tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post5064615591266459386..comments2024-03-28T21:56:51.675-04:00Comments on Face to Face: Defining who Millenials are by cultural changesagnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-47468656556778617002009-07-09T09:32:18.770-04:002009-07-09T09:32:18.770-04:00"All that Generation X and Y stuff is bullshi..."All that Generation X and Y stuff is bullshit. Generations happen in families. Children are the next generation of their parents line."<br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.sgnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-11711681969342607112009-07-07T12:50:44.777-04:002009-07-07T12:50:44.777-04:00In each case, there's an eruption of women pre...<i>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><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />PeterAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-73672909818714804862009-07-07T08:16:06.299-04:002009-07-07T08:16:06.299-04:00All that Generation X and Y stuff is bullshit. Gen...All that Generation X and Y stuff is bullshit. Generations happen in families. Children are the next generation of their parents line.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-77454180526751354452009-07-06T23:14:50.341-04:002009-07-06T23:14:50.341-04:00To split Baby Boomer hairs even further -- I'm...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. <br /><br />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.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04896402796926124332noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-34306327248381531752009-07-06T16:23:48.743-04:002009-07-06T16:23:48.743-04:00You might look at the economy too. There's a b...<i>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.</i><br /><br />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.<br /><br />PeterAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-84614532812330597602009-07-06T15:16:35.535-04:002009-07-06T15:16:35.535-04:00"and maybe something else around 1900 (not su..."and maybe something else around 1900 (not sure there)."<br /><br />Ragtime.<br /><br />i.p.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-51203138418915056762009-07-06T15:15:28.173-04:002009-07-06T15:15:28.173-04:00You might look at the economy too. There's a b...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.<br /><br />It would be interesting to pursue this further.<br /><br />intellectual pariahAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-48126370541784477432009-07-06T14:21:08.823-04:002009-07-06T14:21:08.823-04:00But I wonder if it isn't more a media creation...<i>But I wonder if it isn't more a media creation than some inherent property of a given cohort that reappears in cycles.</i><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-63900119568760097822009-07-06T14:13:13.366-04:002009-07-06T14:13:13.366-04:00"Being part of that group myself, it really r..."Being part of that group myself, it really rankles my feathers to be lumped in together with the Baby Boom generation." <br /><br />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 <br />1960's-1970's...<br /><br />TschaferAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-59124374824419543952009-07-06T13:32:44.650-04:002009-07-06T13:32:44.650-04:00I think your generation is called Generation Y. M...I think your generation is called Generation Y. Millenials are definitely younger than you are, mostly still in their teens.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-36722617710414607312009-07-06T10:25:02.026-04:002009-07-06T10:25:02.026-04:00As another example, in between Baby Boomers and Ge...<i>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.</i><br /><br />Being part of that group myself, it really rankles my feathers to be lumped in together with the Baby Boom generation. We have <i>almost nothing</i> 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.<br /><br />PeterAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-11431356806595366232009-07-06T09:22:29.964-04:002009-07-06T09:22:29.964-04:00Isn't there a "Generation Y" between...Isn't there a "Generation Y" between the X'ers and Millenials, or is GenY and Millennials the same thing?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The only reason there even <i> was </i> a Generation X is because MTV and Newsweek said so.PAnoreply@blogger.com