Question about "baby boom" and "generation x"

[Heyo]

What periods of time do those terms represent basically?.... I always kind of had it in my head that those born in the late 40's and 50's or so were boomers... 70s and 80 the Xers... but I really don't know for sure.

I am 28, I guess I'm an Xer

:shrug:

Heyo

[donco6]

1. Most statisticians put the end of the baby boom

at about 1961. But it's pretty fuzzy, really. It's trying to draw an end to a hyperbolic curve.

[BattyDem]

2. I remember reading somewhere ...

that Generation X is anyone born in 1965-1980. I don't know if that's the "official" age range ... if there is an official age range. :-)

[PragMantisT]

3. I posted this on another thread.

I was born in 1963 and feel like neither a Boomer or an Xer. http://www.wordspy.com/words/13thgeneration.asp Scroll down to see a list of the American generations.

But I've also seen it stated that Boomers lead straight to Xers.
I disagree. I see Xers as more of the Millennial generation. But Xers seemed to have entered college in the nineties and helped forge what was called college radio.

It's all so confusing, especially for a mutant.

[Heyo]

4. Neat link....

I wonder what they mean by the "Lost" generation.

Heyo

[ForrestGump]

7. Lost in the meatgrinder of WWI trenches

That conflict wiped out a huge chunk of young men from the combatant countries. The 1918 influenza epidemic killed a terrifyingly large portion of thew world's population, too.

[PragMantisT]

21. Wordspy is the bomb! Lots of fun new words.

Lost has many connotations. Read "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway to get a feel for the milieu and malaise.

[ForrestGump]

6. Oh, great...today I'm an Xer

Usually, the baby Boom's cut off just in time to include me. No wonder I'm confused all the time.

[skooooo]

20. I feel like I'm an Xer...

...and I was born the tail end of '63.

[ForrestGump]

5. Most say the last year of the baby Boom was 1964

I looked this up last time this question came up on DU but, from fading memory, I think that there's an awful lot of disagreement over who's X and who's not...Xers started to come in to the world in 1965, under most schemes, but when they halted production varies widely, between the early '70s and early '80s, with some even saying later. And I can't even remember the name of the generation that followed X, the generation that I for so long thought WAS Generation X.

The real question is, who decides all this in the first place? Man, I was a teenager when The Big Chill came out, and had pretty much nothing in common with its Baby Boom characters (except that I dug their groovy tunes).

[yvr girl]

8. Generation

Boom, Bust & Echo is a great book on demographics, and what that means to society.

The baby boom is slightly different in each country. It depends on when their soldiers started coming home from the war. There is no 'baby boom' effect in Europe - they had to recover from the war, and couldn't procreate in quite the same way.

Generally, the baby boom lasted until 1964-1966 depending on your source and your country. However, the boomers born in the sixties are different than their older brothers and sisters. They are sometimes called trailing boomers. Not quite boomer, not quite Gen-X. Gen-Xers are those born from aprox. mid-sixties to either mid-seventies, or 1980, again depends who you ask. Birth rates went down dramatically in this time period especially until from 1965-1975. This is a very small cohort.

The generation following the Xers is known by several names: Generation Y, Echo or Millennials. Basically, these are boomer children. There are a lot of them, because their parents are from the largest generation ever. (Not as large as the boomers though, because birthrates have declined.)

There is a book called (I think) "Generations" that chronicles all the American generations. I believe that it referred to boomers as the 13th generation. I don't know who coined the term 'Baby Boomer', I think it just reflected an obvious phenomenon. Generation X comes from Douglas Coupland's book. Generation Y, just followed suit. Baby Busters (Gen-X) and Echo both come from Boom, Bust & Echo.

[Tom Kitten]

9. I don't get it either....

I've heard it put the boomers were born between 1946-1964...theoretically a boomer could have a child who could also be considered a boomer...I was born in 1959, therefore a boomer but too young to do anything much in the 60s, but too old to be a Gen Xer...

I think it's a bunch of marketing nonsense, anyways...Who consciously identifies themselves with a generation?

