Talk:Generation X/Archive 1

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

DO NOT EDIT OR POST REPLIES TO THIS PAGE. THIS PAGE IS AN ARCHIVE.

This archive page covers approximately the dates between 22 October 2001 (page creation) and 17 November 2005.

Post replies to the main talk page, copying the section you are replying to if necessary. (See Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page.)

Please add new archivals to Talk:Generation_X. Thank you. ManekiNeko | Talk 23:20, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

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Contents 1 Gen X into the early 1980s? 2 Coupland's Generation X and shorter generations 3 What are Gen X attitudes? 4 Comment about Talk discussions 5 Boomer's perspective 6 Gen X not slackers? 7 Generation between boomers and Gen X? 8 Article violating copyright? 9 Notes on generations and this article 10 General suggestions for the article 11 Questions 12 Is there any basis to generational theory? 13 Suggestion for cultural "touchstones" 14 Classic Quote from article 15 Major Date Problem 16 Article is too America-centric 17 List of generation xers 18 List of Cultural Achievements 19 This Is A Useless Debate 20 Second paragraph 21 Cultural Aspects of Generation X 22 What to do? Make it a collage. 23 "Mystery" Generations 24 Generation box 25 Outlook not so good 26 This isn't rocket science... 27 Too much POV, too little research 28 I Hate GenX 29 Another Xer 30 Generation X ran from 1965 - 85, dates in this article are incorrect 31 A massive talk page, full of personal rants 32 A bit of data 33 My definition 34 Definition of a generation 35 Confessions of a Gen X'er 36 Ask people born in 1981. 37 Some more food for thought from a less US-centric view 37.1 Agreed, Gen X are the Children of the Boomers 37.2 lets start a new generation 37.3 "Lost Generation?" 38 Why this discussion exists:

Gen X into the early 1980s?

I was born in 1981. I know I am X gen because of the marketing targeted at me, & my generation. I feel it was a form of warfare. It still goes on today. It is done by all, the baby boomers, those before, & those after. Away from marketing, I'll continue with, anyone who was in their teens upon the new millennium, is certainly, X gen. Me, I don't care. Why do we label? I've had this debate with my father who claims he is a boomer, & loosely, he is. 1981 was a birth of a new age, if you look at what occured in 81 you'd recognize this group as gen X. Currently, the population of renegades is difficult to tabulate, but you'll find a percentage of this group hails from, 1981. - allan@alicairo.com

I was born in 1981, but as a graduate of the high school Class of 2000, and with my early immersion in technology, I consider myself at the beginning of Generation Y. I think the Class of 2000 is considered to be the first of the Y'ers. For the U.S. at least, I would use these guidelines: Those in Generation X were in school to see the Challenger explode. Those in Generation Y were not out of school (including college) and on their own when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. There might be some overlap, but not much.

In other words, I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of Generation X.

I was also born in 1981, and in most articles I have read in the past, I have been classified as Generation X (the very end of it, but still in GenX). I listened to a black Michael Jackson on records, had a childhood before the overabundance of (pointless) toys --- just look at what GenY grew/grow up with --- and watched The Simpsons through late Primary School and High School --- Bart and Lisa once even refer to themselves as GenX (not that The Simpsons have ever been a reliable source of information). When I look at Generation Y today, I do not understand them at all, and frankly they annoy the heck out of me. They listen to crazy music, enjoy wierd movies, and have no fashion sense. I am familiar with technology --- heck, I work in IT! --- but I do not understand why GenY use Instant Messaging to chat with a friend who lives 5 minutes down the road!

The trouble with a thing like this, however, is that the Generations are not clearly defined: there is no official body who say `Generation X was 19xx-19xx': it probably comes down to more of a `feel' than anything else. It is who you feel you best relate to. Anything I have ever read about Generation X tends to move the start and end around a few years: it is only really the middle part that is indisputable. Elric of Grans 22:53, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Gen Xer here:

To me everyone is going to have an opinion on this subject so here is mine people born from 1964 to 1981 are Gen Xers. Gen Y starts in 1982. It just seems logical to me. I was born in 1977 and I definitely consider myself a Gen Xer because all my teen years were spent in the early and mid nineties when grunge and alternative music ruled the music scene. When I started high school people were still listening to Winger and Warrant. By my second year everybody had flannel shirts and ripped jeans and were listening to Pearl Jam and gangster rap and in some i dont know what you want to call it but i will call it conservative gen xers want to call people born 76 77 78 79 almost gen y because alot of the pop icon of today were born than is hog wash look at gwen stefani born in 1969 and is a huge pop star that all the gen y kids look up to i think alot of the older gen xers aka peopel born in the mid to late 60's want to make the generation more exclusive and they frown on anyone being born in the 80"s a gen xer .if you were gonna snip a couple of years off the gen i would not snip 80 or 81 i would snip 64 and 65.

If the Generation X is born between 1967-1979, what am I born in 1981? Generation Triple X?

Think about it...

Isn't 1967-1979 Generation X?

Coupland's Generation X and shorter generations

Ten Years ago Douglas Coupland declared "X is dead", but apparently nobody was paying attention. In "Generation X", Coupland was specifically talking about the post-peak baby boomers, also known as Trailing Edge Boomers. Marketing and media throughout the early 90's later attached the name to the group following the back end of the baby boom, the baby busters.

"Generation X" is a social satire based in part on the intergenerational conflict of the 1958-1964 group with pre-boomers (who drive nice cars and have lots of cash), older boomers (who took all the best jobs and left behind only "McJobs") and the first half of baby busters (he labels Global Teens) who have different traits altogether (and with their non-formally educated technology savvy, got ridiculously high paying jobs that we all heard about and got sick over). None of these cohorts are long enough to constitute a "generation" because in the modern world, change is lightning quick (hence...accelerated culture).

It seems pointless to consider 22-year generations at all for anything following pre-boomers because the first and last year will have little if any shared life experiences in common. Following demographics and considering birth cohorts (like back-end boomers or baby busters) is pobably much more meaningfull. The main thing to consider is that terms like "Gen-X" are just a description of someone who wears Doc Martens and listens to grunge music ... and can be applied to someone born in 1958, 1970 or 1981.

What are Gen X attitudes?

We know what is going on today with young people because we experience it, see it on the street and at the raves and on TV. And we can read alot about what happened with young people in the sixties or seventies. The Gen-X Wiki article only seems to say that Gen-Xers are anti idealistic and then talks about some of the social influences and events during their childhoods. But it does not say anything much about attitudes common among them about race, environment, poverty, war and such. Are those only topics that "idealists" think about (so, therefore, GenXers don't care about them at all)? Its almost like the article is style instead of information. But thats not what an encyclopedia is supposed to offer.

Comment about Talk discussions

None of the above is really productive towards the work on this article, so I don't see why it was added. It's all POV and not actual info on the generation; there's plenty of Gen Xers who don't share this person's opinions. In fact, most of it sounds like conservative opinions, which are not shared by those of us Gen Xers who are liberals. -- LGagnon

Unfortunately this page has been edited so much since you posted this that it is completely unclear which comment you are replying to. While cleaning up this page, I left it in place. ManekiNeko | Talk 23:20, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Boomer's perspective

As a boomer ('53), I feel fortunate to have raised my college-aged kids to conform to neither boomer nor Gen-X ideals - respecting the values of those who came before them, conscious of the ideals which mobilized a generation before their time, educated yet unpretentious, not needing material things to be happy, loving even those who hate them, appreciating classical, blues, jazz, be-bop, hip-hop, classical rock, country, and all the rest, sure enough of themselves and eager enough to contribute to society that they have no time to find fault with or poke fun at traditions and values whose time has passed, but whose lessons live on. AyeSpy

"My child the emperor" - didn't Steinbeck call this a disease and name it paedosis?

Also an early GenXer ('69), but raised by a Dad and Grandparents who still remembered the Depression and WW2 and taught me values gleaned from those occurrences. My GenX friends call me a BoomXer. Why are stuck on these labels? --Invictus

Gen X not slackers?

(moved from the non-talk page): Some have also suggested, though with questionable basis, that the Generation Xers are more like the World War II generation that preceeded the baby boomers. The WWII generation was one of confidence in the value of tradition and strongly-held cultural mores, which seldom questioned whether their society was on the right path. The formula rebellion of stereotypical Gen-Xers is anathema to such thinking.

I'm 1966 myself. It's interesting to note that while the original meaning of "Generation X" had to do with being a "slacker" or something like that, later research showed that Generation X was a highly motivated and entrpreneurial generation. I remember reading Coupland's initial descriptions and the subsequent media love affair with the term and being puzzled because it seemed so remote from my life or the lives of my friends.

