What happens if a kid finds a rusty nail? No rules at all?
It's amazing any kids survived the era of kids going outside.
Dare I ask why they keep track of meat consumed?
I assume they do some sort of nutritional reporting? It's a state-run daycare, attached to a public university.
Your kids haven't been unwittingly enrolled in a study, have they? You know how fragile their brains are.
1: if Moby's around he gets dibs, but otherwise the kids share it.
They actually provide all meals and snacks and everything, once you're 12 months old.
So, just to clarify, before this experiment, these schools (and by extension, the average school in NZ) had a long list of rules for recess? And this is also very common here in the US now? That's sad. When I was in junior high, one of my friends would climb dozens of feet up the side of the brick school building. And some times one of the aides would glance over and yell at him to climb down again, but that was about it. And we weren't allowed to leave the grounds, obviously. Other than that, as long as we weren't smoking or fighting or something like that, it was just free time. Sigh. No wonder the Millennials are so screwed up.
I have a very vivid memory of a girl walking around barefoot in a city playground and stepping on a rusty nail. That involved a trip to the ER. I would think they could, maybe, tell kids not to step on nails.
It's not really clear what the rules were, and what it meant to abandon them.
Shades of the Pirate's Code - perhaps more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.
They don't even have rules about quoting movie lines correctly.
A friend married a dude from NZ and had kids. They moved back for a couple years explicitly so the kids could experience the rule-free NZ school system. They were diving off cliffs during recess. (OK, maybe that one was a school trips.)
6- Less than 12 months old and it's lord of the flies type fights for the scraps from the older kids.
What happens if a kid finds a rusty nail?
Thankks, kid. I knew I put thaat drink down aaround here somewhere. You deserve a reward. Heere, have a sip.
Sigh. No wonder the Millennials are so screwed up
Yes, being prevented from climbing up the sides of buildings has destroyed them for life.
(I like letting kids run all over but I think Millenials are basically just fine.)
I could google this, but what age are the millenials? I might not know any. But I'm willing to believe pretty much anything about them.
Well, actually, that was the fellow who spent all of HS stoned out of his gourd, and then developed a meth problem in his 20s, so maybe there is a place for rules at recess.
one of my friends would climb dozens of feet up the side of the brick school building.... And we weren't allowed to leave the grounds, obviously.
How is that not leaving the grounds?
I think Millenials are born in the 90s.
What kind of rules could you even have during playtime, beyond not hitting each other or climbing the roof etc?
like letting kids run all over
I read this as "like letting kids get run over." Hardcore, man.
Partially kidding about the Millennials. One of my friend's kids is a late-Millennial and she is just about the most awesomely creative and driven kid I've ever met. That whole thing about them expecting lots of praise is sometimes true, but often not. They do seem impatient to advance, careerwise, though. But maybe that's just the way it looks to a Gen X slacker.
19: Well, that's why he got yelled at if any of the adults saw him, innit?
14: pwned by Sifu in 5.
As a small child a cab driver gave me a Pina Colada which my parents made me throw out when Iwas around 5.
I blame my cold for not having proofread 26.
Wikipedia tells me Millenials are born anywhere from the early 80s to the 2000s. So...I'm not going to take this category any more seriously than Chinese animal years, with all due respect to my mysterious Asiatic planet-mates.
||
Speaking of millenials, I was reminded talking to my daughter just now that both my kids have grown up to be polymath intellectuals.
My son, home on break a couple of weeks ago, expressing his disdain for a Pitchfork review, used a phrase of Adorno's: "The Jargon of Authenticity."
Made me so proud.
|>
I suppose it's very American to react to this story with "can you precisely enumerate the rules that were in effect, and are no longer operative?" Whatever, let's bomb New Zealand.
Is it just me, or is there some kind of convergent evolution going on between Ogged and Halford?
When I want to impress people with how aged I am, I tell them that my high school had a smoking area for the students.
Boringly: rules at playgrounds I've seen involve specific limits to the number of people on a thing at a time (3 on the tire swing, for example, or one kid per regular swing, or no more than 4 in the little house) and rules about how long turns are and queuing behavior for people who want the next turn, and where you are allowed to run, and whether you are allowed to be holding anything in your hands (and what) while you run, and whether or not you can jump off of certain things, and no throwing wood chips, and who gets dibs on the 4-square court and which game is everyone playing on it, and no going up the slide, and only going down the slide feet first, and and and and.