[Heyo]

10. Not me..

..said Jeffy.

Heyo

[ForrestGump]

11. But wasn't Pepsi the Choice of a New Generation?

Holy Shoot...that was 20 years ago.

:o

That generation's already on walkers and Geritol.

[Rhiannon12866]

12. Supposedly, from what I've heard, Boomers are from the end of WWII

until 1964. I guess that Xers are the generation after that. Technically, I should belong to the former group, but did worse on "Boomer" Trivial Pursuit than I did on any other version. Who in hell is "Howdy Doody?" Sounds gross.:shrug:

[lazarus]

13. I'm 1965

My parents are Boomers. And these crazy GenX kids, I dunno.

I consider myself part of Gen13, if anything.

I'm that generation that was told in middle school that jobs would be plentiful, because there were so few of us.

Nobody thought about the fact that the Boomers would still be flooding the market, and outsourcing all the good jobs. Bastards.

Heck, my wife is older than me by several years, and she's not a boomer. Boomers are my parents, and that's that.

[yorgatron]

14. i was born in '61

and have always felt stuck between.

[lazarus]

15. I guess

we're the Reagan generation, as much as it sucks to think about that.

We reached maturity just as AIDS was hitting the big time. Instead of free love and potheads, we got crack and AIDS. Hooray, us.

Or we could be the punk generation? I like that better, to be honest.

[ForrestGump]

16. Yeah, that's true...I missed the Sexual Revolution by thiiiiiiiiiisssss

much and, instead, got going with things (woefully too few times, I must say) after Rock Hudson dide from AIDS. Born too late, for sure. Maybe even worse for those of us on the cusp than it is for those born a few years later, because we were so close that -- oh, baby --we could almost taste it.

And, yeah, then there was Reagan, but pretty much everyone alive then suffered through that, and it's so much worse this time around.

[lazarus]

17. yeah, so close

In a way, we're really mixed up, because our early adolescence was during the hedonism of the '70s. Then, when we finally got a chance to branch out, what happened?

Disco died, and we were told sex could kill you. Man, that's frustrating.

[ForrestGump]

18. Explains a lot, I guess, now that you put it that way

It was all chest hair and medallions and then suddenly, just as our chest hair was almost on the verge of becoming visible, we were told to be afraid to go near Haitians (the first bogeyman offered to our collective fear, if memory serves) for fear of developing AIDS.

Let's start a club. But let's all wear latex gloves to our meetings.

[lazarus]

19. LOL

Indeed.

Remember Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign? Or "Hugs not Drugs"?

Pathetic.

I had forgotten the evil Haitians. Suppose that explains the continuing problem Bush, et al, have with Haiti today?

[Susang]

23. You are smack dab in Generation X

See my post at the bottom of the page. We were the age that the term was coined for (I was born in '65 also).

[Susang]

22. Generation X

Is the generation directly following the baby boomers. The term was coined by Douglas Coupland in his book, Generation X. Coupland was born in 1961. It was meant to comprise people born at the very tail end of the boom and came of age in the seventies and eighties.


From an interview with Coupland:

No one envisioned the book would have the impact it did. "I thought only the people I went to high school with would ever understand what I was writing about," he says.

What he was writing about was the generation that follows the Baby Boomers. Aimless, and while not quite complacent, unwilling to reach out for any tangible signs of success.

Coupland refuses to see himself as a spokesman for a generation, especially since at least technically he's a tail-end Baby Boomer.

"Can you just be a spokesman for this article?" he's been asked by reporters.

"If you're a spokesman," he says, "you're not a person. You're an object."

He calls Gen X "my Campbell's Soup cans," something he'll always be associated with, much like Andy Warhol will forever be known for his iconic treatment of a mundane pantry item.

http://membres.lycos.fr/coupland/sflorss1.html

Read the book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/031205436X/ref%3Dpd%5Fsl%5Faw%5Falx-jeb-9-1%5Fbook%5F4514950%5F3/002-5014713-2252833

P.S. He also coined the term "Mc Job" in the very same book. Prophetic man, don't you think?