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Gen X, Millenials, Boomers... what a pointless label.
How can you compare a "millenial" from Yugoslavia and another from California? What about 2 "boomers" from Alabama but one of them fought in Vietnam and the other didn't? Even identical tweens are individuals and can be very different in almost everything.
2 years ago · 👍 aka_dude, comatoast
This is a pointed and valid critque. Generalizations like this can be helpful for statistics and data analysis from time to time, though. · 2 years ago
Some people need labels, not all intellects are equal. The mental effort it takes to try understanding the near infinite complexity of people and the factors that made them who they are greatly outweighs the ease of instantly putting people into easy to understand boxes, generalizations. Whats seldom thought about is that every time you make a generalization, name a thing, assert *your* simple human understanding over it, it degrades the beauty of the unique indivdual. A common practice in meditation is un-learning to the need to label. Allowing your mind to passively observe things as themselves without asserting your intellectual ego on it. · 2 years ago
I don't think they're entirely useless, because people of different generations do have different experiences in broad, general ways, but some people make way too much of them (especially the media). Almost anywhere that generational cohorts are being discussed would be better off talking about class instead. · 2 years ago
We kind of need to label the world to make sense of it. No labels are ever going to capture it, but the alternative is the uncomprehensible and unbridled chaos that is things as they really are. · 2 years ago
All generalization is absurd. · 2 years ago
post-modernist propaganda... · 2 years ago
These terms aren't trying to label groups of people as exactly the same - they exist to refer to a shared temporal context, in the way terms like "Yugoslavia" exist to define a spatial context. Words only refer to the things they're supposed to refer to and we need to stop inferring more than that. We've watered so many words down to the point of uselessness and it's supremely frustrating. · 2 years ago
I think they are relevant to an extent. The world where Boomers grew up, regardless of country (except maybe North Korea), was very different to the one Zoomers are growing up in now. · 2 years ago