I personally think that there is a good reason to doubt the validity of assuming a consistency among people born in a particular time period, except perhaps with regard to some fairly superficial pop culture stuff. I had a Six Million Dollar man action figure. So what? :-) --Jimbo Wales

Generation between boomers and Gen X?

It is said that Generation X follows the Baby Boomer generation, however I think that there must have been an intervening generation, too early to be GenX, but too late to be Baby Boomers. The "lost tribe of the seventies?" I wouldn't know how to characterize them. They'd have experienced Disco, ABBA, the 8-track tape, Watergate, and the Energy Crisis.

Here is how I come to this conclusion. A generation of time is a 30 year period, however when speaking of a generation as a collection of people, I think we refer to a people born in a 15 year window. For example, GenX'ers are born in, roughly, the 1967-1982 time frame, and GenY in 1983-1998 period. The Baby Boom would have been in 1937-1952, and this mystery generation in 1953-1966.

What do you think? Is this mystery generation just Baby Boomers in disguise? Or were they proto-GenX'ers? Or do they deserve a generation name of their own? Is 15 years between definable generations right, or is it better to stick to 30 year intervals? -- BryceHarrington

Calm down everyone! The End of Eternity memorably satirises generational chauvinism by drawing together people from different centuries in a parallel world outside time. A character from an future ice age inveighs against his home-when being described as underpopulated instead of sensibly populated.

I have some sympathy with the contributor above born in 1953 as that year has always seemed to me to be a cusp between early boomers and late boomers. Tony Blair was born that year which may account for some of his appeal. In my experience, those born too late to be boomers but too early to be Gen-X are usually called the yuppie generation. They are people who grew up during the 1970s. Since the 1960s lasted until the fall of Saigon (May 1, 1975) and the 1980s began with the election of Margaret Thatcher (May 4, 1979) we are rather a small cohort :-) -- Alan Peakall 17:25 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)

Personally, whilst the Baby Boomers really were a quite recognisable group because of the population bump, without such a demographic phenomenon subsequent "generations" really are hard to differentiate. As somebody born in 1976, what am I? Am I a "cynical Gen-Xer"? A net-obsessed, label crazy Gen-Y? Both? Neither? --Robert Merkel

Robert, consider yourself lucky to not have had rehashed 1960s hippie and 1970s disco culture assault you during your formative years.

The length of a generation is more like 22 years, 1976 is definitely within the birth years of Generation X, and there is no intervening generation between the Boom and X. -- Gpietsch 15:16 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

Article violating copyright?

I know I've read this somewhere before; I recognize the style as William Strauss and Neil Howe but I can't pinpoint which of their books it came from. This is almost assurredly a copyright violation though. If it's not a word-for-word copy of one of their book chapters, it takes very large portions of it verbatim. Dave Farquhar

Notes on generations and this article

A few notes that mostly apply to all of the "generation" articles:

• The person above who said only Baby Boomers are part of a clearly defined generation is correct. Is there any rational and logical argument that other generations described as such are anything more people born between randomly chosen years?
• Do they apply only to the US? If so, it should be made explicit in the first sentence.
• Grunge music became popular in the early 1990s. The oldest Xers were 25 in 1990. While Cobain and Eddie Vedder et al may have been living up to the description of Generation X before that, the vast majority of Xers grew up listening to Def Leppard, A Flock of Seagulls and Guns n Roses. Does this description apply to black people? If so, I suppose the black equivalent of Nevermind is The Chronic or Straight Outta Compton? It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back? The Great Adventures of Slick Rick? These are fundamentally different from the ethos of grunge music. None of the 80s or early 90s hip hop artists condemned, explicitly or implicitly, 1960s radicalism. Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash et al were actually pretty activist, and then gangsta rap popped up with the earliest examples of bling-bling -- very different from grunge's anti-fashion. What about women? Tori Amos and Tracy Chapman are Xers, right? None of this really makes much sense. In country music, Garth Brooks, Dwight Yoakam and Clint Black rose to prominence -- once again, absurdly different from grunge.
• The paragraph beginning "other people born" is ridiculous. The fact that there is no Generation X identity is used as support for there being a Generation X identity? The very problem central to Generation X is that the years chosen are entirely random. I was born in 1981, but stayed in kindergarten for two years -- hence, almost all of my high school friends were born in 1982 and are not Xers. This would come as a great shock to them, I imagine. Yet people who graduated from high school in 1983 and were probably listening to Quiet Riot are part of Generation X? The people that bought "We Are the World" are Generation X?
• Where does the list of cultural endowments come from? If I had to come up with a list of cultural endowments made by Americans born from 65 to 81, it would have been totally different. "Planet Rock", Appetite for Destruction, The Breakfast Club (maybe, how old is Hughes? The actors were the right ages, but does that count? Ally Sheedy's character is Xer, and maybe Bender but three out of five seem totally out-of-place, as does Sheedy's ending conversion -- does it count?)
• I do think Generation X needs an article because it is a real term, but it should be contextualized as a fictional construct unless someone can point out something that Xers actually have in common (and please, not a lack of having anything in common). Do people born from 65 to 81 have any similarities? The article implies that they do, but concrete examples are few and far between. The following characteristics are given:
  • A rejection of 60s idealism and activism -- doesn't apply to old school hip hop, Pearl Jam, female singer-songwriters or the honky tonk revival
  • A rejection of consumerism -- most Xers grew up during the late seventies and eighties, hardly a time when consumerism was on the wane.
  • The they fantasize sentence about Baby Boomers and sex -- has no meaning that I can discern
  • What the hell is a generational core, and why am I looking for one? Or does that only apply to immigrant Xers? Or am I not really an Xer because I identify with people born in 82, making me a member of whatever fictionally constructed generation comes next?
  • Generation X survived a hurried childhood of divorce, latchkeys, open classrooms, devil-child movies, and a shift from G to R ratings. -- at the very least, some facts would be nice, about the rate of divorce, latchkey kids... Once again, however, this is purely arbitrary -- why not spotlight cocaine use, increased attempts at censorship of music, sex ed, the rise of obesity and Brat Pack movies?
  • The Reality Bites reference in the last sentence is ludicrous and pointless. I haven't seen the movie, don't know what it means and don't really care. In any case, that came out some years after Xers hit adulthood. Does it still count?
• I could write just as accurate a description as this article, and make it seem true and such, about people born from 1974 to 1986 or any other pair of randomly chosen years.
• The generations previous to the Boomers are even more fictional in my mind than this one, but the same basic ideas apply. Silent Generation: Dick Cheney and John Erlichman "fell under the trance of their free-spirited next-juniors, the Boomers"? People born 1925 to 1942 were civil rights activists, huh? All? Most? Proof? Missionary Generation: Harding and FDR are part of the same generation? I'm no presidential historian, but that seems strange.

Reading over my comments, they seems confusing and meandering, with little information. But then, so does the article in question. Tuf-Kat

General suggestions for the article

How about the movie Fight Club? It seems to speak to the GenX description, if the description has any value that is. Chuck Palahniuk 1961, Jim Uhls 1961, David Fincher 1962, Brad Pitt 1963, Helena Bonham Carter 1966, Edward Norton 1969, The dust brothers 1970/1971.

Fussell, Strauss and Howe base the dates on math rather than culture. Anyone alive during the JFK assassination should not be listed as a gen-xer. The baby boom ended in 1964, so gen-x started in 1964. Kingturtle 21:57 16 May 2003 (UTC)

Could someone please de-Strauss and Howe this entry and also set Generation X in the global context where it belongs to -- it surely isn't an USA-only phenomenon. -- till we *) 20:52 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Can we move Alanis and Shania into celebrities list? What's all this with keeping Canadians out of the main list? Wiwaxia 22:01, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Britney Spears a Gen-Xer? I think not - surely, Britney doesn't have that Gen-X style - not grungy enough, eh? Dzof 8 November 2003

Well, at least it would work for Luke Helder, Dylan Klebold, Amy Lee or some other 1981 celebrities. Of course, Reese Witherspoon doesn't seem to fit the Gen-X mold either, and she was born in 1975. On the other hand, Avril Lavigne is more plausible a fit than Britney and she was born in 1984. The whole 1961-1981 range is stupid -- the reason they built the list on these dates and left out everyone born 1982 and later is that the person who started this article based it on Strauss and Howe, who use 1961-1981 as the boundaries for their "Thirteenth Generation", roughly equivalent to Generation X. A "Generation Y" that includes people born in the eighties and in the late seventies would work better for these people. Wiwaxia 19:09, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Questions

Can I have a question here...