1. One summer in the late 60s I volunteered on an out of school playground in the East End of London which was on a WWII bomb site (No, they hadn't been able to clear them all in 23 years, you buggers don't know you're born.
Much of the activity consisted of building dens from building site lumber, using hammers and nails provided by the volunteers (this was the kids' idea, we just obliged them) so of course there were injuries from rusty nails etc., although we tried to keep an eye on things to the best of our ability. The strategy for this was that there was always at least one person on site with a car to take the injured kid to A&E (ER) for a tetanus shot.
Nobody died. Nobody was disfigured. Nobody was taken off the playground by their parents. Juvenile crime in the area fell somewhat.
There does seem to be a tremendous amount of "you must use the equipment as it was intended".
Sometimes, Heebie, even Hollywood lawyers can be right.
Wow, Messily, thanks. That really is different from how I grew up. And I turned out horribly. Rules for everyone!
In the first 7-up movie, the kids go play somewhere, and they're handling long pieces of wood (the English are just as perverted as you've heard) with nails sticking out of them, there are makeshift rope swings, etc. All those kids are dead now, right? I haven't seen the last few movies.
I was kidding, Chris. I'm funnier than you remember. Ok, too much commenting. Later!
One of them even lives in Wisconsin. If you can call it "living."
There does seem to be a tremendous amount of "you must use the equipment as it was intended".
What's wrong with that? I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I'm saying? But hey, sin: It's not logical, my man. It's just not logical.
I know I read somewhere millenials were 1981-97?
18 years is way too long for it to be a meaningful category.
"Generation x" or "millenials" should be something only people who run focus groups for Pepsi talk about, but apparently actual scientists use those categories all the time and even use those names, and people identify with their supposed generation and have feeling about other made up generations.
This concept, under the concept "adventure playgrounds" runs through the postwar British anarchist literature centered around Colin Ward.
I applied them in my own way, letting my son and his friends build whatever they wanted with whatever they could find on the flat roof of our garage. Parents came by for reassurance and were mostly persuaded/mollified. Massive clumsy shack was the result, eventually had to be demolished when I got a citation.
I call it a success.
It's nice to see academia has moved beyond the intentional fallacy.
There's a new book of interviews with Colin Ward that's just been published by PM Press, if anyone would like to know more.
Heebie is not area-trolling the blog. This is precision-trolling of Halford. (Experiments on kids, MEAT, etc.) I guess it could be better by having an IP angle.
43.3: Do you think the Baby Boomers are made-up too then? I mean, the whole point of Generation X was that, contra the Baby Boomers, there really wasn't anything meaningful about us, other than a vague sense of unease. And there were a lot fewer of us, so like, school closings, less crime, etc.
47: I've just skimmed it a bit (only came in the mail a few days ago.) Looks pretty decent. I've always meant to get into Ward and Graham Purchase, who picked up some of Ward's themes, but their works only show up occasionally here, and I haven't been quite motivated enough to order them online. I like the sense of practicality and let's-roll-up-our-shirtsleeves-and-make-anarchism-happen you get from that tendency in British anarchism.
In the eighties and early nineties Ward wrote a weekly column for the New Statesman and Society References to other writers and thinkers, enough to last a lifetime, demonstrations of how to think about things. I photocopied every one of them. The number of books I've bought and read on his recommendation may run to the hundreds.
49: Famous baby boomers include Bill Clinton, Dolly Parton, Tommy Lee Jones, Pat Sajak, Barack Obama, Eazy E, Johnny Depp, Quentin Tarantino and Lisa Kudrow.
What happens if a kid finds a rusty nail? No rules at all? I have a very vivid memory of a girl walking around barefoot in a city playground and stepping on a rusty nail. That involved a trip to the ER. I would think they could, maybe, tell kids not to step on nails.
I feel reasonably confident that having rules against stepping on rusty nails is not what keeps most children from stepping on them, nor is it the absence of rules against stepping on rusty nails that causes any of the stepping on rusty nails that does occur.
Idp: Amazon's page on that work of Adorno includes a paean from Irish Murdoch.
53: I was thinking. "Wow, I'd like to step on that rusty nail, but the oppressive school rules forbid it!" Years later: "Golly, I guess some of those rules that seemed so silly at the time actually made pretty good sense."
Deborah Harry, Tom Seleck, Rod Stewart, Carly Simon, Helen Mirren aren't boomers, they're part of the silent generation, as is someone called Randolph Mantooth.
