- Boomers are having their last dance in charge.
- Gen X leaders are stepping up to replace the last of them.
- Younger leaders are taking charge of politics and corporate giants such as Boeing, HSBC, and Costco.
Kamala was born in 64. She’s a boomer. Also, GTFO with Generation Jones. She’s a boomer. X-ers are those who came after the pill became omnipresent after the mid 60s. I am one of those (born in 77). We are relatively few in numbers in comparison to the boomers. Because of the pill. Also GTFO with Generation Jones. She’s a boomer.
Trump and Biden also aren’t boomers. They predate the boomers. They were born during or shortly after WW2. That’s usually called the silent generation. Trump being part of the silent generation is of course ridiculous. But he’s the exception of the rule, I guess. But both are born very late in that generation, so they are its last remnants I guess. Soon they will all be gone.
Boomers is short for Baby Boomers which were literally the babies born after WW2 vets came home and had families. I don’t know why your misinformed comment has so many upvotes
What’s the fact you’re objecting to? The only thing wrong is Trump as a Silent as he’s born in the very first year of the Boomers. Everything else is following the common definitions.
Where does the common definition of ‘Boomer’ say it starts after 1946 (the year Trump was born) and stops with the birth control pill (1960)?
I have never seen such a definition anywhere. Certainly not one that says it starts at least two years after the end of WWII.
You might be right there. I’m German. And many a man did come back later, after the war, here. A lot of refugees were forcefully relocated from what is today Poland. Also a lot of POWs came back long after the war was over. So the baby boom was a bit delayed over here.
We are relatively few in numbers in comparison to the boomers
That’s not true. The birth rate dropped slightly from the low 20s per 1000 in the 40s to the mid-60s, then dropped to the high teens in the Gen X era. Relatively few in numbers implies that there were twice as many boomers or something. The reality is that there were about 75 million baby boomers births, and about 65 million Gen X.
Trump is a boomer (1946, same year as Clinton and Bush), Biden is a “silent generation” guy, born before the end of WWII. He’s actually the first (and presumably last) Silent Generation president. The ones before him were all boomers or “greatest” generation.
While those facts might not be wrong in your neck of the woods, they are at least very, very US centric. That is of course ok, as we are talking about the US candidates here. But generally, keep in mind that the world is way bigger than the US. You make up a whole of 4% of the world’s population. And those numbers all vary from country to country.
The article and the discussion was US-centric. I’m aware things are different outside the US. I don’t live in the US. I’m merely pointing out that for an American to think that the baby boom was some kind of massive shift in population that means the number of boomers dwarfs any other generation is wrong.
Gen X isnt much better tbh. They grew up during the golden age of the boomer era where society had not started to breakdown yet. Some of them may have progressive views, but I bet it won’t be until millenials are in charge that we start to see meaningful change. Gen Z will really get into progressivism I bet.
As a millennial, I think I can speak for all of us and say we’re OK with Gen Z taking over early, they might still have the emotional capacity to effect lasting change.
I agree, and since most of us didn’t start our careers “on time” due to the absolute destruction of the economy in 2008, and also being most of the military strength during GWOT, Gen Z can take charge.
Just don’t short us too badly, maybe throw us a little bone here and there. We will happily take it since our Boomer parents were so massively shitty to us.
That’s really the answer to any of the “Generation ___ will save us”. It’s not generations, it’s age. If a generation takes over earlier it will be more far looking and less fearful. If it doesn’t, it will age into being the same mess all the others have been.
The Boomers dying off might change things merely because they were a huge generation and X is a small one, meaning the average age of a voter should be going down.
The difference is that Millennials seem to be disproportionately tired of responsibility while Boomers hoarded it. What sort of Millennial wants to go through the effort of maintaining a home owners’ association or of showing up at town halls to complain about new developments? Just give us some mtg cards and a runescape membership and you can have the White House.
Abrogation of responsibility is still messy selfishness, but it’s easier to work around for people who do want to be productive. Those in power are more than old enough that Millennials not replacing them in large enough numbers means reasonably middle-aged Zoomers get those positions instead.
The boomers grew up in the “Golden age”… Gen x is the boomers first round of kids… Born from hippy free love and mistakes… Then the boomers grew up, got divorced, and started their millennial “real” families… Gen x caught the shit end of the boomer stick for sure, and it fucked them up as a generation… That and the fact that they caught a lot of the boomers pig headedness, probably because they had far less access to information than millennials.
Luckily they’re a small and mostly insignificant generation that won’t ever be able to prop up the old oligarchy parties the way the boomers have been able to.
I’m Gen X and I can tell you from experience that that is mostly accurate.
We’re the generation that was born, came of age, and entered the workforce when Boomers were still far from retirement age and hording all the good jobs. We had to all go to university to study for the leftovers.
