2732: How Society Has Come to View Generations Jun 13, 2024

The “Lost Generation” preceded the “Silent Generation”, but what generation preceded them? The answer is that there are no generational names earlier than this because it is a very new practice of breaking up and naming generations is really very new. Naturally, there had been plenty of momentous events throughout history that shaped society in sudden ways, but it was only after WWI that the collective experience of everyone born in a narrow set of years was classed as a generation. Before this, ‘generation’ only denoted the lines in a particular family.

Sometimes these social-generations will be based on an event, such as those above and the post-WWII baby boom (hence boomers) but increasingly the naming of generations is not ex post facto, but anticipated every fifteen years or so. 

In recent decades a flurry of names are selected for each generation until one sticks. After “baby boomers” named for the postwar baby boom came the “baby busters”—denoting the subsequent drop in fertility—until this was replaced with “Gen X”. That particular name came from the use of X as an undefined variable like in algebra, supposedly denoting the counterculture’s anti-definition approach, but was taken to be alphabetical. It was then applied to “Gen Y” (eventually replaced by “millennial”) and “Gen Z”, which was also early on called “iGeneration” but that didn’t stick nor did the i-names in technology, really.

Following this people have come up with “Generation α” (i.e. ‘alpha’), still supposing the earlier Gen X was alphabetical and now restarting with a new alphabet. It has really only been from the mid-1960’s then that social generations became taken as a matter of course, as opposed to the earlier albeit relatively novel event-based delineations.