July 6, 2009

Defining who Millenials are by cultural changes

Although I'm very glad not to be part of Generation X, that doesn't mean I'm automatically a Millennial. The wrong and common view of generations is that there's a big generation that lasts for some time, and then another big one takes its place, and so on. In reality, there is a cycle, but it is between attention-whore generations and silent generations. In fact, one of the supposedly big generations is called just that -- The Silent Generation. As another example, in between Baby Boomers and Generation X, there is another silent generation, born from roughly 1958 or '59 to 1963 or '64, a typical one being born in 1962. Steve Sailer, Alias Clio, and Barack Obama are part of this silent generation.

As a 28 year-old, I notice clearly that I'm not Gen X (again, thank god). But though they're close to me and I have friends among their group, I'm not part of the Millennials either. And neither are people who are just below me in age. We're a silent generation too (roughly 1979 or '80 to 1986).

Actually, no one is fully a Millennial yet because it takes a catalyzing hysteria to make an attention-whore generation -- the mid-late '60s for Baby Boomers, the early '90s for Generation X. This hysteria leads to young people demanding that everyone drop everything they're doing and "hear the voice of a new generation." (Booorrrrinnggg.) This probably won't happen again until sometime in the middle of the next decade. Still, they're already out there just waiting to hatch and go on another feminist, identity politics rampage. It's actually kind of scary.

Anyway, the group that will be affected by the next hysteria -- those who will be 15 to 24 year-olds at the time -- will have been born between roughly 1987 and 2000. In 20 years, something like this will be common knowledge -- a cliche, even:

dude, SO glad I was born in 2005 instead of 1994 and have to go through all that leftist bullshit in college...

yeah i know, i would've been like, "omg, fml!" -- that's what they said right? buncha fags.


But before they hatch, is there any way to tell where the break in the birth year is? I think so. This will be part of an ongoing series, but for now I'll just look at smoking. Unlike violent crime and rape, drug use did not decline until about 2000 or 2001. And of course it's mostly young people smoking dope. Unlike crime, smoking is more of a health or lifestyle choice -- perhaps an ethnic marker that people in your group use to identify each other (whether your group smokes or doesn't).

The large national representative sample from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows us how much trouble high schoolers are getting into, for various types of trouble -- sex, drugs, junk food, etc. There are lots of questions about smoking (see here), but they all show the same pattern over time. Here is the percent of students who have ever smoked, even just one or two puffs:


There's basically no change until 2001, when the smoking rate starts plummeting. Young people have made a huge shift in deciding that smoking isn't their thing -- old people do that. You figure it's the young students paving the way, since you're faced with the choice to take your first puff or not pretty early -- say, 14, a high school freshman. If this pioneering group was 14 in 2001, then they were born in 1987 -- which is what I guessed just by forecasting the next big social hysteria and working backwards to guess what birth years would be affected by it and so be transformed into an attention-whore generation.

I chose smoking rather than other things like crime because it's a lot closer to a group membership badge than stealing or killing is -- "is it gonna make me look cool or not?" There are other things I've found, which I'll write more about later, and they also point to roughly the late '80s as the earliest birth years of the Millennials.

BTW, there's some practical advice for when a bunch of barely legal girls come up to talk to you at '80s night (or perhaps not even legal if it's at the mall): make sure you don't smoke, or at least don't do it during that time. It'll instantly give your age away. I've never smoked, and high school and college girls always guess that I'm 22 or 23 anyway, so no big worry. But if you're a smoker, you'll seem as out of place among them as a pipe smoker would among anyone under 80.

12 comments:

  1. Isn't there a "Generation Y" between the X'ers and Millenials, or is GenY and Millennials the same thing?

    Also, you did make an interesting obseration about the cyclical eruption of PC hysteria, like with Boomers and X'ers. But I wonder if it isn't more a media creation than some inherent property of a given cohort that reappears in cycles.

    The only reason there even was a Generation X is because MTV and Newsweek said so.

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  2. As another example, in between Baby Boomers and Generation X, there is another silent generation, born from roughly 1958 or '59 to 1963 or '64, a typical one being born in 1962. Steve Sailer, Alias Clio, and Barack Obama are part of this silent generation.

    Being part of that group myself, it really rankles my feathers to be lumped in together with the Baby Boom generation. We have almost nothing in common with people who were born in the late 1940's and early to middle 1950's. We paid little attention to the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960's because we were just children at the time. The changes wrought by those movements, for example the acceptance of women in the workplace, were just the normal part of life for us - you mean things weren't always that way? We were too young to have gone to Woodstock, and by the time we were old enough to live in a hippie commune there weren't any left. While a few of us had older brothers who were drafted to fight in Vietnam, that wasn't common, and of course we were too young to be personally at risk.

