# What makes each Generation distinct?



## rickybobby (Jun 10, 2011)

I'm just wondering why the Baby Boomers (18 years), Gen X (11 years), and Gen Y (17 years) have those years assigned to them? Does anyone know? Just curious.


----------



## Tasnia (Apr 1, 2012)

I don't. I'm curious, too. I'm considered a baby boomer on here, but I've never considered myself one. I was born in 1959 at the tail end of baby boomers. I see baby boomers as my two older brothers who grew up during the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution of the sixties. My teenage memories are of the 70's. I'm a 70's child. The big things happening during my age were "Dance Fever" with John Travolta, Captain and Taneille, Star Wars, John Denver... 

I think the things that people mark a generation is what time you grew up in. That's how I do it. I don't fit the generation of my brothers. I never got into the hippy thing. I was too young. By 1970 I was only 10 years old. It seems to be those years that you live your teenage and early 20's. Your formative years kindof mark you, because it's the music and hit movies and things that happen at that age that are so emotionally strong. Like, if I hear music from the 70's I feel young again. I connect with it.

I don't connect with Elvis Pressly, for example. That was before my time. But my mother does.


----------



## Glenda Gnome Starr (May 12, 2011)

I think that these generation dates are just arbitrary numbers. 
I too found it kind of annoying to be simply lumped in to a "generation" with hippies and folks who were in college when I was in elementary school. I lived most of my teenage years, as well as my early twenties, in the 1970s, as I was 13 years old when the 1970s began. 
I can identify more with a "cohort" than with a "generation." My friends were mostly two to three years younger than I was so the cohort that I bonded with was even a younger part of the "baby boom" than I was. Kids my age tended to bully me and to ignore me, which was very discouraging.


----------



## Empress Appleia Cattius XII (Dec 22, 2010)

I also wonder why Generation Z is not on this site. I'm listed as Generation Y on here (being born in 94), but Gen Y really finished at the end of the 80s, and I don't really consider myself a Gen Y either.


----------



## Tasnia (Apr 1, 2012)

Here is a quote from Wiki for fodder:




> Auguste Comte was the first philosopher to make a serious attempt to systematically
> study generations. In _Cours de philosophie positive_ Comte suggested that
> social change is determined by generational change and in particular conflict
> between successive generations.[6] *As the members of a given *
> ...


I boldened the part that seems to agree with what I said above. It's the time period of your youth that seems to be what is taken into account. I would take that to be your teenage years and early 20's.

The 70's and 80's didn't seem that different to me. By the 90's, there had been so much experamentation with different styles of clothes and music, that things seemed to become a little bit of everything. The 90's were very eclectic, it seems to me.

Technology affects each generation a lot, I think. I was born before the internet, for example. That's like being born before recorded music. I have an old wind up Edison, one of the first of record players. When I listen to it, I feel that I can get a sense of what it must have been to listen to recorded music for the first time. It's exciting. But I'm sure it's not anything near what people felt back in my mothers day. It's those kind of things that define us, makes us a cohesive group; generation.




> Those associated with Generation X have cultural perspectives and political experiences that were shaped by series of events. These include the 1973 oil crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan,


I relate more to this. I think I'm kind of an inbetween. But I would say I'm more like the generation X, which can be said to start in the 1960's.



> The phrase _Generation Y_ first appeared in an August 1993 _Ad Age_ editorial to describe teenagers of the day, which they defined, at that time, as separate from Generation X, and then aged 12 or younger (born after 1981), as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years.[19] Since then, the company has sometimes used 1982 as the starting birth year for this generation.[20] "Generation Y" alludes to a succession from "Generation X."


Here's a source that has exactly where a name first appeared.



> *Generation Z *also known as *Generation M* (for multitasking), *Generation C* (for *Connected Generation*), the *Net Generation*, or the *Internet Generation*) is a common name in the US and other Western nations for the group of people born from the early or mid 1990s to the present, with the earliest date starting in 1990


There are multiple names for this generation.


----------