• Who(are there any real job?) divide people in generation(by the year they were born)?
• Why generation X ends in 1977?
• And to which Cultural Endowments "American Pie" movie is in?

Roscoe_X

I've always heard that "Generation X" referred to the tenth generation of people born in the United States. I've not read any of the early uses of it, though -- can anybody confirm this, or is this just a retcon?

Is there any basis to generational theory?

Am I alone in thinking that this whole concept is just lazy-minded, posturing tripe? The first and most obvious thing that struck me when reading this article was that "Generation X" can not be said to exist on any even vaguely scientific grounds. The idea that all the people in the world born between two (quite arbitrary) dates share universal, very specific traits should only be dealt with in an encyclopedia like this as the crank theory that it most blatantly is. How is it that when all the Aboriginal tribespeople, American McDonnalds cashiers, Icelandic fishermen, Somalian prostitutes, Siberian sheep farmers, English aristocrats, Peruvian cattle dealers, and hundreds of millions more born within a certain time period are tossed wholesale by a complacent American journalist into a non-existent pigeonhole for the sake of a soundbite, anyone outside his profession takes him at all seriously?

This article comes from totally the wrong angle - the phenomenon is a media creation and nothing more. The huge flaw of the article is that it takes the concept far too seriously - if “Generation X” (which means nothing without the inverted commas) merits discussion at all, it should only be in terms of where the phrase come from, who thought it up, why they thought it up, who used it, who identified themselves with it, what effect the existence of such a concept may or may not have had on certain specific cultural groups, etc., always citing sources.

The article is full of patently subjective, un-researched, ill-conceived items of nonsense posing as fact. These three quotes (I could have used many more) can only be applied to individuals, not cultural groups:

- "A fashion for grunge music exemplified by the band Nirvana expressed the frustrations of a generation forever doomed to live in the shadow of its elders."

- "Generation X has survived a hurried childhood of divorce, latchkeys, space shuttle explosions"

- "As young adults... they date and marry cautiously"

This leaves me suspecting that the writer is writing about himself or about his immediate circle of friends, and projecting these very personal issues onto a vast and complicated world he’s never seen. The following is also nonsense:

- "In Europe, the generation is often known as Generation E, or simply known as the Nineties Generation... In France, the term Génération Bof is in use, with "bof" being a French word for "Whatever", the defining Gen-X saying. In Iran, they are called the Burnt Generation."

These phrases are not widely used in any of the places mentioned. If they have been used at all, it should be stated by who and when, and demonstrated that this is more than just their way of refering to the US media phenomenon under discussion (as apposed to a cultural phenomenon identified with by those populations as a whole). Further nonsense:

- Assuming generations have a 22-year average length, this means Generation X's children will be born from 1982 to 2004. Its typical grandchildren will be born from 2005 to about 2027. (What is meant by typical is that a generation's grandchildren will be born at a bell-curve rate and those years are the top of the bell curve.)

This a plain error (I'm often suspicious of people who throw the term "bell curve" around) - human fertility as a timeline does not follow a normal distribution, and even if it did, a span of twelve years could not be said to form the "top of the curve".

All in all, this article needs a thorough working-over. But probably a demolition team will do a more satisfying job than a cosmetologist. User:Palefire 21/9/04

Suggestion for cultural "touchstones"

Some cutural 'touchstones' rather than disputed dates might give a better feel to the article. Old enough to see Star Wars in the cinema. Grew up with the cold war. There must be more too. Roo, 25/8/05

Classic Quote from article

They [GenXers] fantasize about how the 1960s and 1970s supposedly offered Boomers easy sex without consequence while resenting the lasting damage done by an era in which they now realize they were the babies adults were trying so much not to have."

LOL - yeah, the lasting damage of birth control on an entire generation is terrible. Who writes this stuff?

Major Date Problem

If the earliest date ascribed to the beginning of Generation X is 1961, and we assume a generation length of 22 years, that places the end of Generation X in 1983, not 1981. If Gen X began in 1965, that puts the end of Gen X in at 1987. So assuming a 22-year generation means that anyone born between '83 and '87 could still be considered Generation X. Assuming a 20-year generation places this between '81 and '85. 'Generation Y' is said to begin (rather ambiguously) in "the 80's".

Now I take extreme exception to this. I was born in 1983 and am a very proud member of Generation X, and you'll notice there is far less of a cultural generation gap between those born in the early 80's and those born in the late 70's than there is between those born in the early 80's and those born in the late 80's.

I truly doubt there's many who were born in the 1980's who wouldn't be insulted by the label 'Generation Y' or 'Millennial'. '65 through '85 is a good date-range for Generation X, '61 through '83 slightly less so considering few would characterize people born in the early sixties as 'Generation X', but still acceptable as a compromise. Classifying those born prior to 1985 as 'Generation Y' is a denegrading insult to millions of Generation Xers born between '81 and '84. --Corvun 06:53, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, I was born in 1983 and I've NEVER EVER felt like I was Generation X. I specifically remember when I was in junior high, 7th or 8th grade, hearing the term and not liking it, what it stood for, and being annoyed because I knew that it didn't describe me or my friends. Again, in high school, I would hear Generation X and think, "aren't those people in their 30s now?" while I listened to my NSync c.d.s. lol. In addition, it wasn't because of a technological divide-- computers, the internet, and cell phones had nothing to do with why I never felt Generation X. It just seemed and still does to be so over and old-and I'm sure people born in 2004 will think the same of Generation Y (btw the name sucks) considering I'm 20 years older then them--I guess they'll be Generation Z. lol. So just because YOU are a very proud member of generation X, does not mean the vast majority of us are. I think the well-documented end date of 1981 proves this.

I was born 1978 and don't feel like I'm part of any generation. The world that existed when Generation X was still teenagers didn't exist anymore by the time I was a teenager. In fact, it was hard core stricter. I talked to many real Xers (Mid 60-Mid 70s) and they confessed that things were already different in my time. Why is it that people born in the late 70s are automatically Xer's? Late 70s and early 80s people are more similar than early 70s and late 70s. August 17, 2005

People choose what generation they identify with most, that they want to be in. If you are born in 1962, you could say you belonged to Generation X because you can't remember Kennedy's assassination. Being born in 1980, I could ostensibly classify myself as a member of either generation X or Y. I can remember typewriters, and I listened to "grunge" music, which was popular around in the early nineties when I was an adolescent. I did not feel, nor can I remember my peers feeling, this animosity toward the baby boom generation. Two people feel strongly enough to post here to declare that they are part of either generation. At best, there is a grey area between one generation and the next (say, 1975-1985 in this case). The named generations are not useful other than to make stereotypes and divide people. There is no particular reason for 22 years, or any length of time for that matter; you can't make a clean cut between liberals and conservatives, and you can't make a clean divide betwene generations.

Article is too America-centric

Article keeps on making reference to the USA as if the Generation X syndrome didn't exist in other western countries. For example, "In their book Generations William Strauss and Neil Howe called this generation the "13th Generation" because the tag, like this generation, is a little Halloweenish, and it is the thirteenth to know the flag of the United States (counting back to the peers of Benjamin Franklin) and set its birth years at 1961 to 1981."

This kind of stuff only applies to one country. I'm a Generation Xer, and don't relate to that kind of thing at all.

List of generation xers

is quite long - would it be suitable for another article?

Are we going to list all of them?

List of Cultural Achievements

I suggest omitting the List of Cultural Achievements for the following reasons:

1. The existence of Generation X is questionable 2. The date-range is also debatable (e.g. 1945+ / teens in the 1965-1989). This means its difficult to know if any particular artist is a Generation Xer. 3. Whether to regard any particular item as a "cultural achievement" is POV.

---

I gotta agree with this. The whole list seems like and extremaly arbitrary pop culture list. It should be removed.

This Is A Useless Debate

Wow, it's so great to be born in 1963, and thus be automatically classified a baby boomer! I have great memories of participating in the whole "Summer Of Love" thing... when I was five. And oh, how that whole Vietnam War bugged me... it's a great thing it ended three years before I was old enough to get a drivers license.

I keenly remember the arguments I had with my brother who was born in 1965 and is thus a "Gen X-er:" "Turn down that Kiss/Rush/Black Sabbath crap! I'm trying to get my peace-and-love thing going with my Jefferson Airplane albums! And for God's sake, will someone please get me a hit of acid? I don't care if you think nine years old is too young to board the yellow submarine!"

