I’ve noted a problem with breaking things down by “generation” or pop-culture “decade”.
We all think we know what the labels mean so we all use them, but it’s rare these days that anyone defines Gen-X or Millennial or “90s Kids”, so much so that ‘millennial’ has become a lazy synonym for “teenagers” even though the most common definition [kids born between 1981 and 1996] means the absolutely youngest ‘millennial’ is 22. Think grad school, not high school. The oldest Millennial is 37 and the median is 29.
“Because generations are analytical constructs, it takes time for popular and expert consensus to develop as to the precise boundaries that demarcate one generation from another. Pew Research Center has assessed demographic, labor market, attitudinal and behavioral measures and has now established an endpoint – albeit inexact – for the Millennial generation. According to our revised definition, the youngest “Millennial” was born in 1996. This post has been updated accordingly”
Millennials projected to overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation [in 2019], Pew Research Center, Richard Fry, 1 March 2018
I’m not a historiographer of sociology (…wow. what a construction that is) but my sideline impression is that “generations” as a named thing didn’t really exist until the mid 1920s when the Lost Generation became a shorthand way to refer to those Europeans born 1883-1900 and subjected to the meat grinder of World War I. This ‘pop culture’ definition (assuming Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway were once considered such) also coincides with some of the earliest academic efforts at describing the same thing. Generations as we now call them are a modern invention, and tied closely to the pace of change of the modern world
(though the ‘kids these days’ complaint dates back to at least the 4th century BCE we could argue that we didn’t complain about “teenagers“ until we invented that word for them, and the “baby boomers”, in the 1950s).
That is to say, if you were born in 1200 or 1400 or 1600 your life might have been significantly different from someone of a century before (or not, for a lot of farmers) but also your life wouldn’t really have been all that different from your mother’ or father’s: 20 years was nothing.
These days, 20 years can feel like a lifetime ago. It’s the difference between a Nokia 3210 and whatever phone you have in your pocket now. It’s the difference between The World Wide Web™ that hasn’t even been indexed by Google yet and a world where ‘the internet’ is a multi-channel, multi-device utility service that operates as an always-on connection to your friends, family, work, finances, potential purchases, and potential mates. Like, reblog, fav, subscribe (remember to hit that bell), swipe right, and hey: rate & review my podcast on iTunes.
20 years is also the frame most use for Baby Boomers, 1945-1965. The next couple of generations only get about 15. As our pace of life and change continues to accelerate (assuming it does) we might think of “generations” or cohorts that are even smaller. Context, socioeconomic circumstances, and regional/urban/rural/suburban differences also matter quite a bit: they might even matter more. I’d say there’s a big damned difference between getting your first computer when you’re 8, or 18 – and from 1980 to today, this ‘first computer’ moment played out in a lot of different ways. For some, it was a Sinclair or TRS-80 in 1978, or a Commodore or Tandy in ’83, or a Gateway in ’88. Dell didn’t even start selling to the public *until 1997*. There are some people whose first computer (their first capable device, for all the definitions we’d apply to ‘computer’ and ‘capable’) would have been a hand-me-down smart phone in 2013. 35 years – “generation” spanning, and a whole lot of gradients in between. There’s a longer essay here but sadly and disappointing to most I’m going to pivot to pop culture instead.
Let me loop in the other point that’s related but different: The Decade. Everyone knows what you mean when you say “The 80s” even though you’re only using 1980-1989 as a bucket into which we’ll pour 10 years of lived experience (or a stereotypical parody version of it) and which is never really about the actual calendar dates. You can type “When did the 80s start?” into Google and get back dozens if not hundreds of articles and forum discussions that have nothing to do with 1 January 1980.
These “pop culture” decades, the zeitgeistgestalts we refer to as “The 60s” or “The 70s”, are as much about nostalgia as they are about history. Anywhere from 20-30 years after the fact, we (well, some) start to look fondly back at a time when things were ‘simpler’ if not ‘better’. That 70s Show premieres in 1998 and is set in 1976. Happy Days is 1955 as seen from 1975, at least when it started, and tracks a roughly eleven year span over its eleven seasons. Part of this might be a result of becoming a parent in your 20s or early 30s, and so having this constant reminder (in the form of a kid) of the time when you were a kid.
Stranger Things is set in 1983; is going back 35 years a creative choice – or because a significant fraction of couples are having their first children in their late 30s rather than early 20s?
We can even use “Back in My Day” as a predictive tool: want to know which properties are going to get a movie reboot or TV spin-off? I’d look at 1987, 1992, & 1997. Predator, Princess Bride, Lost Boys; Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mighty Ducks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie); Titanic, Men In Black, The Fifth Element (fingers crossed)
I’m not saying each is going to get revisited, and there’s plenty of stuff I skipped from each year (and in the years in between). And it’s not quite a 20-year thing – the anniversary rolls around, there’s a DVD release or a documentary retrospective, and it takes a couple of years to roll into enough momentum for a reboot. So I looked at 22-27-32 years ago, not 20-25-30. But that’s my theory (not sure how to count Buffy; the movie was 1992 but the TV show was 1996, not 1997)
We like big round numbers. It’s a human failing. We put a lot of weight on calendar events that end in zeros when the reality is much more like the difference between Tuesday and Wednesday (huge New Year’s parties where you get drunk and kiss someone you shouldn’t have aside)
Decades get ‘defined’ by their politics and world events, broadly, but more specifically by the film, TV, music, fads & memes. It’s not so much about *defining* a decade though: instead we rely on lists. Top 10 albums. Top 10 movies. Top 10 Things Only 90s Kids Remember. Call this take, buzzfeed decades [they should do a set of books, like the old Time-Life volumes]
The internet is so full of decade-spanning lists like these that I can only assume they form some sort of underlying infrastructure. Like, Facebook would crash if we deleted every fossil top 10 from the geocities era of the internet. It’s literally top 10 turtles all the way down.