Gruesome lockjaw stories: best rusty-nail-stepping deterrent.
Adorno also uses that phrase in the wonderful book I've been reading on the bus and train the last few weeks: Mahler, A Musical Physiognomy.
"Our Ben" would love that book, and may already have read it.
Requirements for shoes, maybe requiring closed laced shoes, are more likely to prevent rusty-nail-onstepping. But barefootedness outdoors is a great pleasure, like riding a bike without a helmet.
I think removing all the rusty nails from the playground might be even better than having a rule against stepping on rusty nails on the playground.
My girls' favorite place to play is a nature playscape, which is a woodsier version of an adventure playground, I suppose. I do get so happy whenever that voiceover in the X Up movies says "adventure playground," though, because it's so delightfully non-American.
what age are the millenials? I might not know any.
I think teo and Stanley count as millennials. nosflow and I might barely.
53 and 55: Very funny. But maybe requiring kids to wear shoes in city playgrounds without grass is a good idea. I really wanted to walk barefoot on city streets, and my mother wouldn't let me.
We should get ahead of the curve and formulate a stupid collective name and identifying narrative for the generation that includes all the new Unfogged babies you people have been having.
But maybe requiring kids to wear shoes in city playgrounds without grass is a good idea.
This seems less like a specific playground rule and more just like a general rule about school attire. I'm sure all the ordinary rules don't just disappear when they hit the playground; I doubt the kids are allowed to take off their pants. So, I guess you're right--"no rules at all" is an exaggeration.
"Generation Wry is notable not only for readily adopting technology but for having opinions strongly influenced by the internet personality Wry Cooter, who rose to prominence in the mid-2010s and quickly became the most widely-known cultural figure around the world since Michael Jackson."
Most places I can find seem to define Millennials as those born in 1980-2000. Some pick a slightly later date (like 1982). I'm right at the boundary of that, but I definitely identify as a millennial more than Generation X. The Iraq war was the formative political experience of my life. I don't remember Ronald Reagan being president. I've never been an adult during a time of economic growth.
Yeah, I think I'm dead center X at 42, and you and your ilk seem like a distinctly different generation to me. Sally (1999) claims to be a millennial, on the basis of that same 1980-2000 definition she saw somewhere, but I think it really applies to people now in their 20s and early 30s rather than anyone now under 20.
I'd argue that anyone too young to remember September 11 is in a different generation. Though to some extent where the generation boundaries are drawn will depend on when (if ever) the economy comes back.
Yeah, I look at my kids and wonder if, when they get out of college, they'll still be screwed, they'll be well timed to ride the next boom, or if we've got time for a booming economy that busts before it can do them any good.
Probably, of course, by the time they're adults the key skills will be keeping the radioactive mutant seabeasts from swamping our floating habitats, so the economy will be less of a worry.
68: My sister is 5.5 years younger than I am. She is a millenial, and I'm pretty squarely Gen X. My Mom is a boomer. My Dad was the 2nd in his family and born during the war, so he's technically a member of the Silent Generation. He was class of '66, and when he started college at a small liberal arts school in New York State in 1962, it was very different from my aunt's experience at Stanford from 68-72.
There was once a buzzfeed list about people born in my 2 year window, in between Xers and millenials. Obviously they caught all sorts of cultural cues from my tween years dead on.
I didn't think shoes were always compulsory in NZ schools.
We had a brilliant adventure playground when I was young - no adults were allowed in, and my favourite thing was a wooden beam, about 6 (? felt a lot higher than me, I am trying to be conservative) feet off the ground, varying between 6-10" wide, that formed three sides of a square about a hundred yards long. Ok, fifteen? And the only way to climb on and off was at the beginning and the end. Or jump. The first time I went on it was terrifying. And there would be big kids coming up behind you wanting to go a lot faster.
I agree, you don't have to go far from your own *annual* birth cohort before you get some real drift.
Our daycare has swings, but not in the part that's for kids under 2, I don't think. They do plenty of climbing and kicking leaves, though.
(Unrelated to any of this, I just found out through my own channels that one of the girls' moms had a baby in the last week. I really, really hope this child doesn't come into care. Cool as it could be to have two sets of girls 17 or so months apart, it's not a good idea for us and I hope things will work out for the family this time, especially because it's configured differently from how it was the last time there was trouble.)