"And impeach Nixon, whoever he is!"

Can we all just knock this crap off?

The "generational debate" was invented for one reason: To catagorize the buying population into "identifiable" classes to which trinket salesmen can market their crap. A few years back, some genius from a marketing group pigeonholed me at the mall and asked me to take a survey on a new modern rock station that had just hit the airwaves. The entire conversation went like this:

"We're looking to interview listeners between the ages of 18-33." "I just turned 34 last month." "Oh well, never mind."

Do yourself a favor and stop wasting any more brain cells on this debate. Like what you want to like, and reject as useless anything that doesn't suit you. And if anyone tries to tell you what your tastes ought to be based on what particular year or star sign you were born under, do yourself and mankind a favor and kick him in the shins.

Just make sure you're young enough to run away from the cops.

Second paragraph

The second paragraph in the article seems poorly done. Do we have any references for this? How did the classification become popular, and how do you know it is? Where do any of these years come from? A lot of this looks like random guesses as to what years count. And it's worse as the paragraph goes on, turning out to look like one guy's personal rant about how he doesn't count the youngins as being part of his generation. Let's get some references for this paragraph, or else it's totally useless. -- LGagnon 19:01, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Because of what is mentioned here and in the discussion below, I've decided that this article should have the neutrality dispute template added to it until these issues are resolved. -- LGagnon July 3, 2005 02:00 (UTC)

Cultural Aspects of Generation X

I would like to see further discussion on the cultural aspects of Generation X. Movies for example. One mentioned Fight Club. Are there other movies? One I have in mind is Trainspotting. What famous people, such as actors, athletes, inventors would place in Generation X? There was mention of Grunge music. How about other musical styles? I was born in 1971; the sort of music I liked was synth pop and electronic. -- 63.98.134.150

It's kind of hard to say what definitely counts as Gen X and what doesn't. Do we count something made by a member of the generation, or do we count something that helps define the generation? Also, how do we reach these definitions? And again we have not given a definite definition for the generation itself; we haven't yet came up with a NPOV set of years that the generation was born in. Without that, who's to say what culture belongs to the generation? -- LGagnon July 3, 2005 01:55 (UTC)

I've always thought "Reality Bites" was the quintecential GenX movie. I guess "Singles" could be mentioned. Personally I thought that movie seemed more "Let's set the movie in Seattle and show some bands because that's cool now," but I'm sure there's a lot of people that liked that movie. 70.106.199.72

What to do? Make it a collage.

I guess the only thing that could be done with a page like this, is to make it a montage of perspectives, theories, and accepted facts. The page must be necessarily ambiguous. It would talk about different people's perceptions of what Gen X was about, what motivated it, what it was like, where it was going. I think this would be fair, and interesting to read.

"Mystery" Generations

For those who came of age in the time of a multi-billion-dollar telecommunication system, a generational debate is useless. The generational template and its timeframe are vague and subjective, and depending on your source of information (and there is no one definitive source), the qualifying date of birth for Generation X ends as LATE AS 1984, and that for Generation Y begins as EARLY AS 1977. There is no definitive source because of the tonnage of information.

http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=neither_x_nor_y

Generation box

I have removed the years from the box at the bottom of this article, as they express a single POV of what the definite years are. I've noticed that similar boxes appear in other articles on generations; it might be best to remove the years from those as well, as they too express a single POV. -- LGagnon 23:19, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

Outlook not so good

The Outlook section is blatantly filled with POV (who says the whole generation is like that?), weasel terms, and unverified data. Even if we clear up the POV about dates, we'd still have to keep the warning because of the poorly worded text in that section. Of course, don't get me wrong, these problems aren't only in the Outlook section, but they are worst there. -- LGagnon 01:54, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

This isn't rocket science...

If the events that marked the lives of the Boomers affected you personally, you're a Boomer. If not, you're Gen-X. I was born in early 1963 but I don't remember Kennedy, Marilyn, the moon landings, or Vietnam. I only remember Watergate because the hearings pre-empted my cartoons after school. I am firmly and irreversibly Gen-X.

At the back end, if you were born in the mid-80's when the entire concept of child-rearing changed and the country became far more child-friendly, then you're a Millenial (I prefer the S&H term). Was there a 'Baby On Board' sign next to your legally mandated car safety seat? Did your folks get hints from T. Berry Brazleton? Did you watch Barney? Then you're Millenial.

While hard, fast years are convenient, what we're ultimately talking about is a sea change in how society views itself and it's children. Things like that don't happen on a schedule, they creep in gradually and only become clear years after they've happened.

I vote for Gen-X = 1963-1985. NetSerfer 21:51, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Anyone born in 1985 is waaaay to late to be a Gen Xer. They would not have experienced the grunge era or were not entering (or already in) the job market during the disastrous recession of the early 1990s. I would say anyone born after 1981 is Generation Y as they do not feel society has let them down to the same degree as the average Gen Xer. In my view Generation X's birth years are 1964 thru 1980 or maybe 1981 but definitely no later. Anyone who has known computers and the internet for their entire life is definitely Gen Y and if you were born in 1982 or later this would be true. Also, most people I know born after about 1981 tend to identify far more strongly with "hip hop" culture where as most Xers have a natural distaste for rap. As for the beginning of Gen X, the "baby bust" began in earnest in 1964 and this is also the year that the earliest boomers would have begun having children. As for the Baby Boomers, there was no "boom" until at least 1942 so the boomers are 1942 or 1943-1963. People born earlier than 1942 are definitely members of the Silent Generation. By the time of the "Summer of Love" they could no longer be considered youths. Having said that there is always blending at the beginning and end of each generation so some born in 1963 may consider themselves Boomers, others Gen Xers, depending on when they were most socially and culturally active and aware. Was it when they were in their late teens or was it when they were in their mid 20s? Do they relate to the Disco era or the glam rock/grunge era? The core of Generation X I would say is birth years 1967-1977 as people born in these years will overwhelmingly identify themselves as members of GenX. Of course when you're speaking of a 20 year time frame naturally there are bound to be differences between the earliest and latest members of any generation but the attitudes and experiences are somewhat similar. So yes, a 1948 is an early boomer and a 1958 a late boomer, but both are boomers nonetheless. Myself, I'm a '69, so as a core Gen Xer I relate very much to the characteristics that are often ascribed to our generation. I also feel a certain affinity to the so called "Lost Generation"; those who were born roughly in the 1880s and 1890s. Like us, they tended to be overshadowed by both the generations before and after them. I think our contribution to society will be to ensure that the Boomers (who I see as one of the most reactionary and dogmatic generations in history) don't get too carried away with their regressive social and economic reforms. -- 142.161.179.71

I thought that our conclusions had generally decided that it is absolutely impossible to define a cultural generation in tight years as seems to be the obsession here. For our puproses X refers to many people born in the 60s and 70s, leave it at that. Much more important than the exact year or month of birth are other factors such as social class, race, geographic location, education, etc... I do agree with the post below though, saying that for the article, we should quote sources, and not just argue about the people we happen to know, and whether or not they enjoyed the Sex Pistols. Peregrine981 11:57, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

That's perhaps your conclusion, but the reality is there do exist different generations with similar characteristics on a very general level. Of course social class, education, etc. are important as well. Certainly no one is suggesting that everyone born between certain dates is exactly the same. And you're quite right, the start and end dates of any "generation" are somewhat grey. Also, as this is a somewhat esoteric topic, sources will be difficult to obtain; and of course their viewpoint will be as equally subjective as anyone's written above. Don't always look for someone else to back up your argument; state your case and then back it up yourself. Christopher Columbus did not rely on "sources". --209.115.235.79 18:23, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Why are we using an ancient explorer as an example for writing an (potentally) academic work written in the present? Anyone who thinks using sources doesn't help make your writing more reliable doesn't know the first thing about writing non-fiction. And besides, references are needed for articles if they plan on becoming featured articles (which all articles shouls strive for if possible). -- LGagnon 21:56, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