It was the generation after us, that second round of kids that you talk about, that came of age and started going to University right around the time that Boomers began to retire, leaving all these well paying jobs for them to pick up now that us X’ers had already settled on the crappy jobs.
A lot of millennials entered the workforce right around the time of the Great Recession. They were not walking out into a land of economic plenty and have been on a worse economic course throughout their lives because of it. I’m in the Xennial range and I’m damn happy I didn’t enter the workforce a few years later.
The tech boom of the 90s would disagree with you. Millennials hadn’t finished puberty yet so they weren’t taking the jobs, and boomers were still astonished by the concept of electricity. And since the computer industry was new, it wasn’t like anyone was going to college for it yet.
Millennials aren’t going to be the savior you think they are. Like, I want to be hopeful, but I see a lot of Millennials my age just acting scared. They’ve finally gotten some stability, they’ve finally gotten some comfort, and they’re incredibly loss averse. I see a bunch of people my age bought a house in the suburbs posting in the neighborhood Facebook group every time there’s a loud bang “did anyone hear that noise? What was it?” with people lamenting about how the neighborhood is going downhill.
Ten years ago, millennials were pissed the fuck off and were ready to burn shit to the ground. The ruling class gave them just enough to be scared of losing it.
People raised with the same ideas as their parents/friends/society aren’t going to magically change just because they come from a younger generation. When Millennials start coming into power, there are still going to be Millennials on both sides of the political divide. The Republican ones will likely be just as insane, if not worse than the Boomers or the Gen Xers. It’s not like Millennials are just magically going to all be progressive and everything changes. Any of them getting into politics are going to become part of the mainstream political culture and internalize their political beliefs as they learn from their elders. The Right is much more organized about maintaining their ideas and pushing their beliefs, that’s why they work so hard to suppress the other side.
Can we stop making assumptions of an entire group based on some arbitrary rule? The people that will get to power is based on the population that votes for them and not when they were born, start voting in primaries, supporting candidates that match your values and going out to vote for them during election and you might just get what you want.
Gen X is too small to matter. Millennials are stepping up and will compete with Boomers for a little while until they finally take over. Thing about Millennials though is that it is a very K shaped generation. About half have had decent success and are conservative/liberal and the other half have been absolutely crushed so it’s kind of a mixed bag and as long as the Boomers have any influence not much is likely to change. GenZ is bigger than Millennials though and should be right behind them. They are very different and much more politically radical, on both the left and right. Things are likely to change with them.
Spoken just like the boomers. Heads up your own asses just like them.
65 million X compared to 72 millennial. Wow. Carry on.
Whatever.
It’s almost like generational distinction is meaningless and it’s actually about class.
One thing I’m looking forward to with millennial leadership is just people that finally fully understand the power of the internet, big data and what truly distinguishes the information age. If you didn’t grow up with it, it’s hard to grapple with just how much it truly upended … fucking everything. They mostly still don’t understand that a computer can basically read their mind now, just through indirect data gathering and comparing them to all of the other people. We all get that at a more intuitive level, we’ve spent too long around these algorithms and seas of semi-anonymous others.
Of course we’ll be in some quantum AI room-temp-superconductor age by then, so, y’know how it goes. But we should at least have a better handle on the information age problems, so that’ll be nice.
But we should at least have a better handle on the information age problems, so that’ll be nice.
Technology keeps creating new problems. The problems don’t stay still and wait to be fixed.
I’m worried about the Alphas and younger Zs who weren’t paying attention until after Covid. The news doesn’t talk about Trump’s laundry list of controversies or extremism. They just yell about the economy and the border and point at Biden.
As usual, they make rationalists look alarmist.
Generational cohorts are all just made up nonsense. It just exists to distract the working class from what we have in common with each other and what separates us from the working class. I, a millennial, have much more in common with a working class baby boomer, than I do with a rich and powerful millennial.
Stop encouraging these artificial divides. Build solidarity across the working class of all ages. And stop playing into the media’s narratives.
I think you’re conflating two different things. There are a variety of social factors that affect age cohorts differently, and a lot of that comes down to the experience during formative years. We are a product of our environment in many ways, and it’s not nonsense to study and opine on these shared experiences and how they shape us. Class solidarity is an entirely different subject. You likely do have more in common with your social class across generations, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything in common with wealthy millennials. I wouldn’t let lazy journalism own the concept of generations itself.
The lived experience of people differs as much, or more, within age cohorts, as it does between age cohorts. They are lazy and hasty generalisations, with very little benefit outside of garbage op-eds and zombie statistics.
Do you often get your personal beliefs from garbage op-eds?
If you would like to learn about generational cohorts from a higher quality source, I recommend The Fourth Turning, a rather prophetic book on generations.
