Why Damaging Generational Stereotypes Are So Pervasive

I challenge you to make a generalisation about a cohort that consists of tens of millions of people, who speak different languages, live in different countries, who have different aspirations, histories, beliefs, faiths and voting intentions. The only thing those people have in common for the sake of definition is that they were born between two arbitrary dates.

It’s impossible, isn’t it? Absurd even. Yet, there’s a whole reseach industry built around that very idea — that different generations exhibit different behaviors and beliefs solely based on being born within a decade of each other.

The spurious art of defining generational traits has produced industrial levels of nonsense as credulous executives race to understand potential customers. Age segments are a simple way of dividing up a populace into neat categories, ascribing attitudes and behaviours to life stages.

But in defining loose cohorts of diverse people, we are falling into the trap of creating reductive stereotypes. At worst, these stereotypes fuel unnecessary feelings of animosity between generations.

Antipathy between old and young is nothing new, but in the last few years insults being fired between self-appointed representatives of generations have intensified.

This all reached a cruel low point when the “Boomer Remover” label was being used on social media to describe COVID-19, which is all the more deadly to older people.

Generational Profiling

Generational profiling has been around for a long time, “Baby Boomer” — the catch-all expression for anybody born after 1945 was coined as early as 1963 in a Daily Post article about escalating college enrolments. But the shaky science of generational profiling really took off in the 2000s as a vaguely-defined cohort came of age with the internet and social media.

Companies became obsessed with reaching “Millennials” — an entire generation that, predictably, showed little interest in traditional media.

As society changes, every new generation embraces new cultural fashions and comes of age with new technologies. In the late twentieth-century that merely meant changing consumer behaviours. So-called Baby Boomers came of age with LPs, network television and rock music; Generation X — those born from 1965 and taking their label from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel of the same name— came of age with CDs, cable TV and rap.

Millennials, however, were fundamentally different. They came of age with a whole new media paradigm. These teenagers stopped buying physical media and, with the world at their fingertips, embraced a dizzying eclecticism of fashion styles and genres.

While Baby Boomers and Generation X had their style tribes (hippies, mods, punks, ravers), Millennials identified with increasingly niche, often amalgam, subcultures forged in internet chatrooms and social media. This left business leaders scratching their heads and traditional media profits in free-fall.

Marketers were tasked with working out what made Millennials tick. When marketers unlocked Millennial motivations, it made sense to do the same for every other living generation. A whole industry of age cohort analysis and commentary developed. The result is generational hocus-pocus and buzzwords that have become part of common parlance.

The Center for Generational Kinetics — yes, that really is a thing — a market-leader in generational analysis, informs us that Millennials are not tech-savvy, but tech dependent. Okay, that analysis seems counter-intuitive and original, right?

But think about it for a moment. What does “tech-savvy” even mean? And how do we define dependence in this context? My mother seems dependent on her cell phone, and yet she’s certainly not tech-savvy. Maybe she’s a 65-year-old Millennial?

These stories — often entertainingly woven by marketing specialists in headsets pacing TED-esque stage shows — are convincing for as long as you suspend disbelief. Touch the actual data and it crumbles like ash.

What are effectively statistical propensities are presented as intrinsic traits of people belonging to particular generations. As a marketer myself, I take none of this seriously. Entire generations spanning vast geographical territories are too broad to be meaningful as market segments. Instead of actionable data, we have something more akin to astrology.

At least astrological signs have clear definitions. Researchers can’t agree on what actually makes a Millennial. Neil Howe and William Strauss, who are credited with coined the term Millennial in Generations, define the group as those born from 1982, while Pew research defines Millennials as being born in 1980. Some researchers put Millennial birth dates back to 1977. The cut off years vary from study to study too — from 1994 to 2000, a full six years.

Sweeping Generalisations

For better or worse, people demand simple stories to explain away the complexity of the world. Sweeping generalisations are a shortcut to understanding people’s behaviour on a mass scale.

What’s more, we have a species capacity to see patterns in all kinds of data. We use those patterns as tools to compartmentalise and exploit any kind of phenomena.

