RE: Generations

Since it's been so long since the original post, this will only partially be a reply to it.

First, a quick primer: My generation (the children of the Baby Boomers) may end up being called the Generation Without a Name or perhaps the Generation of a Million Names. No one can seem to decide what to call us, which is probably indicative of something which I hope to explore in a later post. Some suggestions include Generation Y (as the logical successor of Gen. X), The Millennials (or the Millennial Generation) and the Echo Boomers. I like the last of these because it's a factual and generic starting point. Without getting too into it (just yet), we'll just say that the Echo Boomers are influenced by at least three major factors: (1) Our parents and their place in the world as Baby Boomers, (2) having grown up with considerable access to internet technology, and (3) having 9/11 mark the beginning of our awareness of the outside world (politics, foreign relations, etc.). As I said, I hope that I get to expand upon this framework, but for now we'll leave it at that.

In regards to the original post, I have trouble feeling anything about the end of the Baby Boomer Generation which, itself, may be an indication as to how my generation, as a whole, will feel about it. I find that my peers notice the existence of generations far less than those older than us seem to. This might be just my peer group, since we're all likely to have been raised by parents (like mine) who didn't particularly enjoy being categorized with the Baby Boomers. However, I think the feeling is probably more wide spread.

To me, and probably to many people of my approximate age, Generation X was a marketing term and our generation (whatever it's called) hasn't really been named. Not that I feel that we are overlooked or that we are "harder to categorize" than previous generations. Rather, I mean that that the confusion about how to define the generation has resulted in us (my cohort) not having it in our vocabulary. This, in turn, probably makes us less aware of the significance of generations because the concept of generations seems not to apply to us.

More cynically, I could say that it's just another thing that Baby Boomers have co-opted to be all about them. That's probably not true, but maybe it just means that until the Baby Boomers stop holding the majority of the airwaves, so to speak, in the discussion of generations as a whole, my peers are likely to overlook the whole concept. Who can say what the result of that might mean? Might we never consider ourselves to be a generation, or will we pick it up somewhere along the way?