still only roller skate. Inline skates terrify me, I tried some AGAIN last summer and quickly gave them right back to the rental booth.


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## Robopop (Jun 15, 2010)

It's often assumed by many that history is an endless row of the same 25 year olds, 50 year olds, and 75 year olds but when looking at different time periods the average 25 year old of 1970 is very different than the 25 year old of 1990. Any young adult embracing the ethos of the early '70s in 1990 would be looked at(by other Gen Xers) as a throwback and a naive idealistic fool trying to relive the sixties. 

This is what the concept of generations is really about, you cannot extrapolate about future trends in a linear manner, a lot of sociological "experts" in the early '60s expected the next patch of kids to be even more well behaved, conformist technocrats(like the Silent generation) but they turned out to be rebellious, self righteous moralizers(Baby Boomers) and the values of the country changed forever after that. Woodstock, the Vietnam protests, Kent State, Watergate, and Jim Jones would not have been foreseen by someone projecting based on fifties trends and this is why a lot of people get social predictions about the future so wrong. 

In the early '90s there was hysteria about crime rates being out of control, there would be "super predators", turns out crime rates started declining rapidly after the mid '90s and are at historic lows, this was around the time Millennials started entering the teens(since that is the peak age of violent crime), they reversed a lot of the negative youth trends enacted by Baby Boomers and accelerated by Gen Xers(high crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, ect). Millennials are different from their preceding generation because the parenting trends of the late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s was heavily protective of children, contrast that with the latchkey kids and open classrooms of the 1970s.


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## Glenda Gnome Starr (May 12, 2011)

It is more like an awful fifteen year project. Completely nonsensical. I saw it as a bunch of gibberish and, you're right, the people propagating the gibberish should know better. Students who passed off that stuff as a class project would probably get a low grade...



fourtines said:


> I took it too seriously. I just don't like an "authoritative" source like a college propagating ridiculous misinformation under the guise of it being some awesome fifteen year project. To me it appears they didn't interview people, factor in social trends of the time period (like pen pals and letters), account for socioeconomic level or gaming systems and other electronic devices being passed down by older relatives or slightly out of date toys or games being acquired by well meaning parents or grandparents who don't purchase the brandnew expensive latest gadgets.
> 
> I think what set me off was the lack of knowledge of ability of children to pay attention and remember basic things, yeah it's so bad it's like a satire.
> 
> Incidentally, I still only roller skate. Inline skates terrify me, I tried some AGAIN last summer and quickly gave them right back to the rental booth.


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## electricky (Feb 18, 2011)

fourtines said:


> Seriously, these cretins never went to the post office or mailed a Christmas card until they were 15? None of them had a record player or played Pac Man? My family had a huge stereo cabinet with a turn table well until the 90s, despite also having cassette tapes. I played my old Atari in the basement and I think it was still around the house until I was in high school. Every pizza parlor had Ms.Pac Man. WHO ARE THESE DEPRAVED INDIVIDUALS??
> 
> I really really don't like those lists. I find them bizarre, like people can't remember anything that happened before they were teens or they are such sheltered rich kids that they had CDs in 1981 and sent the maid to buy postage.
> 
> ...


LOL at the 1980 list. I was born in 89 and:

I played TONS of Pac Man (including Ms. Pac Man at pizza parlors) and know exactly what Pong is. 
Understand the "you sound like a broken record" thing.
Had a TV set with only 13 channels WITH the 13 button designations for them on the TV itself (so yeah no remote control), remember not having cable and hearing about Beta Max players (we stuck to VCRs for the most part)

And probably more..... and I'm an intuitive


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## Glenda Gnome Starr (May 12, 2011)

Beta Max actually produced better quality videos than VHS but, for reasons unknown to me, it was VHS that became popular and Beta Max just sort of vanished until it was no more.



ElectricSparkle said:


> LOL at the 1980 list. I was born in 89 and:
> 
> I played TONS of Pac Man (including Ms. Pac Man at pizza parlors) and know exactly what Pong is.
> Understand the "you sound like a broken record" thing.
> ...


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## PowerShell (Feb 3, 2013)

walking tourist said:


> Beta Max actually produced better quality videos than VHS but, for reasons unknown to me, it was VHS that became popular and Beta Max just sort of vanished until it was no more.


Porn industry choose VHS over betamax.


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## Glenda Gnome Starr (May 12, 2011)

Um, ewwwww. And yuck.



PowerShell said:


> Porn industry choose VHS over betamax.


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