This has been a bee in my bonnet (which sounds a trifle nasty, doesn’t it?). Generations don’t happen in waves, they happen all the time, seamlessly. To say that because some individuals are born in a particular cluster of years “makes” them a “Boomer” or a part of generations “X” or “Y” and thus gives them certain shared characteristics ignores individuality, parental modeling, the role of genetic variation and the fact that humans are adaptive and will change their behaviours to suit conditions.

At worst it’s just lazy, convenient labelling. At best? Well it’s harmless fun, innit? I don’t doubt that people are affected by both their environment and the events within their lives, but just because the World Wars demonstrably affected a wide selection of the world’s population severely and disastrously doesn’t make it follow that forever more whatever happens will be reflected in some measurable mass generational change of mindset. If we look hard enough we’ll find “something”, but that’s humanity for you – looking for patterns and finding “something”. Like a face on the moon and animal shapes in clouds, or the stars above.

So in today’s Sydney Morning Herald we finally find a change in thinking: There is a little bit of generation Y in us all, says a leading researcher who believes it is time to rip up the generational rulebook and rethink the way we view people’s behaviour. Rather than break down the population into demographics based on age, Mark McCrindle says it is time to look at a whole chunk of Australia as one group based on attitude, or as social analysts like him call it, psychodemographics. And, he says, the prevailing mind-set in the future is that of generation Y.

It’s still a case of looking for a pattern and giving it a label, but at least we are shaking off this “born in year ‘x’ therefore you act like this” rubbish. Which only applies to the rich Westerners who are targeted by marketers anyway. But people are people, wherever they are, and individuals. Let’s treat them as individuals.
Or am I just acting like a wrathful Scorpio?