The Generational Wars Are Very Silly

An appeal for ending the labelling altogether

As far as I can tell, the convention of naming generations started with the early twentieth century. Gertrude Stein looked around her, saw a cohort that had been born at the wrong time, and dubbed them the Lost Generation. From the very beginning, when we started naming generations, it was in service of a narrative, a story we wanted to tell about these people.

We cemented the trend when we named the next cohort the Greatest Generation. This generation experienced the Golden Age of Hollywood, the advent of many of our favorite genres, and, of course, the horrors of the Second World War.

Ever since then, we’ve named subsequent generations, often well before they were able to define themselves. Millennials were so dubbed because they were born close to the turning of the millennium; we couldn’t find anything of interest for the next cohort, so we called them Generation Z, pretending that Millenials were the Y between them and Generation X. My own children missed out on the opportunity to be Alphas, and now the media want to call them Betas — something I simply refuse to go along with.

I have always thought of generational labels as something akin to astrology charts: a bit fun, mostly harmless, but ultimately useless in terms of explanations. But I keep running into people who take their generational identity very seriously, and they seem to think that:

1. There are substantial differences between generational cohorts

2. These cohorts have competing interests and are, in some loose sense, ‘at war.’

3. And, conveniently, the cohort the speaker is a member of is, of course, the one that has been historically wronged (and just so happens to be best along some/most/all dimensions).

I was born in 1990. By the (completely fake) conventions of generational sorting, I am a Millennial. To be clear: I do not call myself a Millennial. That’s for two reasons. First, I always forget about the second n. Second, I think that defining yourself by your generational cohort is silly — and that it leads to pernicious patterns of thought that we’d do well to excise from our minds.

All of this leads to the thesis of this post: the generational wars are silly, and as part of our strategy of avoiding them, we should stop thinking in terms of generational labels.

The Monkey King Vali’s Funeral Pyre

Going to college at the cusp of the second decade of this millennium, I vividly recall headlines to the effect that the then-rising generation was killing beloved American businesses like Applebee’s, or that the lavish lifestyles they had become accustomed to would keep them from any sort of financial success. This came a bit late, but an article in The Guardian really summed this up: millennials needed to stop eating avocado toast if they wanted to buy a house. It was an older man, Tim Gurner, telling them this, and he knows something about houses: The Guardian calls him an Australian real estate mogul.

This is just one instance of generational antagonism, worth mentioning only because of its odd specificity. A member of one generational cohort looks at another cohort and says You’re living in the wrong sort of way.

Or, rather: Something is wrong with you.

This antagonism does not only go from the old toward the young.

At some point – years ago, now – people started to say ‘OK, Boomer’ as a dismissive reply to older people, not necessarily in the Baby Boomer cohort. The widespread use of the term fueled quite a bit of resentment. Boomers were mad at people calling them Boomers, and everybody was mad at Boomers.