With generational profiling, as with any generalising logic, you have the worst of both these worlds.

Horoscope-like generalisations about massive swathes of people are not just fuzzy, they are damaging. Much of what is said about generations is so obvious as to be useless to act on.

Here's an example. "Millennials are tech-savvy because they grew up with the internet." What do I learn from that statement? How do I put it to use in any meaningful way?

What are presented as cohort traits are actually behaviours. These behaviors are given shape by wider technological, economic and political changes.

Gen Z are supposedly “generation sobriety” for their unprecedented low levels of alcohol consumption. Is that because they actually prize sobriety in itself or is it because it’s harder to fake I.D. these days? Statistics are useless without meaning, yet we're sold the statistic itself as the meaning.

Solidarity and?Bigotry

As a member of the Generation X (I was born on the cusp in late ’78), I “get” all the Gen-X cultural touchstones - things like grunge, Brit-pop, The Word, the "golden age" episodes of The Simpsons, The X-Files, Trainspotting and so on and I feel like I’m part of the gang. I came of age with these moments.

It's a cozy feeling, the same we may get when we hear a celeb is the same star sign as us. We can't help but feel a connection. But it’s absurd that we can talk about tens of millions of people as if we’re in a gang together.

This virtual solidarity springs more from a need to feel belonging, and to “belong” is often to set yourself and your “tribe” apart from others. The former is benign, but the latter can get dangerous.

With generalisations come negative stereotypes and even bigotry. Through sheer luck, Baby Boomers lived through a period of enormous economic growth, and for that supposed sin they are perceived by younger generations as greedy, self-centred and even narcisistic.

Millennials, the children of Baby Boomers, are supposedly pampered and entitled because they received participation trophies as kids and keep getting told (by their supposedly rich parents) that the world is their oyster. But tell that to the millions of people born between 1980 and 2000 into poverty.

When we talk dismissively about Millennials are we really talking about a chimera we want to hate on but can’t quite define?

These are all simplistic stories, they make it easy to compartmentalise entire swathes of a populace. Just like horoscopes, people can have fun with them, but even seemingly positive generalisations are insidious. Millennials aren’t ambitious any more than Generation X are cynical slackers and Baby Boomers greedy hedonists. These are as lazy — and almost as malignant— as generalisations about race and sex.

Narratives like these are further distancing generation from generation, and person to person. We’ve already seen the “OK Boomer” meme: mean-spirited “take downs” of an ill-defined stereotype. The “boomer remover” hashtag takes the bitterness and spite to new levels. Do the people sharing these cruel labels have elderly relatives?

Trends, not traits

I eat avocado toast, I do yoga on Sundays and I’m a “digital native” who hasn’t picked up a physical newspaper for months. Am I a Millennial? No, I’m not, but I exhibit “Millennial behaviours” and I’m starting to identify with the behaviours of Generation Z.

This is because I’m describing trends, not traits. While traits are intrinsic to an individual’s make-up, working from the inside out, trends are something we find ourselves consumed by.

All these market researchers are doing is ascribing the cultural fads and attitudes of the zeitgeist, for want of a better word, to whatever generation happens to be coming of age. Huge swathes of people are saddled with the fads of their salad days.

While the research itself is preposterous, irresponsible cultural commentators have picked up on this marketing fad to sow division and antipathy between age groups. Generational cliché spans the chasm between hokum and serious socio-cultural commentary. A simple web search yields hundreds of bitter protests written from the perspective of one generation or another.

Cohort difference becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and generations become entrenched in their own fictitious understanding of themselves. What we have now is “generational othering” that literally pits family members against each other.

The churn of fashions, fads and trends in culture is a phenomenon we’ve never been without. We grow up not wanting to be like our parents, and so we express that in our consumer habits and tastes.

When we ascribe these trends to some deeper hive-psyche of millions of people who only share the fate of being born within twenty or so years of each other, we’re making a silly generalisation. When we attribute negative traits to these groups, we’re on a more sinister path.

This was originally posted in 2020 on my Medium account here.