Politically, we may have more in common across generations than within them. (Photo credit.)
Marketers and communicators love dividing us into generations. Polls and focus groups and reams of research are used to discover Baby Boomers’ favorite toothpaste flavors and Millennials’ political preferences.
It probably helps, in very broad terms, to know how we differ by age, but it’s also a lazy and misleading way to understand the world. Clumping us together by generation is a little more scientific than believing everyone born in the “Year of the Dragon” shares the same traits, but it still creates problems.
In short, we are not our generation.
You can say some general things about Millennials. For instance, in the aggregate, they seem to be environmentally conscious, support marriage equality, and they don’t like Donald Trump.
But if you are guided only by those generalities, you will sound tone deaf to millions. There are 76 million Baby Boomers, 65 million Gen Xers, and 83 million Millennials. In all of those groups there are conservatives, libertarians, progressives, socialists, centrists, and every other variation of political views.
There many are Baby Boomers who never "dropped out,” Millennials who don’t buy organic, and Centennials who aren't ready to be labeled because of when they were born.
There are some reasonable ways to divide us by age. For instance, it’s safe to believe that younger people are more comfortable with technology and social media. (How many people over 40 do you know with a Snapchat account?) That might help us know how to communicate with them, but not what to say.
The truth is we may have more in common across generations than within them. Aging hippies and young progressives, rubbing shoulders at Dead & Company shows, will likely respond to the same messages. Twenty-somethings on Wall Street and CEOs born in the fifties are probably both more skeptical of government regulations.
There are also many people without a named generation, usually tossed in with a chronologically adjacent lump of humanity. I was born in 1964—weeks after the Kennedy assassination, in the last days of the Mad Men era, just on the cusp of the Hippie Sixties—and my contemporaries belong to no real historical generation.
Text books will tell you that the Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, a neat flipping of digits that would seem to settle the issue. But, culturally, Baby Boomers are the children of returning World War Two veterans and their spouses. Their parents faced the brutality of war, defeated the dark forces of Fascism, and returned home to start families. They spilled out into new suburbs and created a new consumer culture.
My parents, on the other hand, were small children during the Second World War. To consider people my age Baby Boomers requires you to think my father, eight years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, can be grouped with those who fought on the black sands of Iwo Jima or in the thick forests of the Ardennes.
On the other side, the Internet says that the following generation, Gen X, runs from the “early 1960's to the early 1980’s.” But I have early childhood memories of 60’s counter culture that most Gen Xers don’t. The lesson is that the arbitrary beginning and end years of named generations are just that—arbitrary—in social and political terms.
All of this is a reminder to communicators (like me) that generalizations by age, while sometimes a helpful crutch, aren’t nearly enough to understand your audience.
You’ll likely see references to the political views of Millennials in my future commentaries—it’s a hard habit to break. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that it provides a truly deep understanding of our fellow Americans.
On Twitter @RealKeithGaby