I think it really applies to people now in their 20s and early 30s rather than anyone now under 20.
Yeah, this is pretty much right. "Millennials" generally refers to people my age or a little older or younger. The late end is a big fuzzy, because there isn't yet a younger generation identified as such. Basically we're the children of the Baby Boomers, and distinct from Generation X in a lot of ways (including, ironically, not generally having strong opinions about other generations). It's not a super-rigorous concept, but it is a group of people with a similar set of life experiences and cultural reference points, and it's useful to have a name for it.
Eh, me and virtually everyone I grew up with was children of Baby Boomers too. I can think of just a handful of people in my cohort who had Silent Generation parents. And there are a chunk of Millennials who are the children of early Gen Xers too.
I suspect there are some meaningful differences between Baby Boomers who had kids young enough for them to be Gen-Xers and those who waited longer and had Millennial kids, but fair enough. The defining characteristic is birth year rather than parental generation, after all, since that's what determines cultural references and so forth.
I remember being taken aback, some years ago now, when teo compared me with his dad. But of course he's right, no matter how much my "older brother" self-assessment flattered me. My daughter's 24, and teo is within a couple of that, I think.
I'm 29, but I would think of a 24-year-old as definitely part of the same generation as me.
Time flies; I feel like Rip Van Winkle.
But I'm 38 years older than my daughter, 40 than my son. Age of parents at birth is a huge factor, and changes how you experience the world.
If I were defining the generation myself, I think I'd probably say my generation is people who graduated from college after the dot-com bust and who were at least in middle school on 9/11. So born in 1978-1990.
I'm 33, and while I'm not sure I'd consider a 24-year-old to be a different generation, those 9 years mark some huge changes in how young people socialize and structure their lives through technology. A 24-year-old has basically always had the web, cell phones, text messages. I mean, yes, yes, the future's always already here, just not evenly distributed. Hearing "digital natives" makes me wince, but there's something to the idea; they grew up with this stuff in a way that I didn't, even if I was dialing up to BBSs in middle school.
I guess from the point of view of technology, people our age do have more in common with gen x. From a technology point of view I'd say anyone who had web browser but not a cell phone while they were in college is the natural generation.
I was realizing the other day that I think of the beginning grad students I'm teaching as being just a little bit younger than I am-- definitely part of the same generation-- but they think of me as being a lot older than they are.
Oh, and also, neoliberalism! That's another thing. I was only 9 when the Berlin Wall fell, but even still, I grew up with a real sense that other economic systems were possible--maybe stupid and wicked and self-defeating, but still possible. I think a typical 24-year-old wouldn't get that sense just by osmosis from pop culture; you'd need to find it elsewhere, whether from radical parents or college classes or falling in with Natilo's crowd or something.
82: Yeah, that sounds about how I would define it too.
Though even from a technology point of view 78-90 isn't so bad. 1990 is around the cutoff for not having facebook during highschool, which is a big one. 78-90 isn't so far off from "had at least AOL or Juno in highschool but didn't have facebook" which is actually a pretty reasonable cohort.
86: That's a big one. I think of my generation as not having any significant memories of the Cold War, and as having grown up during the "End of History" period when it seemed obvious that capitalism and bourgeois democracy had conquered every other possible alternative and would dominate in the future as far as the eye could see. 9/11 and the Great Recession tore that worldview apart, of course, and were important forces shaping our subsequent worldviews, but that starting point is important, I think, and an important difference between us and previous generations.
When my grandfather was a boy he was sent to be the summer companion/help of his widowered grandfather. Who'd been born in the 18th century.
Huh. I guess in age I'm slightly closer to trapnel than to teo, but I'm more on teo's side of this one. The collapse of the Soviet Union happened early enough in my life that I don't really remember a time when it seemed important.
I think teo and Stanley count as millennials. nosflow and I might barely.
nosflow probably seems old, what with the fancy words and the not-having-sex-very-much, but I'm actually older than he is.
We got broadband in the fall of 2001, around 9/11. My daughter made a friend, a girl in Queensland she's still friends with, who is now a professor in Seoul. Must have made her first skype call in the first years of broadband.
I definitely remember the end of the cold war. But I don't really feel like the Cold War was all that formative on who I am.
I also want to continue to push the claim that people younger than us aren't better at technology, they're much worse at technology (since they've only ever dealt with user-friendly gated systems). So, I'd like to say the next generation starts at the age of people who don't know to look for their professor's webpage on the web, and only use their universities learning management system. I feel like born before or after 1990 is about right for that.