There is no suggestion that failing to use sources makes writing more or as reliable. But what sources do you expect to find on such a topic? It's like using sources to write a critique or a review of a novel. The opinions expressed by the "sources" will be equally as subjective as your own. With respect to this article I see them as valuable but not entirely necessary. Also, Columbus was not an "ancient" explorer, but a Renaissance one. The example was one of many that could have been used. The point is, one can make an argument (and perhaps be proved right in the end) without relying exclusively on other sources, or the accepted opinions of the day. To believe otherwise would make one simply a slave to dogma. And one who can't spell "potentially" or "should" doesn't know the first thing about writing, period. --209.115.235.79 08:48, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Sources make an article better because they improve the reliability of the article (as we know you aren't just making things up) and because many sources are written by someone with expertise (something that many Wikipedia editors lack). If you've ever taken a higher-than-101 level writing course in college (as I have), you'd learn about the concept of exigence, in that sources make your work much more credible. In fact, outside of original research, non-fiction works tend to be untrustworthy if they can't name at least a few sources for the "facts" they cite. And even if the sources are subjective, they at least show where you are getting your info from; that way, if you are using a bad source the reader can determine this by checking it (plus other editors can change false info easier if they know it came from an uncredible source). As for your "slave to dogma" argument, we are not here to push one opinion nor are we here to publish original research; thus, unless you can find sources to back your opinion (you probably can; look a bit harder for them), you shouldn't waste our time adding it just for the sake of rebeling against Wikipedia's rules (that is, the NPOV and no original research rules). And as for the Columbus and mispellings comments (the latter being rather immature of you), I recommend looking up "hyperbole" and "typo" in a dictionary; you don't seem to understand what those are. -- LGagnon 22:39, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

One of the cardinal rules of writing is that all work should should be proof read to check for errors (ie. "typos") in spelling and grammar. When one reads a piece of written work riddled with errors, whether argument or prose, the incredibility of the author is enhanced. As a dogmatic individual, you should be well aware of this. Furthermore, this is a discussion page, not part of the main article. Sources are valuable, as always, but not entirely necessary for these purposes. Certainly the main article should quote sources, if available, whenever a fact or opinion is expressed to enhance credibility. With respect to this page, I would never support quashing any individual's right to expressing his or her opinion simply because they were unable to quote "reliable", or indeed any, sources. All opinions merit interest, whether for debate or simply for dismissal. I am very pleased for you that you have completed a college writing course. Could I ask what purpose you had in mentioning this? Do you believe this will bolster your own credibility? Rather shallow, indeed. --206.45.166.115 08:16, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

If a piece of work has numerous typos, then yes, it may lack credibility (that word, by the way, does not start with the letters IN). However, a few typos are really harmless, and do show up from time to time in professionally written works. Either way, they are minor mistakes, and not nearly as bad as not citing sources. And I think you miss my point on what sources are needed for. I have been arguing, over and over again, that the article, not the talk page, is lacking sources. This is a very serious problem for the article, as much of what it will be based around is certain points of view on the subject. However, rather than try to improve the article by coming up with more sources, people have been using this talk page as a soapbox to give their opinion on Gen X. This would be ok if it helped improve the article, but it doesn't if it contains nothing we can use - which is the case with almost all of them. The point of these talk pages is not to turn them into message boards about the subject, and yet that is exactly what this talk page is becoming. And as for the college bit, I mentioned that because you seem to be ignoring a rather basic concept of professional-level non-fiction writing, and because chances are you wouldn't have been taught about exigence outside of college (although you should have picked that concept up by now). -- LGagnon 21:34, August 30, 2005 (UTC)

Read the phrase as above:"incredibility is enhanced"; Yes, the word does start with the words "IN". Something that is not to be believed is incredible not uncredible. If you believe you are a professional level writer with your numerous "typos" and grammatical errors I hate to think of the state of the writing profession, at least in your locale. As to the rest of your patronising (correct spelling) banter, I will simply make use of the classic Generation X expression........."Whatever". I have undertaken a great deal more formal education than a college writing course, but I feel little need to detail that here. I need not boast of my accomplishments to enhance my own credibility in argument. I suppose you are one of those people who if you earned a Ph.D., you would insist on being called "Doctor". --209.115.235.79 00:49, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

I don't see the point of using "incredibility" instead of "credibility"; it sounds like you are trying (poorly) to cover your tracks with a rather unintelligible rationalization (yes, there's a Z there; it's called American English, and it's not wrong, it's just different from the British form). And it's just laughable that you define numerous as "two". I'm not going to bother commenting on the rest of your immature, snobbish buffoonery; college education or not, you haven't proven it in the childish way you act (and especially not in the way you put the trivial before the critical). -- LGagnon 02:17, August 31, 2005 (UTC)

Potentally = Potentially, Shouls = Should, Rebeling = Rebelling, Uncredible = Incredible. That makes four by my count. Given the limited amount of comment involved, four is certainly numerous! Yes indeed, quite laughable! You count about as good as you write! With that type of primary school writing ability I'd say that makes you the childish one! Of course the trivial is more important than the critical.....did you not follow the 2000 and 2004 presidential election campaigns? --207.161.32.237 07:31, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

All you are doing now is trolling. You're adding nothing to the discussion and merely attacking me on the basis of typos (and you're still using the word "incredible" wrongly). If you have nothing constructive to say, I suggest you quit arguing. -- LGagnon 01:03, September 2, 2005 (UTC)

Go fuck yourself you anal-retentive bastard. If you weren't so stupid you'd realise that incredible is used correctly in the context above. I think you'd better enroll yourself back in one of your second rate colleges and retake your primary level writing course. Learn how to spell, and type! I'll write whatever I bloody well please and I won't let a fascist dogmatic asshole like yourself tell me otherwise!

Too much POV, too little research

Rather than argue about what we think, could we actually come up with some citable sources? We aren't going to resolve anything by sitting here and constantly saying "I think Gen X is this or that". There should be reference material out there that clears things up better than arguing over our own opinions will. We're not here to do original research, after all. -- LGagnon 12:24, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

---

But it is even POV with citable sources. Who carries the most weight? Coupland originally defined "Generation X" as tail end Baby Boomers; 1958 to 1966 in Canada, 1964 in the US. His criteria was:

• too young to march for peace (Viet Nam war protests ended in 1973; typical protestors 16-24 making youngest born in 1957)
• don't remember/weren't born yet when JFK was shot in 1963 (long-term memory difficult before age of 5; youngest to recollect born in 1957)

Even Statistics Canada (US Census Bureau equivalent) define Generation X as "back end Baby Boomers" (search "Generation X" http://www.statcan.ca and see 2001 Census result) as does Canadian economist/demographer David Foot. Strauss & Howe say 1961-1981 and Bruce Tulgan acknowledges "cusp" Xers, 1960-1964.

These are all credible sources and much research went into each one. However, basically each source either recognizes demographic or psychometric parameters. Then is it a question of which is a more accurate sociologic tool? Or, maybe it depends on what is being defined in terms of marketing, economics, etc.

My POV: birth rates can't be disputed. And there are actual biological and economic consequences to large (boom) or small (bust) peer groups. Otherwise, there will never be agreement with psychometric parameters. Although there may be some agreement with the "experts", there probably will never be precisely defined Gen X years based on psychometrics.

Douglas Coupland defined a group that exists in an accelerated culture. Too much rapid change exists today for continuity from first to last birth year with a 20 or 22 year generation (POV?). Coupland originally defined the 1958 to final boomer year, Canadian or American, as Xers. This is equivalent to post peak (1957) American Boomers, and the younger half of Canadian Boomers. He originally wrote about Generation X in 1987 (Vancouver Magazine article) and the characteristics are identical to what is attributed to those considered Xers today (seeming lack of ambition, economically disenfranchised, live w/parents, over-educated, etc); those born from the mid 60's throughout the 70's. He also said in 1995 ... Let X = X; I say let it. -- 4.239.147.191

I understand that each expert and/or citable source will give different years. My point is that instead of using the millions of different year sets that will inevitably be suggested by Wikipedia editors, let's just use those that have actually been said in a citable sources and show that there are different sets proposed. After all, Wikipedia is not the place for POV or original research. If it was, we'd never fix the problems with this article. -- LGagnon 23:48, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. Then, that would narrow it down to thousands of year sets by citable sources. But, the whole point is being completely overlooked. Wikipedia is not the place for POV or original research, but it should strive for accuracy.

This term being debated was specifically used in it's origin (notwithstanding Deverson & Hamblett which only got British acclaim in 1964) to describe those who could/should/would not be affiliated as a Baby Boomer, "Boomer-NOT" as Strauss & Howe said, back-end Boomers living in the shadow of their older peers even as they were told they were Boomers. The younger Boomers wanted to "X" themslves from the older group which they did not relate to. Then in the mid 90's forward, the term was corrupted to label another group of different year sets.

