Generations are getting shorter (and more meaningless)

There's a fun article in the Globe and Mail about all the named generations we seem to attach so much significance to these days, about how the names came about, how they have come to define certain age groups, and ultimately how random and pointless they are.

First, a quick summary for those who are not keeping up:

• Greatest Generation: born 1901 to 1927.
• Silent Generation: 1928 to 1945.
• Baby Boomers: 1946 to 1964.
• Gen X: 1965 to 1980.
• Gen Y (Millennials): 1981 to 1996.
• Gen Z: 1997 to 2010.
• Gen Alpha: 2011 to 2024.
• Gen Beta: 2025 to 2039.

It used to be the case that we looked at older generations, after the fact, and tried to attribute some social/economic/technological generalizations to them. Thus, the Baby Boomers were an optimistic post-war generation that felt emboldened to have lots of kids, relatively speaking. That kind of made sense.

Generation X was just a generation that happened to follow the Baby Boomers ("a note to follow 'soh'"?), named after a novel by Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, whose jaded, cynical characters came to identify and stereotype the generation, whatever the actual reality.

And from there, Y, Z, Alpha and Beta just flowed automatically, in a lazy progression of increasingly meaningless labels. For no good reason, Gen Y also has a separate nickname, "Millennials", so named because the cohort would graduate around the turn of the millennium, as though that has any deep significance.

These generations are not really defined by any social, economic or technological parameters, though. Rather, sociologists and social media influencers try to impose characteristics on them, with varying levels of success, on the assumption that such generalizations are useful or significant, and that each cohort is sufficiently different in some way from preceding generations.

Interestingly, generations are now being named and defined in advance. Generation Beta already exists, even though just a few babies have been born into it since the start of this year, and their characters and defining circumstances are far from apparent yet. There is now a whole industry of demographers, market researchers and influencers, all clamouring to be the ones to define generations in the same way as Douglas Coupland (accidentally) did for Gen X, and Strauss and Howe did for Millennials.

It also seems that generations are getting shorter and shorter. While the Greatest Generation spanned 27 years, the Silent Generation 18 years, and  the Baby Boomers 19 years, Gen X and Y were only 16 years long. Gen Z, Alpha and Beta, though, are only 14 years each, which suggests that they are expected to procreate a new generation by age 14!

It's a tongue-in-cheek article, and the generations identified are clearly only generalized guides, and their timings are mere conventions and open to debate. They are not designed to be taken too seriously, except maybe by marketers. But it brings up some interesting points about how we love to compartmentalize and categorize, however meaningless the categories may actually be.