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Puppetcancer — Generational Chart
Published: 2013-01-28 04:39:55 +0000 UTC; Views: 3841; Favourites: 0; Downloads: 13
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For some inexplicable reason, tonight I had the urge to refamiliarize myself with Strauss and Howe's theory regarding how nationwide personality traits tend to reappear in cycles. Although I've never been convinced they were accurate, I still think they were onto something big.The current year of 2013 is in the gray boxes. i.e. Yeah, according to Strauss and Howe, we're on the precipice of a society-wracking crisis. Juuuust great.
I also made a copy for myself which features the names of every friend and family member whose birthday I knew. It's not important for the purposes of the DA version you see here, but it did remind me that I ought to remind my parents that the children of my cousins will eventually have voting preferences which resembles that of my parents rather than the voting preferences of my cousins or myself. Likewise, I see now why parents and offspring don't get along throughout American history. If you hate your parents now, wait a few decades longer, and you'll get along with a lot of people if you know where (and when) to look.
Please don't giggle too much at how the Baby Boomers were born in the "high" age. On a much more serious note, there's a danger in using Strauss and Howe's theory. Namely, in 2013 there's already a lot of the telltale cultural divisiveness and extremism going on in America (and I'm not just referring to Congress), and the last thing we need now is to hold a prejudice against an entire age group. Blaming the Baby Boomers for our national deficit and multiple foreign wars might be true or it might not be true; discriminating against them is not productive IMO. Shipping all the Baby Boomers out of the country without their precious entitlements might make you feel better, but what if instead of Baby Boomers I was suggesting that we save the country by kicking out all the black people? It's not so funny anymore, is it? It won't be productive to make any "group" a scapegoat. (and believe me, as a GenXer, I can get riled up whenever the Baby Boomers are mentioned in the headlines. So, I really have to watch out for any jingoism or prejudice in my thoughts.)
Likewise, this chart can be foolishly used as a crutch. Just because I'm a member of the generation that is supposedly everyone else's dumping ground, that doesn't mean I have the right to whine or use this chart as an excuse for why I was fired from my job on the week before Christmas. The first black President of the U.S. is a member of GenX, and that's going in the history books. (Granted, that might be the ONLY thing we accomplish, but I'll take a compliment where I can get it.)
One final word of warning about using Strauss and Howe's famous book: when you're looking at large numbers of people in a demographic, don't be shocked if many of the same personality traits, opinions, and outlooks DO appear. (I'm a big believer that stereotypes might be cruel, but stereotypes are usually pretty accurate. That doesn't mean that every individual in a group falls neatly in the stereotype. There are short NBA players and stupid Harvard graduates. However, most basketball players are tall and most Harvard grads are smart.)
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Comments: 7
I happen to be a Millenial. Odd, though, I was mistaken in thinking I was Gen X, wasn't aware the cut off on that was 1981, just a tick before my theatrical entrance to this world at the ungodly hour of 3:29AM, April 7th, 1983. Learned something new here, so thanks for that! Just because I happen to be nosey, when is your birthday and where do you fall in all of this?
Mandi
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You're in luck: folks born on the edges aren't bound in stone to one or the other generation. Unlike a drinking age upon a driver's license, the borders between generations aren't rigid. Strauss and Howe's theory breaks down when it comes to exact numbers, which is probably one reason why some sociologists hate the whole theory.
i.e. Different sources regarding generational cut-off dates have slightly different ranges of years listed. While my own mom was technically born at the very start of the Baby Boomers, she definitely doesn't consider herself a Baby Boomer. She identifies much more strongly with the Silent Generation, and I would agree that she's the antithesis of the stereotypical Baby Boomer. Unlike a Myers-Briggs personality test or membership in civic organization, the generations aren't very scientifically-rooted in reliable or valid evidence.
(One of the IMO better characteristics when defining membership in a generation is based not on a range of years but on what major events are remembered by huge numbers in s society. i.e. Baby Boomers can tell you exactly where they were when JFK was shot. Gen Xers can tell you exactly where they were when the Challenger blew up. Millennials will probably always have Sandy Hook shaping their worldview. I'll bet that somewhere out there, some sociologist or anthropologist has developed a checklist of historical events, and people who check off the same events (under the definition of the checked events being deeply ingrained into their memories) will resemble one another as a generational group. Then again, that's me thinking more along the lines of psychology than sociology.