Today, people are completely unaware of the original connotation from 1987, later known internationally in 1991. Coupland painstakingly set up a foundation that somebody else later came along and built another house on. I think Wikipedia should read:

"Generation X - the group of back end Baby Boomers as defined by Douglas Coupland, 1958 to 1964 (in the US) 1966 (Canada). Other sources may claim a variety of other year sets using this term." Period. Let X = X. -- 4.239.147.191

And yet that supports only one POV, elevating it above all others. And it's not even the original definition. What we really need is to show various citable opinions on the year set and not put one above all others. -- LGagnon 21:38, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

I don't think Deverson & Hamblett and got the international acclaim Coupland did, only being limited to the British public. Most people today think of another demographic other than British youth born 1940-1951. The term Gen X, that involves certain universal stereotypes originally applied a specific sub-cohort post-peak Boomers (in the US), was later exploited by media and marketers and used to label a younger demographic (usually those born 1965-1976) that shared many characteristics in common. -- 4.239.147.58

You are arguing that we should place one POV over others. We are not going to make the article POV just because you have a problem with the media's view, academic views, or any view other than Coupland's. I'm a Coupland fan too, but that doesn't change the fact that we have a NPOV rule. On an unrelated note, I took the liberty of changing the non-standard format of replying (the lines and lack of signature) for you, as it makes this page less confusing to read; I hope that's not a problem. -- LGagnon 22:10, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

Referencing citable sources may have some validity. Then, where do the bracketing years of 1964 (the year I was born) - to 1979 or 1981 come from? What credible source stated "The starting point for Generation X should be 1964 because Eddie Vedder was born that year."? Was it Strauss, Yankelovich or Bruce Tulgan? I've only heard about it through Wikipedia, and possibly "NeXT generation" religious-based sources. I question where the author got that from, which is POV in the extreem, isn't it? And, it's one of the major points of the article.

There are other references we haven't added yet, you know. Given enough time, we should come up with more references with a wider variety of POVs. Then, we'll be better able to source these years. I wasn't saying that the references we have now are the only ones, after all; I was saying that we need more references, as this article isn't researched well enough. -- LGagnon 00:48, August 21, 2005 (UTC)

I Hate GenX

Can I please add I Hate GenX as an external link? It's a great site with a lot of information despite the title; I Hate Gen X -- Jpblo

No. It's way too POV, factually inaccurate, and doesn't cite references. And it's not even from a reputable source; it's a just someone's Geocities page. -- LGagnon 22:10, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

---

Really badly written page, with dangling participles.

Another Xer

I surfed here, and thought I might add a few random thoughts. I was born at the end of 1969. My teen years perfectly span the eighties. I was 10 in 1980 and 20 by 1990. So here's my perspective:

I think things should be standardized. A standard 15 years is used for the first 12 generations. If we are 13th Gen, then we should be an even 15 too. If Baby Boom is '46 to '60. Then GenX should be '61-'75. I think this makes a lot of sense.

A friend of mine had a really practical test - he always told me "Generation Xers were old enough to see Star Wars in the theater" (since it seems to be such a cultural touchstone for so many, I always thought that was an interesting litmus test).

I think Generation Y has appropriated, copied and generally mimicked Gen X so much that it can sometimes be hard to tell them apart, but there really is a difference between those that remember the Vietnam war on TV during the dinner hour, and those that were born during the Reagan 80s.

Just my opinion.

Having been born in 1963, I definitely would not consider myself to be a Baby Boomer. The experiences and attitudes are quite different. 1960 seems like a reasonable baby boom cutoff date - as the differences between someone born in 1958 and those born 1963 are much greater than those between those born in 1963 and those born in 1968.

Those at http://www.babybusters.org/debunk.htm seem to think people born from 1958 to 1968 have a lot in common. Check out the celebrities born in 1957 and compare with those born in 1958...

Generation X ran from 1965 - 85, dates in this article are incorrect

A generation is commonly regarded as twenty years (with the assumption that by that time, the initial members of the generation will come of age and start producing the next generation). The dates of Generation X ran from 1965 - 1985. The fact that a number of important Generation X figures (Kobain, Courney Love, etc.) were born in the early '60s does not mean that they themselves are Gen-X-ers, just as many key Baby Boom figures -- Bob Dylan (born 1941), the Beatles (born between 1940 - 43) -- are not themselves Baby Boomers. Markt3 - August 21, 2005

Again, we have no sources for this. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this article isn't going anywhere until we get more references. Heresay, personal opinions, and wild guesses are not going to improve this article. -- LGagnon 16:12, August 21, 2005 (UTC)

While the end dates of Gen X are more debatable, the beginning years cannot begin before 1965, as the Baby Boom has ALWAYS been defined as running from post World War II (1945) - 65 (or 64). From the US Census (http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2001/cb01-52.html): "The baby boom population is defined as those born between 1946 and 1964."

This is the US Census definition. If this is the case, then Gen X cannot be defined as beginning in 1961. The article already *is* extremely slanted, POV. It should, at the very least, be based on commonly acknowledged and accepted dates, not simply based on which generation certain parties associate themselves with, regardless of when they were born. Markt3 Auugust 21, 2005

Douglas Coupland's original definition of Generation X was equivalent to Trailing Edge Boomers, which the US Census Bureau does acknowledge. The term was later applied to the group born after the Baby Boom, the "Baby Bust", as the Census Bureau defines as those born from 1965-1976.

A decade or so back, the popular term was "The 'Wonder Years' Generation" (after the sitcom of that name), meaning people of this age group who, as small children, witnessed the tail end of the late 1960s/early 1970s activism and unrest (through parents, older siblings and on television), but were too young to have participated themselves. But it was always acknowledged that this was a subgroup of the Baby Boom generation itself.

I've heard that expression but unfortunately didn't catch many shows. "Tweeners" are an organization w/same viewpoint.

A massive talk page, full of personal rants

Last I looked, these talk pages on Wikipedia were meant for discussion of the article and for helping to facilitate the improvement of the article. And yet, what we have here is a ton of personal rants about personal experiences (what happened to the No original research rule?) and POV. What we don't have is what the article needs: more references and more reliable data. But despite that, nobody seems willing to provide anything of the sort. From what I can tell, this talk page is going to end up being an endless pile of useless info if it continues on the way it is right now.

I have requested that those who wish to resolve the POV problem in this article help out by poviding references and real, usable data. So far, no one seems willing to. I'm going to ask again for the 3rd time on this talk page already: please try to retain focus and add some citable references so we can have real usable data. -- LGagnon 23:10, August 22, 2005 (UTC)

A bit of data

(1) "Generation X" was popularized by Douglas Coupland in his book with the same name. Strauss and Howe published a book called "Generations." Both were published in 1991. The S&H book was based on their research, and calculated transitions by looking at trend reversals (e.g. drug usage, SAT scores) by cohort (extrapolated). S&H put the start of GenX at 1961. This was unpopular at the time of publication, as those who defined the Baby Boom (for marketing/planning reasons) did so by birthrate, and so put the end of the boom at 1964. S&H argue that as their placement of the year depended on cultural parameters rather than simply birthrate, their's was the more relevant for cultural discussion. (They also called GenX the 13th Generation.) This original book focused on the United States ONLY. It wasn't until later books that the authors expanded their theory.

Strauss and Howe are both Baby Boomers. The impetus of the book, according to the authors, was experience parenting a GenX child vs. a child of the generation after GenX.

(2) The point of a cultural generation is that it's one of many cultures that might influence someone. Quite possibly a person can be born in a certain year but not raised in that peer group and of course it would make a difference. Also s/he might belong to a subculture that has a stronger effect, whether racial, religious, or professional (artist, engineer...). The degree to which a local community is trend-setting, trend-following, or traditional (trend-resistant) will also affect the amplitude and timing of adoption of country-wide generational attributes. Further, one of the variables that changes from generation to generation is how conformist the generation is. GenX were raised in an environment that valued creative expression relative to Silents, who were raised in an environment that more highly valued conformity.

(3) Given those caveats, GenX's unique experiences include:

- Being legislated against. Property tax revolt led by Howard Jarvis hit the schools and communities. Reagan-era caps on student loans with simultaneous new restrictions in financial aid and the beginning of the volunteer army that paid for college http://www-tech.mit.edu/V105/N2/budget.02n.html made it difficult to go to afford school but seductive to join the military to solve that problem. Repeal of income averaging (helps new graduates get started in life... 1986), and taxing educational benefits (also 1986) made it difficult to start out once people were out of college and working. The 1991 recession's net job loss in the US was borne by GenX (I asked Howe about this one, and he said it was based on census data). Further, the 60's and 70's had many experimental curricula, leading to a concensus by employers that GenX's education was spotty.

