Remember when a generation was deemed as 30 years? Now, it seems, there’s one for everyone in the audience.
As with so much else, this seems driven by the great god Consumption, conspicuously so where our “grate” neighbours to the West are concerned – those across the wide and newly named Galway Bay (formerly known as the Atlantic Ocean).
There, where, to quote dear Oscar (Wilde), they are currently experiencing an orgy in knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
In Oscar’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Darlington describes a cynic as “a man (there were no women in the later 19th century) who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”. To which his interlocutor Cecil Graham adds: “And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
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You might say, though, that, by any objective standard, the current designation of “a generation” has become absurd.
So we have the so-called “Greatest Generation”, born between 1901 and 1927, for those who survived the Great Depression only to fight in World War II; followed by the “Silent Generation”, born between 1928 and 1945 and who were quiet and conformist during the fearful “anti-communist” McCarthy era in the US.
The “Baby Boomer Generation”, born between 1946 and 1964, is next and so-named due to a population explosion following World War II, becoming the heroes who brought us “the 60s”. Bless them!
They are followed by “Generation X”, born between 1965 and 1980, often dismissed as aimless and apathetic, while “Generation Y”, or Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are frequently seen as both self-centred and community orientated. A contradiction, but who cares.
“Generation Z” was born between 1997 and 2010, and have known only connection to one another through phones, screens and tablets; which brings us to the Greek alphabet (comes after Z it seems) and “Generation Alpha”, born between 2010 and 2024, the most tech-savvy of all.
So to “Generation Beta”, born between 2025 and 2039, about which, yet, there can only be a question mark.
You will note how all those “Generations” are described as seen through the American experience – there being no other. Hokum.
Generation, from Latin generationem, for “people born in the same period”.
