Why Gen X is the real loser generation
economist.comThat's just, like, your opinion, man.
I think GenX gets largely absorbed into millennials and boomers when people make generalizations. The birth year cutoff for millenial has crept increasingly downward, subsuming what I remember as GenY, and I think for marketing purposes, a childless 47 year old renter would probably be lumped in with millennials while a 51 year old with a kid in university would be called a boomer.
Not that I agree with it.
> The birth year cutoff for millenial has crept increasingly downward, subsuming what I remember as GenY
The term "millennials" was coined before "Generation Y," and the initial definition was children born during or after 1982, which is more or less where it stands now (I've seen the definition of millennials get extended back to 1980, but rarely if ever into the 70's.) Generation X is actually the one that absorbed the originally defined Generation Y, which comprised children born from 1974-1980.
Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials#Terminology_and_et...
Likewise, baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. They are called boomers because they were born in the baby boom that occurred after WWII.
So a 51 year old is most definitely Gen X and not a Boomer. No matter what. Kids born in the mid-70's (50+) are quite outside by more than a decade of the baby boom period.
Source: My parents are definitely boomers, and I am definitely GenX. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to learn what the X meant. It was significant in the same way "boomer" was. Anyone trying to change or extend the meanings needs a history lesson.
Baby Boomers, GenX and Millenials all have meanings of significance to their titles, whereas Y, Z and the super weird "alpha" are just keeping up a pattern that loses the meanings of the other generations that got meaningful names.
At one point the distinction between Gen X and Gen Y was defined as which side of the end of WW2 one's parents were born on (within reason) which would make Gen Y children of boomers, and Gen X not children of boomers.
My 6th grade teacher (in the early 80's) asked our class once which of us thought that the world would end in nuclear armageddon, and all of us raised our hands. I mention this as it's likely a baseline for how Gen X'ers view the state of the world.
Boomers screwed us.
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