82: I was born in 1978 but graduated college pre-dot com bust. I think I'm humble-bragging but not very impressively.
For example, no one in generation facebook will ever comment on unfogged. It's just not the kind of way they interact with technology. I think that also gives born in 1990 as roughly the right cutoff.
92: Oops. I remembered you and nosflow and paren and I were all approximately the same age but I guess I have the order all mixed up.
Hey, I also use fancy words and have very little sex. I guess I'm just permanently typecast as "young."
How young does someone have to have been when they started using Facebook in order to count as "generation facebook"?
100: High school, maybe? I do think there's an important cutoff somewhere along the lines of what UPETGI is saying, but I'm not sure exactly where it is.
Facebook is apparently deprecated among people who are currently in high school, so that might be another cutoff.
Instagram, from what I've heard. Which is owned by Facebook, of course, but they don't know that.
They also don't text anymore, they use snapchat and whatsapp. Because your helicopter parents will read your texts and your facebook page.
I guess my primary means of online communication from sometime in high school through a couple of years after college was instant messenger. I felt it as a real loss when people stopped using it in favor of Facebook.
The Kids Today use gchat a lot. In class, anyway.
That's too narrow an age range, but yes I identify with the very narrow window where the sentence "Oh, twitter is like IM away messages but without IM" is a sensible thing to say.
For me gchat never really recovered the central role IM used to have in my internet use. Of course, part of that is I was using IM in college when staying up until 4 AM chatting online was something I wanted to do all the time, as opposed to now when *yawn* what was I talking about?
IM away messages really amplified a lot of angsty social drama my last year or so of college, with all the passive-aggressive notes and cryptic messages people would misinterpret. God, we were stupid young people.
||Veronica Mars Season 1, truly is the Veronica Mars Season 1 of television |>
90: I need to go back one more generation to get to the 18th century, but then I would be really pushing it to have adult children at this point. (A friend who is 3 mos. younger than me has a HS senior which is too weird to even contemplate.) It does seem like kids today see FB as some kind of obscure necessity with implied parental oversight.
My great great grandfather was born in the 18th century, or possibly the eighteen noughties, about then anyway. Never met him, nor did my grandfather.
In my dad's first job there was a doorman on the building who used to talk about "The War", meaning the Crimea.
The Kids Today use gchat a lot. In class, anyway.
When gchat first rolled out, I had students pinging me to say hi. It was the worst, most awkward intrusion. I'm sure they thought I'd be lively and chatty, like I am in class? But nope, I'm awkward when I'm trying to extract myself. We had bad-date conversation and then I left. Before long, I figured out how to change my status permanently to red.
We had the web my freshman year in college, broadband too. But the upperclassmen didn't get it until the next year. My first year of college there were Seniors who didn't even use e-mail.
The thing I like about gen-X and millennial is that as normally defined they essentially leave me out entirely. Happy to be here!
Also, I should chat essear, that sounds fun.
Nothing will ever be like irc.
Generation September That Never Ended here.
I found the buzzfeed listicle Heebie mentioned about tweeners:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/leonoraepstein/signs-youre-stuck-between-gen-x-and-millennials
I think a defining characteristic of having a childhood in the 80s and teendom in the 90s is MTV having been the focus of your window into youth culture. I hang out with a lot of people born 85-90 and that seems to be a really big gap with them.
I was born in the gap but we didn't have cable so I never watched MTV.
As far as I can tell, in the library world there isn't a whole lot of difference between saying "millenials" and "kids today".
118: Yeah, that's pretty accurage
116.1: back when I was hanging out on alt.society.generation-x we usually considered "born between '61 and '81" the canonical definition. Which one are you using?
122: I usually hear about it ending earlier, like 72 or 73.
Back when I was wondering who hung out on alt.* I thought the late Gen X year was pre-78. I certainly didn't identify with the vast majority of things identified with Xers except maybe some personality traits. But that may be because I was a late adopter of technology during those years and not really up on pop culture.
123: what? That's crazy talk. (I just went back and checked and Strauss & Howe go with '61-'81.)
Yeah, I'm '71 and I'm a hair on the young side of center X, but still in the core. Not a year from the edge.
Yes, I'm definitely a very late X-er, but I haven't got an affinity for it. I do have a mistrust of those who came immediately after, though. If you were born 5+ years after me? Ugh. Millenial.
