[throw_away2]

The whole thing was invented by two boomers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

My personal theory is that it is just an artifact of US boomer navel-gazing and self-exceptionalism.

Also that it fits in nicely with peoples' tendency to want to drop other people into little buckets so that they don't have to think about them too hard. People do the same thing with race, believing these differences between us are discrete and fall into categories that define our essence, rather than continuous multivariate gradations.

[komali2]

I feel you there, although I do think it can be useful to say things like "people born before 1980 will not experience climate change like those born after."

[throw_away2]

Fair enough, as this is something that will happen to a given person, not some intrinsic attribute of their personality. But consider, too, the arbitrariness of specifying 1980. As someone born in 1980, I feel this acutely, as I'm not really gen-x nor am I really millennial. People born just before and just after me will feel climate change about the same. The framing implies a discrete change, but there isn't one.

[dwd]

It's annoying how the media continues to perpetuate their shit by parroting the labels as if they meant something.

Thinking about it further newspapers have always printed daily horoscopes, so obviously there's money to be made pandering to peoples self identity.

[goto11]

The post-war baby boom was not something exceptional to the US. There were baby booms in most of the western world.

[asdff]

Very true, but the life of a post war baby was very different than someone who grew up during the great depression, or during the roaring 20s, or any other time. It is useful to bin people into groups facing similar environmental and temporal situations, it makes comparisons and tracking a given bin of people through time easier.