1033：The truth about generations

The truth about generations: Why millennials aren't special snowflakes We increasingly form opinions about people based on the generation they belong to, but these labels are often lacking in science By Amelia Tait People born between the mid-80s and early 2000s have been called many things: Generation Y, the Net Generation and, more usually, millennials. Now, a new name is growing in popularity: the Burnout Generation. The argument, laid out in a viral BuzzFeed article last month, is that growing up, millennials were unduly affected by the financial crisis of the late 2000s and pressured by a new wave of intensive parenting. As a result, they are uniquely overambitious, overworked and overwhelmed. The description rang true to many millennial readers, but also left a lot of people in the previous cohort, Generation X, wondering why no one was paying attention to the difficulties they face. This disparity exposes the looseness with which we talk about generations. So is it even useful to divide people up in this way? “If you want to draw a boundary between two historical generations, there needs to be a reason for it,” says Elwood Carlson, a sociologist at Florida State University. Generally, that should be a collective difference between the two groups that can be identified empirically, he says. It isn’t clear whether “burnout” fulfills that criteria, but it might. “Deciding which differences are important for separating generations is more of an art than a science,” says Carlson. … https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132162-300-the-truth-about-generations-why-millennials-arent-special-snowflakes/