People who were in their 20s in the late 80s and early 90s are the core of Gen X to me.
Of course, then there's the sibling thing -- My younger sister is fully Millennial, no matter how you slice it, except that she grew up around me and our middle sister, so many of her cultural references and lifeways are more similar to Gen X than Millennial culture. Also, my parents didn't get cable until she was finishing up HS, so a lot of her referents are held up that way too. I can't remember when she first got email -- probably had an account about as early as she needed one, but didn't get a cellphone till after HS.
128: Yeah, like LB says, that '68-'72 tranche is the real core of it. My friend who was born in '79 has always struck me as much more Millennial, esp. since she was the oldest kid in her family.
Bullrush is a game with many synonyms - red rover, British bulldog - where basically you run at each other and get tackled. One person runs out first and when they reach the defendeds the rest of the attacking team can run up. Person who gets tackled last wins. It's kind of rugby without a ball.
I clearly remember it being banned under each pseudonym in sequence while I was in primary school.
It's interesting that the best test I can think of for being a core member of "Generation X" is age and lifestyle proximity to the characters from "Reality Bites," which was the grand commercial betrayal of Generation X.
I was born in 1979 but identify as Millennial because I was just young enough to miss the dot-com boom, and as I was the oldest child with overprotective parents, most of my cultural references skew a bit younger.
120: This is really funny when it's the older faculty whining about Millennials/kids today, meaning to exclude (one hopes) the Millennial junior faculty...
I have never identified with any generation, probably because I have always had friends in a -10 to +20 year age range difference. Also I'm blindingly ignorant of a lot of pop-culture stuff; what I do know is mostly the result of conscious, effortful study.
This piece perfectly captures my exasperation with "generational" media portrayals.
Oh yeah, and I was raised by people who thought it was totally fine to give a 3-year-old a real kitchen knife or a real hammer and a 5-year-old a real (hand) saw -- to be used independently, though with adult supervision. So my risk-assessment is probably way skewed too.
I do feel generational about telephone usage, though. I cannot for the life of me understand why Kids These Days (really, anyone under 30) will not pick up the damn phone *in the cases where it is the most efficient medium*.
I get why they don't do long phone chats and why texting is incredibly handy. I don't get why they will use email or text literally 100% of the time unless I give them an explicit instruction to make a phone call.*
*Yes, they work for me. But they seem to behave this way in their private lives too.
131 - ha, yes, it got banned a lot at my nice girls school too.
It is definitely fine to give a three year old a proper knife. It's worse to give them a blunt knife because they can't cut anything and will just slip and poke their eye out. Sharp knife, a cut-in-half-lengthways courgette, enjoy kiddo.
I could not tell you anything aboutReality Bytes except for the title.
Sometimes the disasters are multi-generational: CNN Chryon: MEAT LOAF DEFENDS JUSTIN BIEBER.
On the subject of 18th century relatives, there's a story I've told here before:
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_6946.html#563591
To my discomfort, I see that I have also told the story in 80 before, in that same thread.
I know: tell once a year, fossilized, yadda yadda, but I'm on a self-awareness kick at the moment.
Reality Bites, has generational significance for me, not because of my age, but because Ebert and Siskel both hated it, thinking she should have chosen the Ben Stiller character. They essentially judged the movie as dads. I remember thinking "Wow!"
Anybody else remember "The Box," a uhf channel in some cities where you could make a call and play a video, like a video jukebox? Just watching what others called in was entertaining. Around '91. A way to keep up w/o MTV.
Re: phones
When I went to France on a homestay in 1989, the program sponsors told us that French families would be afraid when we picked up the phone. Why? American teenagers were known for talking on the phone for hours. Local calls in France were still billed by the minute.
I wonder if mine is the last cohort that had request-driven radio shows? Or is that even more location-bound?
Strauss & Howe go with '61-'81.
That makes Obama (August '61) the bleeding edge.
The '61-'65 or so period are in a miasmic zone. It really depends on where you identify. If you're born in that range, you can identify with the prior period, or with the upcoming one.
Anybody else remember "The Box," a uhf channel in some cities where you could make a call and play a video, like a video jukebox? Just watching what others called in was entertaining.
I remember that! It was still on when I was in high school. We didn't have cable, so it was the only way to see music videos on TV. Then MTV bought it and turned it into MTV2, which they later made cable-only, and that was that.