Zero to Zero Decades, Midnight 1 Jan whenever to 31 Dec whenever else, are kind of useless, though, even if we have to set some limits. Take [U.S.] presidential administrations: mostly but not always two terms and so 8 years of lived experience – Reagan lines up with the 80s, but not all of the 80s, just 20 January 1981 to the same day in 1989. Neat framing, but even within those 8 years, Reagan’s second term differs enough from his first that we can divide the decade in half. There are other things that hit mid-80s – Michael Jordan, Apple’s Macintosh, Shoulder Pads, The Extremely Odd Occurrence Of The Hair Band Power Ballad – that it’s almost comically easy to divide early 80s [Smurfs, Knight Rider, Hill Street Blues] from late 80s [Garfield and Friends, Baywatch, 21 Jump Street] [wait. um.]
Regardless of how we define or divide, though, there’s always going to be overlap. The Boomer Block 1945-1965, subsumes “the 50s” but The Korean War is a different 50s from Civil Rights Marches 50s which is different from Walt Disney Presents 50s and Rebel Without A Cause 50s – even though there were about 9 months where all 4 of those were “the 50s” and these days no one can tell you if Truman or Eisenhower was president at the time.
We like the divisions, our 80s and 90s, but a better way to parse your timeline is in six year chunks, as you lived it
Personal timelines: Six Year Chunks
- 7-12 Grade school
- 13-18 Jr High/High School
- 19-24 College, roughly* (Or your first military enlistment. Or your 1st job out of HS)
Past that, well,
- 25-30 Why haven’t I still figured this out yet
- 31-36 Oh gods why is everything so hard (sometimes, with special bonus: kids)
- 37-42 Nostalgia for the time you were 10 or 15 or 20, backed up by “hey remember” retrospectives and reboots of everything
What you or I would call “history”, events before our childhood, we all tend to generalize into the usual decades: the 1950s or 60s or 70s, But if you lived through it, you’re more likely to parse things down into 4- or 5- or 6-year blocks. And so we get things like Xennials and “90s kids” or groups we might eventually call the Columbine-Parkland generation or Afghanistan War Vets [see also The Onion: “Soldier Excited To Take Over Father’s Old Afghanistan Patrol Route”]
There are also some roughly equivalent 6-year pop culture and political blocks, like
- 22 November 1963 to 29 August 1968, Kennedy to Chicago
- ST:TNG 1987-1994 sci-fi on syndicated TV era.
- followed almost immediately by Hercules & Xena in syndication, 1995-1999
- Gorbachev’s “glasnost”, 1986-1991
- September 1956 to February 1964, from Elvis’s 1st appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show to the Beatles’
- May 1957 to Oct 1961, the gap between I Love Lucy to The Dick Van Dyke Show, five years with The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents in between.
- 1976-82, Logan’s Run through Alien through to Wrath of Khan (with some small films from Lucas during that period) (up through E.T., and ending on Jedi in May of ’83 but done before Temple of Doom in ’84 and Aliens in ’86, a different era)
- the seven years of a console. whichever generation. SNES, NG4, Gamecube, PS2, PS3, PS4, XBOX to 360 to “720” to XBone – and on to whatever they’re calling the 2019 offerings.Each runs about 6-7 years until the economics of sunk costs no longer counter-balances the potential gain of an upgrade and then suddenly: the whole user base flips from one platform to the next.
A number of two-term presidential administrations hit a wall in year 6, brought down by internal scandals or a bad lame-duck mid-term election result. A lot of popular and critically acclaimed TV shows either only run 6-7 seasons in total or have a ‘golden age’ that hits six years, or slightly less, occasionally more. [“Jumping the Shark” literally derives from Fronzie doing exactly that, 5 years into Happy Days’ 11 year run.]
A “generation”, as we’ve been using the term, could encompass between two and four of these 6 year blocks. Or not.
Breaking things down into six year blocks isn’t better than decades; they’re are no hard delimiters and anyone who tries to define a decade or a generation usually just ends up defining themselves.
But when we discuss things like the 90s, or Millennial vs Gen Z Kai, maybe keep this off-beat of six year intervals in mind, to complement our understanding of decades and the roughly-15-year-block “generations” to come.
final aside: 6, 10, and 15 line up every 30 years. Two generations, three decades, and five pop culture blocks. Take from that what you will, but it likely explains why most gen-xrs and millennials will tell you 1988-1992 was its own whole damn decade and, further back, why the 19A0s are a thing.