You know what I really dislike? Being categorized in an age bracket. Baby Boomers. Generation X. The Millennials. There’s all these strange, fluctuating categories of people roughly defined by the year they were born and a few stereotypical demographics like feeling a need to belong or rebelling against the status quo.
Rarely do they acknowledge that people are, for the most part, individuals. Also, they seem to forget that generations really don’t mean a lot anymore. After all, teens graduate from high school every year. The population is fairly fluid from seven months to seventy. There aren’t well-defined generations of people my age, people my parents’ age, and people my grandparents’ age. The result is that some of us are left out.
Like me. I was born in 1979. By most estimates I’m too young to be a Generation Xer, and too old to be a Millennial. So what the heck am I? Screwed? Or just an overlooked demographic, which really isn’t a bad thing.
Isn’t it great what broad social marketing trends can do?