92: Oops. I remembered you and nosflow and paren and I were all approximately the same age but I guess I have the order all mixed up.
I think I'm the oldest out of the group! I can't tell for sure because SOMEBODY (essear) doesn't have his birthday listed on FB.
Weirdly, I'd never self-identify as a millennial. That's my sister, born 1989 and definitely a different generation than I. (Or maybe I'm just old. That's definitely possible.) I thought we were Generation Y? Or something.
I was born in 1978 but graduated college pre-dot com bust.
And this makes me feel like I really need to get cracking on the baby having, if I'm gonna. Heebie is only three years older than me!
146.1: Actually, trapnel is. I haven't actually had my birthday this year, it turns out.
I thought we were Generation Y? Or something.
My understanding is that "Generation Y" and "Echo Boomers" were both terms that were occasionally used to describe the generation now known as "Millennials" before that term caught on. I hate both those other terms, so if some other generations wants to use them, go ahead.
I like (and everyone hates) Josh Glenn's generational revision scheme. His generations are 10 years long, with middle-late-Gen Xers knows as the Reconstructionists, 1965-74, followed by the Revivalists, 1975-1984. (There's also an "OGX" from 1955-64.) This was illustrated for me powerfully when I played accordion for a gig with LA's psychobilly roots band The Evangenitals, fronted by a woman my age who likes to throw a klezmer Prince cover in with the scabrous country songs, when we were followed by younger The Dustbowl Revival, who, well, it's in the name. "Revivalists are precocious and earnest, entrepreneurial, and dedicated to renewing bygone cultural forms and franchises."
I'm a 1980 person and have identified as X mostly because the definitions of what comes after have always seemed messy and wrong. Since Lee was born in '62, we're both in generational gray zones on either side of Generation X. It feels like we should be in different generations, but I'm not convinced I quite belong with my younger brothers.
Oh dear god, 150 makes the need to do something with my life even more plain.
Um, that might sound overly weird, Thorn. Didn't mean it as such; just hadn't realised you were only a year older than me. I am sooo used to everyone having kids as 'older' than me that I'm beginning to forget it's now relatively normal for most of my peers to be parents! Aging, it's weird.
Ehhh, you went to grad school and aren't a worthless ignoramus like I am. It's also easier and faster for me to have kids than people doing the traditional baby thing. I mean, three in three years is doable, but it's really been more like 7 in 4.
Apparently, Generation Awesome was defined on Becks' old blog, which, like this one, is not in search engine caches. So the name is available for use again.
Oh, it's not just the baby having, it's like - getting your stuff together enough to have been a foster parent for the last 4 years!
Grad school just feels like extended undergrad for me, since I didn't end up with the degree and am not currently working in the field. Which is fine and happy and all (truly!), but it didn't leave me feeling particularly 'adult.' Well, beyond the whole need to go to bed before midnight thing. I've achieved that level of adulthood.
I have been going through a not-unhappy yet mildly crisis-like period in my life lately where I've realised that yo, I am actually 32 (or 33, as I seemed to think earlier) and it's a fine time in my life but hey, also I'm irrevocably an adult (and have been for some time) and woo there are choices to be made in the next few years that I'm really looking forward to ... and, and, and!
TL;DR - I've had a drink or two and am pondering life!
"Revivalists are precocious and earnest, entrepreneurial, and dedicated to renewing bygone cultural forms and franchises."
I liked this categorization better than most.
I remain enamored of my own, birth-president age cohort scheme. It has the advantage of variable length, with the one-termers corresponding to transitional periods anyway. And everybody already knows the dates and terminology. Try it!
Trumans, like me, are attriting away now. The responsible grownups on this site are Nixons.
I'm a Nixon. Not sure what that does for your theory.
Explain this birth-president scheme? Was it linked earlier? (I don't see it.)
I'm an LBJ child, which surprises me slightly, as I'd thought I was alive, just barely, when Kennedy was shot. But I guess not. So LBJ.
But this means nothing, IDP! I'm a Reagan young adult, and that's really all that counts. That's what shaped me.
It makes no matter. Reagan young adults were all born around the same time, by definition, and that time was K/J.
149: Hmm. I think I identify more with the "Social Darwikian" generation than with the "Revivalists" generation. But I was born near the border. I guess that's the problem with all of these classification schemes: the generational boundaries are kind of fluid, and people born near the edge of one of them in any classification scheme are probably going to feel like it doesn't quite fit them.