In contrast, there was a Baby Boom in the first place because of the end of WW II and the resulting return to family life during an economic boom.

Also in contrast, the generation following GenX, sometimes called "Millenials," had the SAT renormed in 1995 as the first cohorts began testing for college; also tenure has fallen out of favor since roughly the early 1990's, allowing more merit-based teaching assignments.

- Womens' Rights changed the world. Kinsey's reports were the beginning but Masters_and_Johnson really flung the doors open in 1966. The Birth Control Pill launched the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, not only because of an atmosphere of novelty but also because women could pursue career paths if they could control pregnancy, whether married or not. Women moving into the workforce meant family structures and rhythms that were socially novel. Title IX finally prevented gender discrimination in school in 1972. All of these things completely changed the ways that families worked, and the change meant at atmosphere of uncertainty for the children, because no one had the answers.

- For many reasons, divorce rates skyrocked during the time GenX were children. Again, this was novel, and society didn't have mature processes in place. From http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/fam-div.html "(Divorce) jumped another 250% between 1960 and 1980. After peaking in 1981 and declining through the mid-eighties, the rate leveled off at about 4.7 divorces per 1,000 population in the late 1980s and early 1990s before again declining to 4.2 in 1998."

(4) Because of this social upheaval in schools, home, and the business world, one secondary attribute that is often Generation X in its youth had a high suicide rate, as well as anxiety and eating disorders; as the Generation has matures, it has found antidotes ranging from humor to religious participation. Many people in Generation X have developed the ability to "pick up the pieces." Another trait is a relatively high degree of comfort with ambiguity and change, and a high degree of resilience as well as an intuitive understanding of the importance of strong social systems and reciprocity.

Kitode

This information really would have done more of a service on the main page. S&H are credible sociologists, no one would disagree. But there are some real factors of cause and effect from large and small birth cohorts. David Foot demonstrated that with Canadian society. I don't think it's a valid argument that fertility rates have nothing to do with what might be called a generation. Economic hardships are one of the major forces that shaped the post-boomer cohorts. Foot's models show how post-peak Boomers were hit with massive unemployment and low wages within an economy that expanded enough to accomodate the growing working population, pre-peak Boomers. Post-peak Boomers were left with dwindling available jobs and tremendous peer competition, amongst themselves and the Boomers before them.

My definition

This is my definition of Generation X: Those who are born in the period of 1963-1978 in North America and Europe, 1965-1985 in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand and 1970-1987 in China.

In America and Europe, enough said. But in Asia-Pacific, this generation is living amongst prosperity and progress, suddenly when they step out in the working world they had the Asian Financial Crisis and the 9/11. In some cases, the rate of growth slowed. In other cases, this generation slugged it out and became successful eventually.

We are talking sociology here, it's quite impossible to get an exact date for an end of a generation and the start of another, for anything more than statistical purpose. I would say the Xers were the last to grow up and live before the digital age, the first to grow up and live in the "post-world" - the post-oil-crisis, post-suburban, post-industrial world. X witnessed transition and turmoil in everything, from economy and international politics to music and lifestyle. That would make 1965-1978 ok as pure statistical reference. This is valid for the West. In Eastern Europe, X could be 1965-1980, the generation to grow up under what one may call "bureaucratic communism", and ending up toppling the communist regimes. In the PRC, those born during Mao's cultural revolution could be called Xers. --Xanthar 19:54, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Definition of a generation

I disagree with the definition of Generation X because it violates the definition of a generation. According to Webster's Dictionary..... September 2005

This, like most other comments made here, is mere POV. It isn't helping to improve the article. And, might I add, the dictionary doesn't determine social constructs; people tend to define things without the use of a dictionary, after all. -- LGagnon 21:19, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

People have already used the late 70s as the beginning of the next generation, so it can't be part of Generation X. Here are some to name a few (google search on Generation Y): www.brandchannel.com/features_effect.asp?pf_id=136, www.trendsetters.com/demotrend/9001,1,Generation-Y.html, www.rcsa.com.au/events/conference2005/speakers.asp?ID=9, www.nurseweek.com/news/features/01-05/generations.html, honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/ committees/FacDevCom/activity/news1003.htm, www.dymocks.com.au/ContentDynamic/ Full_Details_smh.asp?ISBN=1740663179, www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/gendif/gendif.htm ==

Confessions of a Gen X'er

I question the influences of Douglas Coupland's book. This book was released in 1991, however, it never appeared on the New York Times best sellers list, nor the Los Angeles Times best seller list, or any other list of best selling books. Not in 1991, or any other year in the 1990s. So, my question is: How many books were sold, and who actually read this book in 1991 or 1992, or 1993..... It appears to me, that this book sat on some obscure bookself, until some advertisement executive dug it up, because they needed a catchy name to sell products.

Plus, starting in early 1990, the youth were already wearing baseball caps, jackets, sweaters, and t-shirts with the letter "X" engraved on it. A good example, look at Janet Jackson "Rythm Nation" video. She wears a black baseball cap, with the letter "X" engraved in the center. Also, you could see the letter "X" being infused heavily in fashion by looking at the music artist that came out during this time: Color Me Badd, Bobby Brown, New Kids on the Block, Mary J. Blige, Jon B., TLC, Snow, Vanilla Ice, Public Enemy and Boyz II Men, along with hundreds of others.

Therefore, these marketing execs blew the dust off of this book only for name value only; it had an "X" in its title. Furthermore, when you read this book (and I have) you'll find out that this book is crap!! Nothing in this book reflects this generation, other than the fact the we love gourment coffee (actually, I'm eager to try that new Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks!!!). Even throughout this article, every other paragraph list stereotypes from the book, and then disputes their validity. So, why is there a major push to give Coupland's book "Da Vinci Code" status. I would like someone, who has the wisdom of Solomon, to provide some facts (not opinions) of what exactly was so influencial about this novel. When, did it gain "holy grail" status, because it definitely didn't happen in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995.......

Also, I believe if you truly consider yourself a slacker, then you should express your "opinions" here!!, or here!!! 65.129.185.70 23:30, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

You do have a few legitimate things to say. While in college, I do remember seeing students wearing clothing with x's on them. But realize, alot of the people editing these articles are not from the first wave of Gen x'ers. So, their views are somewhat different from the first wave. But this happens in every generation, the first wave of boomers are vastly different than the second wave. So here are some facts. I was born in 1970, and i came into adulthood in the last 80's. A good indication of adulthood is the first year you were allowed to vote. For me it was 1988, at the age of 18. Afer the euphoria of the Reagan revolution, between 1989 to 1992 a major transitioning period happened for Americans X'ers (in music, fashion, television, politics, technology), and influences came from all directions. Primarily from music, because the first wave of X'ers witnessed the transtion from superficial bastardized pop music to more socially cautious music, with realistic lyrics and sound. Hip-hop/r&b went through a transition, and was a major influence in defining the mindset of the youth, primarily in the urban metropolitan areas. Rock music went through a transition as well, and was equally a major influencial in defining the mindset, primarily in suburban and rural areas. I don't see what influences Coupland's book had during this time (I believe little or non), it appears the first wave of Gen X'ers were influences by everything that happened before and during this transitional period (the good, the bad, and the ugly). The next wave of X'ers entering adulthood (begining in 1993) were probably more influenced by a different society, and the fact that the letter "X" was literally everywhere. So, Coupland book do have some influences, but probably more heavily with the second wave of X'ers. But, that's just my opinion! :)

Ask people born in 1981.

You won't find anyone born in 1981 or 1982 who thinks they're in Gen X. We're becoming young adults in the Internet age, not 80's and 90's.

These generation descriptions are social constructs. They need not follow set formulae as to how many years are in each. It's about people who had a shared experience growing up. For the Baby Boomers, it was the anti-war movement as young adults and the Greedy Eighties as adults. For Generation X, it was the 80's as teens and the 90's as adults. For my generation, it was the Internet era as teenagers, and who knows what as adults.

Coupland made the character of Tyler a Gen Xer, and he was only a teenager at the beginning of the 90s. Not every member of Gen X shares the same experiences, but then again not everyone born in the same year does either. There are definitely people born in 81 that can count as Gen X if they shared some of the same experiences in the 90s as the other Gen Xers. -- LGagnon 19:11, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Some more food for thought from a less US-centric view

Just some points about Gen X that are less US-centric and perhaps more global...

BTW "global" is a term somehow linked to Gen X.

