I think culture is a pretty useful grouping for assessing a lot of traits and behaviours. Sure, it depends on the culture and the trait you are assessing, but as groupings go there are entire academic fields devoted to the study of how those things work.
Similarly with economic factors and class. These can be useful in describing proportions of a population. And how they react relative, again, providing the trait we are assessing is relative to that factor.
I know you are probably just being glib, and you are right that and generalisation can be pretty useless. But I still think the exceedingly broad “generation” is the most useless.
Yes, but those events and the relative importance of those events are highly variable.
Someone living in the 80s in a small town in Scotland is unlikely to have lived through the same 80s as someone running a FTSE company in New York at that time.
There’s this idea, and I think it is particularly American, that the whole world lives to their narrative. The narrative of the rather privileged middle class.
For example when we talk about the 80s the narrative is big hair, cocaine, excess… But that’s only true of a very small proportion of the world. I know plenty of folk that didn’t see a cell phone until the early 2000s.
Let’s ignore discrepancies in economics, geography, race and culture and suggest people behave, en mass, based on the decades they were born in.
This is just astrology for the politically feeble.
Hey, it’s no worse of a grouping than any of the categories you mentioned.
Fuck the generational war. The class war is real and it’s one sided, it’s basically a class genocide.
I disagree.
It’s a question of granularity and correlation.
I think culture is a pretty useful grouping for assessing a lot of traits and behaviours. Sure, it depends on the culture and the trait you are assessing, but as groupings go there are entire academic fields devoted to the study of how those things work.
Similarly with economic factors and class. These can be useful in describing proportions of a population. And how they react relative, again, providing the trait we are assessing is relative to that factor.
I know you are probably just being glib, and you are right that and generalisation can be pretty useless. But I still think the exceedingly broad “generation” is the most useless.
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“This is just astrology for the politically feeble.”
Brilliant.
Events in one’s lifetime impact them more than the alignment of the stars
Yes, but those events and the relative importance of those events are highly variable.
Someone living in the 80s in a small town in Scotland is unlikely to have lived through the same 80s as someone running a FTSE company in New York at that time.
There’s this idea, and I think it is particularly American, that the whole world lives to their narrative. The narrative of the rather privileged middle class.
For example when we talk about the 80s the narrative is big hair, cocaine, excess… But that’s only true of a very small proportion of the world. I know plenty of folk that didn’t see a cell phone until the early 2000s.