Whoops! Too much speculating. I already did that a lot in my own Description section beneath my chart.
In response to your question, I'm a Gen X born in the early 70s. (I usually hate stating my true birthday on the web, because of privacy concerns against rampant consumerism and unscrupulous marketing directors. I was born in April, although when I sign up for things online I always put down another date within a year of my true birthday. It's none of their business, and to me I'm more than a cookie or a marketing demographic.) In some ways, I don't act like the stereotypical Gen Xer, but to me the value of Strauss & Howe's theory is that every society lives alongside other generations whose experiences and assumptions are wildly different, but eventually every society comes full circle. (Although, as a Gen X member, I can safely say that one big difference IMO between Gen X and other currently-living generations is that being in Gen X is like hearing everyone talk about a great beach, finally getting a day off to go to the beach, and then arriving at the beach to find that every square foot of sand is already claimed by other people's umbrellas and beach towels.)
(In contrast, in personality tests like the MBTI, I'm definitely an INTJ, and that's a lot more reliable and valid than saying I'm an Aries. LOL)
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No "whoops" necessary; I wish I could accurately convey how much I enjoy reading your thoughts on ... well, anything. If you chose to discuss your opinion, ad nauseum, about the pros and cons of concrete or pondering to me if we eat too much garlic as a nation, I'd be delighted to listen.
That being said, thank you for elaborating on this, it was hugely insightful, far more so than you and I could say, "We are Aries babies." And a bit more descriptive and perhaps accurate, too.
Thank you, consiquently, for seeing astrology as a little less reliable than it is. A friend studying this topic did a full "chart" for me, whatever that is, and told me "you're an Aquarius Moon Rising, (or something), Marilyn Monroe was, too. Aquarius Moons have been noted for being exceptionally beautiful." (Which I'm not, but am completely fine with that.) I told her such things as the construct of my appearance, in whole or in part, were complete nonsense, to which she shook her head at me as if I were simple and said, "what a typical Aries thing to say!"
Mandi
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One of my favorite single-panel cartoons depicts two college students walking through campus. One student says to her friend, "My logic professor says I failed his class because I didn't study, but I think it's because he's a Sagittarius."
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Okay, that right there made me laugh and I didn't even see it... that's the mark of a good cartoon.
Mandi
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Pretty sure there were a few crisis moments during the Cold War...
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Yeah, I gave up trying to type in exact historical events into the boxes. Strauss and Howe's theory is kinda like Freudianism to me: there are holes all over it, yet there's just something that rings true at the core of it.
Granted, the older I get, the more convinced I've become that intuition and insight can sometimes uncover the truth of a matter better than facts or reasoning can. Unfortunately, courts and technology must rely upon facts and reasoning to operate correctly, and too many people are fixated on the hard evidence and on the rhetoric. For the sake of fairness, IMO lawsuits and our courts must overlook whether or not one side is correct in favor of whether or not one side can prove it's correct. Yet, behind the scenes, the actual gathering of the evidence and the precedents and the counterarguments rely upon insight and intuition IMO.) Likewise, I'm not convinced that Strauss and Howe's overall theory is rubbish even though there are a lot of specifics which are easy to disprove.
I kinda wish they'd just stick to a Cliff's Notes version, but the drive to study its specifics is so how that neither the creators nor the detractors can leave the specifics alone.
Plus, even though Freud himself once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I'm sure Strauss and Howe still get attacked viciously in academia by critics who chop down trees and assume that they've automatically chopped down the whole forest.
Eventually, there will be enough documented evidence within the next 100 or 200 years or so to be able to better double-check Strauss & Howe's ideas. (I'm not a fan of retroactive studies going backwards in history with guesswork, but I do like longitudinal studies that keep track of subjects decade-after-decade.) Right now, there's just not a lot of reliable data, since there wasn't anybody running around with questionnaires during Andrew Jackson's presidency. LOL
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