That blue line, is the line from 22/100 and 22/1000 that I was speaking of, and ironically I had never heard of 'Generations Jones' until I saw that wiki article when I decided to check what the 'official' Boomer and X years were and if there was any real thought to the concept or it was more or less popularized gibberish. That blue line is pretty much it. I'd have thought the various drop and boom references I was dropping would have indicated I was staring at that graph... I'm not criticizing of course, we all look at wiki these days I just find it humorous to click on your link and see a graph I'd been staring at earlier today. Of course, I've seen that graph before, we all probably have, but I still had never heard of the Generation Jones, and arbitrary labels that aren't well known are even more pointless.



I remember where I was when the Wall fell, I was sitting on my couch with a guitar and... oh wait, that's that Jesus Jones video. No, I remember being in school when Challenger blew and the Principal called in a moment of silence... wait, no I don't, because I'm picturing myself in a classroom that I clearly identify as the one I was in in '89, not '86. I also remember where I was when I when man landed on the moon, I was with my mother and sister watching MTV. I do remember where I was when the David Koresh's Waco complex burned to the ground, and I remember where I was for 9/11, those are genuine. But truth be told, in this era of TV, there's little separating true memory from personal old memory. When I think Berlin Wall I think Reagan's "Tear Down" comments and the Jesus Jones video, not any personal memory even if Reagan hadn't been elected yet when I was born. I'm not denying the shared experiences impact, of course it exists and is real, but I think they combine into a smoothie of memory, as opposed to a near identical drink like coffee where your choice of beans and creamer is about the only substantive difference. That two people might both have a banana in their smoothie, e.g. JFK, might have very lttile impact as one guy throws in protein powder and chocolate, and the other throws in strawberries. There's precious little similiarity between V8 and a tiny little sandwich with watercress, Cucumber and egg salad on it, for all that they both have watercress, and for the connection this article makes it would basically require than a person who ate that sandwich and another who drank a can of V8 were both so equally impacted by watergate, I mean watercress, that they raised their kids the same.



I think people see paradigm shifts in too many things. Special Relativity, evolution, and Quantum Mechanics are paradigm shifts, they require a fundamental change in your view of the laws of reality. I do recognize the terms legit usage to describe societal changes but people use it to freely and also use it when they should use 'zeitgeist' or the economic and culture effects of 'disruptive technology', like a printing press. What we really mean here are powerful events that specifically triggered reactions in a large segment of the population. JFK's assassination did it to a lot people, but the reality is that it probably did it to a lot of people of a specific age less than a specific birth year. That "Mugged by Reality" comment a lot of us on the right like to use, generally refers to big stuff like that as much as personalized individual experiences. Leaders get killed a lot, by raw numbers your odds of surviving a presidency in the US is way worse than your odds of being killed in a modern war zone or working as a lumberjack or coal miner. Libya being a fairly unreal think to a lot of people, I can't help but think that a lot of us smiled when we heard the bastard was dead, as much as when we hung Saddam or the Seals gave OBL Excedrin Migraine #762. So yes, these things do have an impact and yeah, age and birthyear tend to play a big role in that... I'm separating age and Birthyear here because because your Grandpa dying when your 10, or your cat getting runover when you're 9, are more important by your age then by your generational affiliation... I think we confuse those as identical concepts a lot. They're not, people who were alive when McKinley got shot weren't going to take JFK in quite the same way, that's ramped up since JFK was pretty popular among young people where as in times before the President was more distant. I don't think many young people had deep emotional attachments to Martin van Buren. TV has the effect of amplifying all of this. I'm not trying to belittle this either, I kinda have to ratchet up the hyperbole when discussing this because its so 'common sense' to think of Boomers or Xers or Beatniks etc that its hard to shake out of that framework and recognize that a lot of the stuff we attribute to a generation is really mostly half empty frameworks the same way most stereotypes are.



One of us was definitely making some incorrect assumptions about the other's age, I was conceived pretty much the same time our Embassy in Iran was being attacked and started walking shortly after Jodie Foster's admirer decided to make history. I hadn't thought you were alive for Woodstock or the Moon Landing.



Right, but any subsequent boom/bust is likely to be wider and shorter, one could argue that brief dip, rise, dip in the 90's was a Boomer follow up but realistically you can't say you see it. It is, like I said to Legolas, like the weather. Further much of this is reacted to differently because of modern technology, cameras and now the Internet drive how stuff like OWS works and how we react to it a lot more than, say, the Civil War riots in NYC. On the other part, I don't think WWI impacted the US enough to explain changes to birth rate on that scale, I'm not attributing it all to the Depression but I'd figure Prohibition, for instance, was a big factor than WWI on the US's BR. Again, though, this is kinda illustration through hyperbole, I can believe a decade of hardship and poverty could seriously screw with BR, I couldn't believe singular events like JFK's assassination would effect it much.



I'm unclear why you disagree with me then, one of my core points was that a pack of people with fairly similar age ranges themselves have parents with a much wider age range. We all have cousins and cousin's kids or even sibligns or aunts & uncles who give the lie tot he idea that any pack of people in some ten year age range are likely to have obvious parental parallels. Though are going to be many people who are legal adults at that event who have parents between your age and mine, and many others who aren't out of place by age with parents who retired already, and that's without getting into the outlier cases of 15 year old parents or a dad who was in his fifties when they were born, neither of which is that rare. An 18 year old and a 26 year old may have a lot of shared experiences but it isn't going to be too likely it's from their parents shared experiences, which could easily be 33 and 76 respectively. So you can't, as this article is trying to imply, make those sort of generational connections.



It is specifically that claim to these unique and fairly specific 'Generations' to which I object. Of course you and I share some formative experiences, as I do with many friends younger than me, but I doubt you and they do, except for ones that really aren't time-related, and a lot of times the connection is non-obvious. Challenger is noteworthy to me not so much because it happened while I was alive, nor even so much because I grew up with older relatives who were big sci-fi buffs and had me reading astronomy books as a kid, rather, I had a neighbor whose wife I used to help garden who'd helped design and manufacture shuttle parts and retired shortly there after to become my neighbor, that's how it impacted me, not a 'I remember that day' but from that. I'm pretty sure those direct connections shape us as much if not more than the nationwide moods and events, and I think it is unwise to try to view thing through that lens.