Humans are not cicadas.  We aren’t born at predictable intervals with long breaks in between.  Even if you were to start a society from scratch with people all born in the same year, it wouldn’t be long before distinctions between one generation and the next broke down.  Say you tracked a “first generation” all born in 1950.  Members of the “second generation” would probably start popping up well before the end of the 1960s.  And they would keep popping up well into the 1990s.  The last few members of the “second generation” would actually be younger than the first few members of the “third generation”.  So how do we draw lines separating one generation from another?  Well, kind of arbitrar­ily.  We look for shared experiences, shared cultural touchstones, and surprisingly, it actually kind of works.  Look at a light spec­trum and try to draw a line between yellow and green.  There’s no naturally occurring line: they blend into one another, and in fact the concepts of “yellow” and “green” are cultural inventions in the first place.  And yet somehow most people are in fact going to end up drawing their lines in roughly the same place.

So in drawing lines separating generations, we can start with a boundary that seems very clear: 1946.  The Baby Boomers are named after the baby boom that hit the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II.  Men came home from the war, and delayed plans to start families were put into motion.  In 1945 the Social Secu­rity Administration registered 2.65 million names shared by at least five babies.  In 1947 the figure had ballooned to 3.60 million.  So 1946 marks a pretty clear inflection point.  When did the boom end?  Not by 1957: at that point the figure had grown still further, to 4.20 million.  But by 1975 the boom was long over, as the SSA figure had dropped to a mere 3.02 million.  The boundary must be somewhere in between, but before I drew a line, I looked to a later generation.

In 1989, then-president George Bush told Houston’s Forum Club that “For people my age, and for people a good deal younger, the twenty-first century has been the place in our minds that we put all the fantastic ideas, all the discoveries and inventions we couldn’t dream of experiencing in our own time.  The twenty-first century was just another name for a future that seemed as dis­tant as a voyage to the Moon. […] The truth is the twenty-first century isn’t far away at all.  I graduated from school in the class of 1942.  Our first-graders today will be the class of 2000.  The twenty-first century is here in our kids.”  The name for that gen­eration, the Millennials, suggests a definition: you’re a Millennial if you were legally a child when the calendar clicked over to the year 2000.  If you were an adult, you’re from an earlier genera­tion; if you weren’t yet born, you’re from a later generation.  That fixes the boundaries for the Millen­nials at 1982 to 1999.

If the early bound for the Boomers is 1946, and the early bound for the Millennials is 1982, then it would be very convenient if the early bound for Generation X were halfway in between, which would define that generation’s birth years as 1964 to 1981.  Coincidentally, this is exactly how I have defined Generation X in my own work dating all the way back to my honors thesis on generational polemic back in college.  Everything clicked into place from there.  I had three consecutive genera­tions whose definitions struck me as close to perfect, all of the exact same length.  All I needed to do was extrapolate outwards, and I wound up with this:

And check it out: that gives us a “G.I. Generation”—​I’m sticking with the term used by Neil Howe and William Strauss in their book Generations, rather than Tom Brokaw’s invidious “Greatest Generation”—​whose final year includes those just old enough to serve in World War II: age 18 in 1945.  Gertrude Stein popularized the term “Lost Generation” in applying it to Ernest Hemingway; he was born in 1899, right in the middle of the range provided by the system above.  It all seemed to work.  So these are the years I ran with in writing up my code.

	look up a name	return to the top page	support this site