From my understanding each generation should be 18 years
Boomer: 1945-1963
Gen x : 1963-1981
Gen y: 1981-1999
Gen a: 1999-2017
However I see on a lot of sites people have the Gen x range to be 20 years and Gen y to be 15
In: Biology
The answer, which I doubt many people know, is that these generations are substantially based on the work of Strauss and Howe, from their books The Fourth Turning, Generations, and so on. They have picked highly specific beginning and end times to generations, which don’t follow an exact 18 year schedule.
>From my understanding each generation should be 18 years
Why?
>1945-1963
I see many put it ending at 1965
>1963-1981
I’ve seen people end it at 1980
>1981-1999
I’ve seen people end it at 1994, 95, or 96. 1999 fits with the name best though. It’s just that people see Gen Z as being very different from millennials in that they were the first generation that would have their first phones be smart phones.
>However I see on a lot of sites people have the Gen x range to be 20 years and Gen y to be 15
So you should already understand already that it’s completely arbitrary.
Generations are defined by shared common experiences, typically during the ages of ~10-20. Depending on the experiences and the state of the world, different cohorts of ages are going to have different formative experiences. The reason that generations are often different band lengths is because of how those experiences affect different ages. Like, I’m a millennial – some of our common, shared experiences are things like: 9/11 [this is probably the biggest one], the emerging prevalence of home computers and internet, personal cell phones becoming common, the politics of GWB (when we were teenagers) and the election of Barack Obama (who we voted for), the 2008 financial crisis, etc. Gen X would’ve been well into adulthood by the time these things happened, and were fairly instrumental in *making* those things happen. By the same token, millennials weren’t nearly as shaped by things that shaped Gen X – the fall of the soviet union, the Presidency of Reagan, the economic boom of the 1980’s.
Given that historic events don’t happen on a strict and uniform timetable, the types of events that affect whether birth years feel “similar” enough to be part of a generation or not may make it so that some generations feel like they last longer than others. It’s also why there are always cusp years, where people born in those years will often feel like they belong to both, or neither, group (because they kind do). Millennials, I think, are strongly shaped by the years from ~1999 to ~2009. The events that came before and after those years feel dramatically different. Boomers, I think, are strongly shaped by 1960-1974 (basically JFK through Watergate). Note that’s a 40% longer time period, but (at least to me) the events both before and after those things feel dramatically different.
It’s also why generations aren’t cross-cultural. The generations in the US don’t translate to, say, middle eastern generations, or chinese generations.
Generations (as in Boomer, X, Y, Z) are a completely made up (primarily US) way of dividing people. Literally nobody outside the US cares. You be yourself, let others people decide what random label to give yourself your
Generations tend to be measured by cultural trends and significant historical moments, more than just by a year count. But even then, having a hard dividing line isn’t always useful. As an example, the JFK assassination is sometimes used as a cutoff point between Boomers and GenX – coinciding with your 1963 date. My mom was born a year and a half before he was assassinated, and her brother was born the day of JFK’s funeral. By some metrics, she’s a Boomer and he’s GenX. But they grew up in the same house, raised by the same parents, with mostly the same cultural experiences and trends shaping them – is it really useful to consider them as different generations?
For millenials, the defining factors tend to be 9/11 (we’re all old enough to remember it, even if the 5-year olds couldn’t really wrap their heads around it), the War on Terror, and the Great Recession. These shaped our childhoods, our studies, and our job market once we were out of school. And we were the generation that grew up alongside the internet, making its way from a modern convenience to an integral part of daily life. There’s not always a clear dividing line between us and the next generation (GenZ), and many experts disagree on where to draw it.
Things change faster than 18 years. Hippies were big in the late 60’s with Woodstock in 1969 but Boomers born in 1963 were only 6. Somebody else born in 1953 would be 16 and they would be total different while only 10 years apart.
IMO, we really only have three definable generations. The easiest to define is baby boomers: children whose parents were either involved in WWII, or delayed starting a family until WWII was over. Their parents, I call “Silvers” because, IMO, “The Greatest Generation” is total BS. Say what you will about Boomer parents, they did a hell of a lot better with their kids than their parents did with them.
Millennials, naturally, are Boomers’ children. It makes far more sense to define me and my cousins as Millennials, even though a third of us were born before 1980. Almost the whole extended family started pretty young.
Gen X gets forgotten / ignored because, relative to Boomers and Millennials, they’re just such a tiny demographic. Their grandparents started families *during* World War II, which was a small minority position.
Gen Z can only be fairly defined as “post-Millennial”. The spread of ages there is so wide, trying to assign an age range is pointless. Having great-grandparents involved in WWII is almost irrelevant to you culturally.
There’s really nothing scientific to back up the “every 20 years” generational theory. It happens to line up with the population booms that happen after a big war, but the effect only lasts 2 generations at most. Parents might start having kids immediately after the war, or wait a few years, and they might continue having children for a long time afterwards. Every subsequent generation amplifies the age range. Before long, the year you were born has a larger impact on the culture you grew up in than whether your parents or grandparents were part of some singular, significant world event, such as WWII.
It’s all nonsense. I’m supposed to have more in common with someone born in 1945 than someone born two years after me? Obvious bullshit.
There is more variance between people living on opposite sides of my hometown than there is between “generational” attitudes. The whole thing is vastly overhyped.
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