    Peter

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  3. I think your generation is called Generation Y. Millenials are definitely younger than you are, mostly still in their teens.

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  4. "Being part of that group myself, it really rankles my feathers to be lumped in together with the Baby Boom generation."

    Me, too. I was born in 1959, and I've never felt like I had anythinmg in common with the Boomers. The "Disco-Punk Generation" as Agnostic once called us, tend to be more pragmatic, more cynical, less political, and more oriented to personal relationships rather than grand social causes, than the Boomers. Just what you'd expect from the generation that had to try to clean up the Boomers mess after their big party in the
    1960's-1970's...

    Tschafer

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  5. But I wonder if it isn't more a media creation than some inherent property of a given cohort that reappears in cycles.

    I wasn't convinced until I looked farther back. There was WWII before the 1968 hysteria, and there was the mid-1920s before that, and roughly turn-of-the-century before that.

    In each case, there's an eruption of women pretending to be men: Rosie the Riveter in WWII, flappers in the Roaring Twenties, and first wave feminists around 1900. There's some kind of identity politics explosion: desegregation of the armed forces and baseball around WWII, jazz music and the Harlem Renaissance in the Roaring Twenties, and maybe something else around 1900 (not sure there).

    And there's a general Dawning of a New Age / Progressive zeitgeist: the Progressive movement around 1900, the Jazz Age and Art Deco spirit of the Roaring Twenties, and America edging out Europe.

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  6. You might look at the economy too. There's a big divide between people who graduated university before and after the 1974 recession, which ended the post-war boom. The "true" (i.e., smug and well-ensconced) boomers were 22+ at that time. People born in 1957 (the peak of the baby boom) experienced the 1974 recession in their teens, then graduated university into the 1979 recession, followed shortly by the sharper 1982 recession. Quite a different initiation into adulthood.

    It would be interesting to pursue this further.

    intellectual pariah

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  7. "and maybe something else around 1900 (not sure there)."

    Ragtime.

    i.p.

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  8. You might look at the economy too. There's a big divide between people who graduated university before and after the 1974 recession, which ended the post-war boom. The "true" (i.e., smug and well-ensconced) boomers were 22+ at that time. People born in 1957 (the peak of the baby boom) experienced the 1974 recession in their teens, then graduated university into the 1979 recession, followed shortly by the sharper 1982 recession. Quite a different initiation into adulthood.

    That's not the only challenge we faced. By "we" I mean those of us born in the c. 1956-1964 period, technically classified as part of the Baby Boom generation but very different from the 1946-1955 cohort. Not only were we thrust into the job market in generally uncertain times, but we also had our opportunities for advancement limited by all the 1946-1955'ers ahead of us. This is still continuing today, although some of the older group are starting to retire.

    Peter

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  9. To split Baby Boomer hairs even further -- I'm a couple of years older than Peter (born in '54 myself) but relate totally to what he's saying. The cliche Boomers (hippies, feminists, tearing down the campuses, orgies, etc) -- that wasn't me and my classmates, that was our older siblings. I was in college from '72 to '76, and we were very aware at the time that the party had been had and was now gone. The last few hippies were seniors when we entered, and by the time we left the first few "Wall Street"-style go-getting '80s types were starting to show up.

    Our older sibs got to party, carry on, burn flags, and then grab great jobs. Me and my classmates had to clean up after them, then emerge into a truly terrible (post-oil Crash, pre-Reagan) job market. We didn't complain about it maybe as much as we should have, mainly because we were used to being overshadowed by our loudmouthed preening self-important older sibs. Punk was our own little moment in the pop-culture sun, but that didn't last long.

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  10. All that Generation X and Y stuff is bullshit. Generations happen in families. Children are the next generation of their parents line.

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  11. In each case, there's an eruption of women pretending to be men: Rosie the Riveter in WWII, flappers in the Roaring Twenties, and first wave feminists around 1900.

    I'd discount the first of those as a historical curiosity. Women pretty much had to enter the workforce during World War II because so many men were in the military. And pretty much as soon as the war ended, women left the labor force in droves.

    Some years back at a flea market I came across a copy of my (then) local newspaper from the 1960's, I can't recall what year specificially, and was quite surprised to see that the Help Wanted ads had separate categories for men and women.

    Peter

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  12. "All that Generation X and Y stuff is bullshit. Generations happen in families. Children are the next generation of their parents line."


    True, if you are Amish and virtually all of the influence in your life is from your parents because you have no access to media and only go to school part time and only till 8th grade and then work by mom or dad's side thereafter.

    The bulk of people however are heavily influenced by the larger culture due to media, high school and college teachers and curriculum and yes, even one another because those are the people they spend the most time with.

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