There will always be the need to have some societal construct for the grouping of people. People in the same generation were generally subjected to similar living conditions at similar points of their life so it makes it a valid grouping.
If not generations, then what? There is also sexual orientations, political beliefs, race… the list goes on.
Realistically you can’t have 8 billion plus classifications for every distinct person, so at some point there needs to be a generally agreed upon roll up.
Income, average household size, cost-of-living, religious preference, level of education, geography… lots of ways to slice up that poll data once you correlate each polling place with other data. The key here is that it’s possibly more valid to correlate with information that is closer to the election date than birthdays that were decades ago.
Oh yeah, you think everyone born in the late 1940s had similar enough lived experiences to universalise them? That’s incredible that there’s so little variation despite drastically different socioeconomic positionalities, almost like you’d have to dismiss certain experiences that inevitably deviate from that imagined norm to allow it to exist. Of course, there’s only so many ways to account for everyone, so we will have to accept these dominant constructions of human experience as something inevitable as well.
You completely missed my point. Generation is a valid grouping even if you don’t like it. Yes there are others that may work, some may be better, some may not. But it is still a unifying thread. Take Xellenials (micro-generation between X and Millenial), it’s described as an “analog childhood and digital adulthood” that is somewhat that pretty much everyone in that generation was subject to, so yeah it was a “similar enough lived [sic] experience to universalize them”.
I don’t think it’s similar living conditions but more of significant world events in their lives. With say Boomers you have Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Reagan as examples that shaped their world views. Not all are shaped the same way but it affected them. Like with Millennials, we have the proliferation of the internet, 2001, and 2008. These have seriously affected how we think and act to differing degrees in the USA.
There will always be the need to have some societal construct for the grouping of people. People in the same generation were generally subjected to similar living conditions at similar points of their life so it makes it a valid grouping.
If not generations, then what? There is also sexual orientations, political beliefs, race… the list goes on.
Realistically you can’t have 8 billion plus classifications for every distinct person, so at some point there needs to be a generally agreed upon roll up.
Income, average household size, cost-of-living, religious preference, level of education, geography… lots of ways to slice up that poll data once you correlate each polling place with other data. The key here is that it’s possibly more valid to correlate with information that is closer to the election date than birthdays that were decades ago.
Oh yeah, you think everyone born in the late 1940s had similar enough lived experiences to universalise them? That’s incredible that there’s so little variation despite drastically different socioeconomic positionalities, almost like you’d have to dismiss certain experiences that inevitably deviate from that imagined norm to allow it to exist. Of course, there’s only so many ways to account for everyone, so we will have to accept these dominant constructions of human experience as something inevitable as well.
I wonder if there’s a word for that.
You completely missed my point. Generation is a valid grouping even if you don’t like it. Yes there are others that may work, some may be better, some may not. But it is still a unifying thread. Take Xellenials (micro-generation between X and Millenial), it’s described as an “analog childhood and digital adulthood” that is somewhat that pretty much everyone in that generation was subject to, so yeah it was a “similar enough lived [sic] experience to universalize them”.
I don’t think it’s similar living conditions but more of significant world events in their lives. With say Boomers you have Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Reagan as examples that shaped their world views. Not all are shaped the same way but it affected them. Like with Millennials, we have the proliferation of the internet, 2001, and 2008. These have seriously affected how we think and act to differing degrees in the USA.