How We Define Who We Are
There’s a generational debate going on, but baby boomers and Generation X need not apply. This debate concerns only those born after 1980. This month, the Pew Research Center defined millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996. Pew, an American public policy organization, looked at birth years as well as the political and cultural events that defined a person’s early life to define the range.
People born after 1996 may know that AOL at one time chirped to its users, “you’ve got mail,” or that the internet was piped through the telephone line, but they likely don’t remember the voice of the AOL announcer or the screeches of dial-up modems.
Baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, grew up in the shadow of World War II. Generation X is bookended between the boomers and millennials and suffers as the “mid- dle child,” according to Pew. American millennials, it said, remember the September 11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latest recession and the 2008 election.
“Many millennials came of age and entered the work force at the height of the economic recession, but many young adults today are entering the work force in an era of economic growth and low unemployment,” Ruth Igielnik, a research associate at Pew, told The Times. As a result, today’s younger generation may not face the same hurdles in their professional and personal lives that millennials did, like finding a well-paying job that will enable them to get married or buy a home.
But what, then, are people born after 1996? No one has figured that out yet. Some commentators have begun using “Generation Z,” but Pew seemed unimpressed by the term. It announced that they will be called, at least for now, “post-millennials.”
In January, in an effort at demographic democracy, The Times asked its younger readers to define themselves. The answer, like democracy, was messy.
“I wouldn’t mind being called Generation Scapegoat,” Alexandra Della Santina, a 22-year- old Boeing engineer, wrote in the most popular response. “When baby boomers and Generation X or Y or whatever decide to start using us as punching bags instead of millennials, it’s gonna be much harder to whine about us if they’re forced to call us The Scapegoats.”
Other suggestions ran the gamut of moods: there was iGeneration, the Hopeful Generation, the Anxious Generation and Generation Fix-It.
Some hated the exercise altogether. “Don’t call us anything. The whole notion of cohesive generations is nonsense,” Kiernan Mejerus- Collins, 22, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Lewiston, Maine, wrote to The Times. (Remaining nameless was the second-most-popular opinion.)
John Quiggin, a senior research fellow in economics at the University of Queensland in Australia, offered a similar solution: get rid of generations altogether.
Mr. Quiggin wrote in The Times that the “‘generation game’ — the insistence on dividing society into groups based on birth year and imputing different characteristics to each group” — has done “more harm than good by obscuring the individual factors that actually shape our attitudes, politics and opportunities.”
There are such wide discrepancies between the experiences of individuals inside a generation, along with differences of class, race, gender and economics, that the exercise creates a false sense of unity.
The generation game is just a reflection of an inane part of human nature. Millennials, Mr. Quiggin wrote, have been “derided as lazy and narcissistic or defended as creative and committed to social change. But these all sound like characteristics that the old have ascribed to the young since the dawn of time.”
Whatever they are labeled, people born after 1996 know they have that to look forward to.