the.com/generations
Each one swears it invented rebellion, then complains the next one ruined everything.
means The successive groups of people born and living around the same time, or the act of producing and bringing something into being.
from From Latin 'generatio,' the noun from 'generare,' meaning 'to beget' or 'bring forth,' itself rooted in 'genus' — birth, race, kind. The same 'gen-' seed sprouts across an enormous family of words: gene, genus, genius, genesis, generous, even kin and kind through their Germanic cousins. The word arrived in English through Old French in the medieval period, and from the start it carried both senses we still use: the making of offspring, and the cohort of people doing the making — each link in the chain that 'gen-' has been quietly tracing back to the first 'to bring into being.'
- naming wars
- Boomers, X, millennials, Z, Alpha — marketers coined most
- loose math
- Roughly 15 to 20 years, no official rule
- old complaint
- Socrates griped about disrespectful youth too
- genome echo
- Trauma may ripple across three generations epigenetically
- overlap chaos
- Cusp years belong to two cohorts at once
baby boomers — americans born 1946-1964, ~73 million people, shaped post-wwii culture
generation z — born 1997-2012, first true digital natives, ~2 billion people globally
silent generation — born 1928-1945, experienced great depression and wwii, defined by civic duty
generation x — born 1965-1980, ~65 million americans, bridge between analog and digital