Generation Hex

(Or, Why You Were Not Actually Born Into a Cosmic Sociocultural Vibe Cluster)

Somewhere around 1991, two men who owned vests made of corduroy (and may or may not have had ponytails tied with girlish scrunchies, and I am resisting the urge to Google this) wrote a book. The kind of book where “history” is described in capital-letter Archetypes, and charts are involved, and somewhere in a boardroom a man in suspenders said: “This will play well in PowerPoint presentations.” The book was called Generations, or something like that, which is not at all vague and hubristic, and its central claim, boiled to its syrupy core, was this: Humanity moves in a great eternal cycle of generational archetypes, repeating every 80ish years in an astrological-feeling loop that is absolutely not astrology or numerology or anything unscientifically loopy, how dare you even think that?

So far, so harmless. Except it worked.

Let me explain. Or rather, let me spiral in a polite and overly metacognitive way toward explaining, because this is North America, and we never land the plane, we just serve pretzels (or the stale baby biscuits WestJet flight attendants insist on calling cookies, and sorry, but we’re out of Club Soda) until the idea has absorbed enough sodium to be shelf-stable.

Here’s the deal: There are no actual “generations,” in the sense that there are no natural fault lines between years like “1981” and “1982” where the stars shift, the world resets, and suddenly babies are born with Bluetooth instead of Walkman energy. Babies are born all the time. Like every day. The same way rain falls or Sobey’s releases a seasonal item involving butternut squash. There’s no Gregorian thunderclap that signals, “All right, everyone, new vibe starts now, cut the umbilical cords with more irony. Everyone into (or out of) the gene pool!”

And yet, here we are. Swimming in these invisible pools of generational branding, like fish who’ve been handed a BuzzFeed quiz that tells them which Hogwarts house they’d belong to based solely on their birth year. Generation X: cool, disaffected, mixtapes. Millennials: anxious, avocado toast. Gen Z: ironic, earnest, memes layered in memes like filo pastry. Gen Alpha: TBD, but probably comes pre-installed with ChatGPT and a vaguely dystopian aura. Baby Boomers: Not quite sure what filo pastry is, but would spell it as “phyllo” out of some dimly remembered, vestigial connection to an older sibling who took one of the final compulsory Latin courses in high school back when there was a kind of hush all over the world and Herman’s Hermits were riding high in the Billboard Most Played in Jukeboxes charts.

These generational divisions are not scientific, nor official, nor even particularly consistent. (Sidebar: the Wikipedia page on generations has more date-range contradictions than a time-travel movie written by a committee of irate Reddit users.) One so-called “generation” might span 17 years, another 30, another 23, all depending on how long it takes society to forget how annoying the last one was. If we applied this logic to geology, the Earth would be like, “Yes, this rock layer is from the iPod Nano era. It was short, but deeply felt by hipsters with receding hairlines and ponytails tied back with girlish scrunchies.”

Let’s take a brief look at the roll call of these allegedly coherent generations:

• Baby Boomers (1945–1960): Defined by a postwar baby surplus and, later, an impressive ability to afford houses. They claim to have invented protest and produced the last decent music humans will ever hear. Are blamed by all subsequent generations, who are (unbelievably) even more selfish than they are, for RUINING THE WORLD.  (People try to put them down. Just because they get around in big fat SUVs.)

• Generation X (1961–1981): Their defining trait is that no one talks about them. The Jan Brady of generations. I’d say more but nothing comes to mind.

  
  

• Millennials (1982–2005-ish?): Possibly the most overanalyzed humans in existence. Once accused of killing everything from napkins to casual dining. Now mostly just tired. Owe $1.1 million on the starter mansions they purchased for $999,900 five years ago in soul-sucking suburbia, but hope to sell rarely used boat and ski resort condo at considerable losses to finance superfluous backyard swimming pool. (Not for them, you understand. For the kids.)

  
  

• Generation Z (2006–????): Digital natives who emerged from the womb filming TikToks. Equal parts nihilism and earnest climate anxiety. Enjoy tacking LPs from prized Boomer collections to their bedroom walls as decorations. Claim Bob Marley as their own.

  
  

• Generation Alpha: The current crop. Too young to type, but their name is already on marketing decks worldwide.

  
  

Note: These dates are as solid as a Jell-O shot in a hot car. Some sources say Millennials ended in 1995. Others say 2000. Still others say 2005, which is convenient if you’re writing a paper and need to lump your younger cousin into a demographic that explains their personality via cartoons they weren’t even alive to watch. Note on Note: Assuming you still read not only the comics but the occasional newspaper sports section — which would make you a Boomer, a member of the so-called Silent Generation (born 1925-45), whose defining characteristic was their commitment to keeping their heads down and working hard, or stone cold dead — don’t those hackneyed leads quoting from songs or movies that were hits 40 years before today’s athletes were born make you snap your suspenders and gum: What in tarnation is going on here?

Or maybe that’s just me. But it gets worse.

In a display of cosmic acknowledgment that generational divisions are ridiculous, people keep inventing subgenerations, which are basically patch notes for the main generational software. “Xennials,” for example, are the slightly older Millennials or slightly younger Gen Xers (1977–1983, approximately), who felt uncomfortable being grouped with either. Their chief cultural identifier is having both played Oregon Trail in school and used Facebook unironically before it was flooded by Boomer aunts posting minion memes. (It would have been tidier to refer to these people MySpaceans, but that name had been already appropriated by the last phase of the Bronze Age in ancient Greece, back when Boomer uncles were just adoring their Commodore 64s.)

These micro-generations are like people elbowing into a group photo, shouting “Wait! I don’t feel like a Millennial. Can I be, like, a Zillennial or something?” And the internet, generous and chaotic as ever, says “Sure, Ashley (and/or Olivia, Jessica or Emily). You’re a Zillennial. Here’s a Tumblr post to prove it.”

Why does any of this stick? Why are people so hellbent on identifying as a member of an arbitrarily defined time-clump? Why do people have visceral intergenerational beefs like Millennials yelling “OK Boomer” at the sky and Boomers writing letters to the editor grousing about bike lanes and how nobody knows how to fix a carburetor any more?

Because it’s identity. Because being part of a generation is like being sorted into a Hogwarts house you didn’t choose, but that still gives you permission to wear a scarf and blame your trauma on something. And surtout because marketers looooove it. They can say: “Ah, Gen Z is nostalgic for 2000s fashion,” and suddenly the grandkids are buying $190 low-rise jeans that make them look like rejects from a Destiny’s Child video. Did I say buying? I meant choosing. You’re the one with the Visa bill at the end of the month.

And so we will continue to slice and dice humanity by the years in which people were born, like some kind of cosmic bologna. We’ll pretend that someone born on December 31, 1981, has more in common with a guy born in 1961 than with someone born 12 hours later on January 1, 1982, who is now technically a Millennial and thus required by law to have strong opinions about crippling student debt and J.K. Rowling’s stance on transgenderism.

But let’s be clear: none of this is real. It’s all vibes and spreadsheets and the psychological need to belong to something that feels meaningful. The generational labels are post-hoc stories we tell ourselves to make sense of history, which — spoiler  alert — is just a bunch of people being born, doing stuff, and dying, on loop. Same as it ever was.

So next time someone says “Oh, you’re such a Boomer or such a Millennial,” just smile. And remember: their words are meaningless. Why don’t they all all f-f-f-f-fade away? Now go fix the carburetor.

Oh, snap. If you’re a Millennial, better first Google what a carburetor is.