I agree with the simple definition that the people that belong to Gen X are the children of the baby boomers, of the hippies, of the 68-ers (sessantottini in italian).

Not all the baby boomers were marching against the war in Vietnam, smoking spliffs, and bombing universities (in Europe), similarly not all GenX-ers were listening to Nevermind and watching Beavis and Butt-head on MTV.

I think it's important to keep in mind that couples in the US tend to get merried and have children earlier than in Europe. Couples in the States usually have their first child in their mid-20s, whereas in Europe in their very late 20s or early 30s. It's no surprise that Gen X is skewed fowards by a few years in Europe.

I agree that GenX is a lable that can be applied more to white than to black people.

Personally I think that GenX is defined in equal measure by what the people that belong to it have in common, but what their parents (the baby boomers) have in common.

GenX-ers do not necessarily rebel against their parents, they rebel against some aspects, embrace or admire others, and make up completely new stuff. Their parents (as for any new generation) don't understand them and don't know what to think about them.

For example they don't understand their political views.

Sometime GenX-ers do not have political views because they simply do not care. They have grown up in prosperity and they don't feel that making a political choice will significantly affect their future.

Sometimes GenX-ers have realised that making a political choice is much like choosing a brand of cornflakes over another. They make that choice without clamour, marches and demonstrations. GenX-ers often do not claim to BE democrat or repubblican (and in Europe liberal, christian-democratic, communist, socialis, lefty, or righty). GenX-ers often simply voted, this time, democrat or repubblican, they ARE none of them.

GenX-ers sometime did much of what their parents did, they become post-70ers, they wear their parent's old jeans and shirts, they smoke cannabis, and get involved with anti-global or environmentalist campaigns.

Their parents, who were hippies in the 70, now have white-collar jobs, have in part rinnegated their past, and are, again, confused: Should they tell their children not to smoke cannabis and not to have sex before marriage (or at least before being in a stable relationship)? They find themselves denying the freedoms that thay conquered 20 years before.

This eclectism and seamless mix of sometime contraddictory values leads me to think of GenX as a postmodern generation.

Another aspect that devides GenX-ers and the previous generation is the digital divide. Gen-Xers have grown up playing videogames and are at ease with technology. Perhaps for the 1st time in history the children teach their parents how to use email, mobile telephones, and the Web. Skills that their parents need in their work and daily life.

Other things that I consider associated with GenX are videgames, demential humour (like Beavis and Butt-head), and anime/manga culture.

These are really great ideas. You have really raised the intelligence level on this topic. However, I disagree with your statement ******I agree that GenX is a lable that can be applied more to white than to black people******. If this is really a "global" generation, why is there is comparison between black and white? What about people like me who are bi-racial, where do I fit in this mix? Plus, every black person I know loves the label "Gen X". Every white person I know loves being an X'ers as well. I guess what you wanted to say was, ******alot of the stereotypical "characteristic" the "media" has attached to GenX, applies more to whites than to black people******. I'll add, it doesn't apply to the majority of whites, blacks, hispanics, bi-racials, or even gay people. But, in this "global" generation, a "one dimensional" perspective is being written for the characteristic of this generation. You did a great job giving a "balanced" and "global" perspective on the "talk page", but the "article" is very "opinionated" and in is "one directional".

- White and black people: You could be right. Perhaps most GenX-ers take racial equality as a given and there are no big distinctions between the experiences of blacks and whites.

- Being bi-ratial does not determine if you belong or not to Gen X or not. What we are trying to find are the main social and cultural trends of the people who have grown up in a certain time period. Now that you bring this up, should we say that white GenX-ers have happily adopted black culture? Think of Hip-Hop and R&B, they have become mainstream in this period. Most of the music in the charts has black origins, although it is often by white artists, and it targets to both white and black audiences.

- (un-)balanced views: Sure, I am not trying to be all-encompassing and objective. I am just raising a few points that I think are worth to be considered.

- One more point: Another thing that popped into my mind today is that in Europe the Socrates/Erasmus programme has influenced young people in Gen X. The programme has given the opportunity to thousands of European students to study in other another European countries.

In my view, black culture in America has always been the pulse of the world, dating back to the Jazz influences of the 1920s. So, white people adopting aspects of black culture is not something exclusive to GenX. Every Generation in the 20th century has adopted many forms of blackness. And vice-versa, many blacks have adopted many forms of white culture. Today, there's not much difference between the races. An example: look at this current generation (whatever they call themselves), black youths are worshiping the most undesirable culture blacks have to offer (pimps, thugs, ghetto bastards). In turn, white youths have followed suit, worshiping the most undesirable culture whites have to offer (trailer trash, trailer parks, hill-billies). Different folks...same strokes.

Anyway, this is the perpective that's missing from this article. These view are strictly American, and even exclude Canadians. There are two segments within American X'ers: those born between 1964-1973, and those born afterward 1973. The "64 to 73" group begun their education at some point in the 1970s, in the midst of the "Age of Aquarius". Therefore, they were the first-born generation educated and cultivated in a radically changing society. Some black X'ers were the first to be bused to all white school, and some white X'ers were the first to be bused to all black school. So, at an early age, this group of X'ers were socially conditioned to interact with people of different backgrounds. This group of X'ers also spent a huge part of their teenage years in the 1980s, the most "over-the-top" decade in American history, and the greatest decade for entertainment. This group of teenaged X'ers were bombarded by all forms of entertainment: music, sports, cable television, movies, and even the current president (Ronald Reagan) who was a former actor. This group was also bombarded by bad influences: poverty, drugs, unemployment, and literally a "cut-throat" society that preached "the only thing that matters in life was how much money is in your back pocket."

This group of X'er came of age begining in 1983, and started influencing society by 1986. Hip Hop was still considered underground music, as well as the early precursers to Grunge. As more members of this generation became adults, the more society gradually changed. 1991 was the "big bang" year, when everthing flipped from baby boom to X. Since, this group witnessed the heavy influences of entertainment in the 1980s, entertainment was used to reflected this groups ideas. If you read the lyrics from many prominent Grunge/Alternative rock artist vs. HipHop/Rap artist, there not much difference. Differenct folks, same strokes. The lyrics reflected the society in which they were cultivated. And, they unleashed all of their rage and anger in their songs and music. And, all nationalities of this generation love and appreciated their music.

This is the foundation that is missing from the defininig element of this generation. The defining characteristics of this generation did not start with some dumbass book, it was a work in progress begining from the 1970s.

Agreed, Gen X are the Children of the Boomers

The children of the boomers started being born in approx. 1967, but the bulk of them weren't born until the 1970's. I was born in '67 to parents born in the "gap", before the boomers.

Some have called those born 1955-1968 the "Lost Generation" meaning, lost between the Boomers and the Gen Xers.

lets start a new generation

sorry to add onto your post but it seems like the general idea of the 79-85 era. We are the generation thrown into a terrible area. look at generation x for a few minutes. Generation X was part of "the breakfast club" the expression "rad" and those god awful "footloose" shoes. now I must admit, I have seen and been a part of all of these things. being born in 1979 I am the beginning of "generation who the hell are we" It seems for years my friends that were born from 1975-80 all make the claim "I am part of generation x" but they all back it up with some non-sense explanation almost without pause. seen as " I am part of generation X because I owned brand new starwars toys." so I say the fu$% with it. we should as a group band together and brainstorm new generational Ideas.

Lets try a few

"generation loner" "generation t.v." "generation internet" (we were the first teens to get the net) in fact thats pretty good "generation nintendo" "generation they kicked us out" "generation we left" "generation left"

any other ideas?

"Lost Generation?"

My mother was born in 1942, which I'm assuming, makes her a Baby Boomer. I was born in 1961, and have never discovered just what my generation was called. At first I thought that maybe my generation was part of the Baby Boomer or rather "Late Baby Boomer" era (if there's such a thing). If my generation was called the "Lost" generation, I would tend to believe that there might be some truth in that. Any comments?

Why this discussion exists:

If you take a look at this discussion, you notice there are generally two kinds of posts. The dominate number of posts are about how children born in the mid 80’s are gen-x. I’m sorry your stuck in between generations. I know that gen-x is damn sweet, but to make a internet post about how you belong in the lamest crap I’ve ever heard. That takes us to the minor number of posts: it’s clever comments by gen-x’ers with a lot of time on their hands. Guess which kind this is. Anywho the point is “I’m sorry your parents didn’t pop you out sooner cause then people wouldn’t have to read your drivel about how cool you think you want to be by labeling yourself old”. I should sell you some t-shirts, but chance’s are, you bought um already.

-Big_Rig