So that's why we're progressives?
Speaking of progressive things, David Simon on Bill Moyers on the crisis of capitalism in America.
I haven't seen it yet: my local PBS station has discontinued the Moyers & Company show just recently, it seems.
Gerald Fords are bored but Jimmy Carters are smarter.
I was born after Nixon was elected but before LBJ left office.
So I guess I narrowly escaped being a responsible adult.
Re 113
My grandfather is 100 in about 3 weeks. His Dad fought in the war, by which he meant the first Boer War. My Dad's mother (dead nearly 30 years ) remembered seeing Buffalo Bill, and Quern Victoria's death.
Can we count the full term Nixon was elected to, even if he didn't serve it? I don't wanna be a Ford.
I'm considering starting my memoirs with the line "I was born in the waning days of the Nixon administration."
I'm core Gen-X. ('72 ) by most definitions although I think, as Sifu says above, at one time that was considered the cut off. I definitely feel 'X' in terms of cultural references and experiences.
My sister (74) definitely feels like a different generation. Something I was conscious of even as a teenager. I remember discussing it with one of my parents when I was still at high school.
So I guess I narrowly escaped being a responsible adult
Ok, approximately. Simplified for clarity, about what birth president cohort a fortyish person is.
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I have a kind of memory trigger, so just now, the question about Gerald R., I heard the voice, in my mind's ear, of Tennessee Earnie Ford.
Serves me right.
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YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME A RESPONSIBLE ADULT, IDP.
The Reconstruction/Revival difference makes a lot of sense to me, for reasons that all fit pretty neatly into that night of music. I read Jameson and really wanted to find just one more thing to detourn, and everyone after me was just like, "let's do this cool thing really well!"
Granting in advance that "reading Jameson" is not a broadly applicable generational touchstone.
(1974: Revivalist cusper, mid-late Gen-X, Ford.)
The real divide is people born after somebody besides Big Bird saw Mr. Snuffalufagus and decent people.
You said 163 funnier last time.
The revivalist description is embarrassingly apt, for me. Maybe because we're Carter babies.
Paren, if it's any consolation, we're not done having babies. So you could easily finish up at a younger age than I will, and not be rushing at all. Not that you have to have babies, of course, and also not any time soon. Unless you are pregnant right now. In which case, congrats.
178: Wow, I used to remember repeat conversations. Age is really starting to take a toll.
169: That's very weird. As someone born in '75, I'd have said that I felt myself to be more of the earlier generation than the later one. I was in college when Reality Bites came out and not in the working world, but it was definitely part of my cultural landscape.
Speaking of teh old, I've found myself living my dad's joke about needing new glasses or longer arms.
I wonder if I can get Reality Bytes on any streaming service I'm subscribed to.
Or Bites I guess. The first time was a joke.
146.1: Actually, trapnel is.
Thanks for the reminder. As far as growing up goes, I'm hoping to actually get a job before I turn 34, but we'll see how that goes.
I knew I'd had some of this conversation before; I didn't know I'd had all of it, maybe better.
I was just now tempted to tell a joke which occurred to me, but then realized I'd probably told that before, too.
Fun to watch mc and biohazard, a couple of Trumans, going at each other as if the other foolery were not going on around them.
178: Wow, I used to remember repeat conversations
Have I told you about Randolph Bourne?
1980, and therefore a lateish Revivalist. I see a lot of truth in that (explains the northern soul dancing and the investigations blog and the startup eh) but I'd draw a distinction between people who were young enough in the 90s to enter the labour market during the long bull run and those who weren't. Perhaps if you got in early, the stuff about entrepreneurship rings true; if you came later, you got to watch it all go pets.com, then Enron, and that was just the trailer for the 2000s....if we were entrepreneurial, we were entrepreneurial because building your own damn artisanal toast was an option in the way that just having a reasonable job wasn't.
"Scrabbling about in the ruins since 1980..."
It's kinda telling how many people I went to school with chose some form of emigration, whether physical (the guy who went to South Korea and ended up with a business, a Korean wife, and a lock on the title of the ROK's leading grime and dubstep DJ) or logical (the Army, finance as an identity, running away to the Internet and taking up with a much older woman).
181: Good point! No baby gestating at present, nor in the near future! (Which to be honest, since I've always been ambivalent about children, is a good thing.)