For the record, I believe generations are a construct. I don’t believe this idea that everyone born within an arbitrary window are somehow more like each other than other people. The oldest members of one generation are the exact same age as the youngest of another. There are no definite boundaries, and in fact mos actual familial generations don’t conform to the dates given for each cohort.
My mom’s parents were both born in 1939, so they’re pre-Baby Boomers, the Silent Generation; my dad’s parents were born in 1917 and 1926 (they were very old when they had my dad), so one’s part of the generation before that, the so called Greatest Generation, and the other is between Greatest and Silent.
My mom is Gen X, but my dad is also in between generations; he’s either an old Gen X or a young Baby Boomer (he personally identifies as the former).
My two older siblings are Millennials (1993 and 1995), my two younger siblings are definitively Gen Z (2001), and here I am,
So, that’s three generations, spanning a combined six generational cohorts.
It’s completely arbitrary.
These generational groupings are, I believe, just a way to divide people even further. It’s a way for the older people in power to create even more in- and out-groups; “you’re one of us,” or “you’re part of them.” It ties unlike individuals together so they are complicit with the sins of the most prolific; it’s the people in power who are responsible for the problems we attribute to the entire generation, a finite number whose names and faces are known, but they’ve managed to shift the blame away from themselves personally and onto their peers through generational association.
There’s nothing inherent about the time period we are born that makes us any one way or another; being born between WWII and Vietnam doesn’t make you a bad person anymore than being born between Reagan and W makes you a destroyer of industry.
