Stop Talking About
My Generation

The generation label was always a lazy shortcut. It’s now a detour. It's time to end it.

The best evidence is how far we're stretching to keep naming these things. We've come full circle from Gen Z to Gen Alpha, inventing new labels faster than they can mean anything.

A generation label is the definition of a cliché. There's a kernel of truth in it, but it's over-used, imprecise, and not insightful enough to build a context-specific decision on.

Worse, it trains you to see people in two dimensions in an age when it's both possible and necessary to see them in three.

They started with the intent to capture The Lost Generation's shared disillusionment after World War I. Later, it required a 432 page book to make the Millennial generational argument honestly.

See, if there’s a meaningful understanding of a generation to be had, it doesn’t come from a bumper sticker or an astrological sign.

Sure, we can laugh about an era-specific corny song or movie we share. But ask yourself what you actually do with familiar lines like these, beyond making a cheesy joke:

• Baby Boomers bought houses for $20,000, lived through Woodstock, and now refuse to retire or stop blaming Millennials for avocado toast.

• Generation X are latchkey kids raised on MTV and sarcasm, fiercely independent, allergic to corporate enthusiasm.

• Millennials are burdened by student debt and propped up by participation trophies, killers of the diamond industry, eternally seeking validation.

• Generation Z is glued to TikTok, painfully online, allegedly incapable of a phone call.

• Generation Alpha was born with an iPad in hand and will never know a world without instant algorithmic gratification.

Some may not be false, they’re just not full. It’s people as punchlines.

What survives in commerce and culture is stripped of everything that made the original idea worth taking seriously. Good for an era when media meant a handful of networks and magazines, but media has fragmented into a million algorithmic feeds, and the shortcut no longer leads anywhere useful.

The Pew Research Center, the institution most invested in generational frameworks, is moving away from them over concerns about scientific accuracy. There's no official definition, no governing body, no consensus on where one generation ends and the next begins. Dates shift depending on who's selling what.

The traits assigned to each cohort ignore race, class, geography, and individual experience so thoroughly that the label tells you less about a person than almost any other data point you could collect.

Meaning, some of the most expensive decisions about product development, market entry, capital allocation, and talent may be built on a taxonomy that even its biggest champions have abandoned.

A 22-year-old first-generation immigrant in Lagos and a 22-year-old in Tribeca are nominally the same "generation." What strategic insight does that shared label actually produce? None you couldn't get more precisely, and more honestly, another way.

The framework doesn't just describe difference; it manufactures it.

"OK Boomer" as cultural shorthand isn't organic tension, it's the residue of decades of segmentation that trained us to treat age as the primary axis of human difference. It isn't, and it never was.

Look beneath the label and the real clustering shows up elsewhere.

• A teenager and her grandfather are both rewatching the same show, worried about the same AI, baking the same sourdough. Some variation of this has been happening for 1,000 years.

• A 45-year-old and a 19-year-old who share a subculture or a design sensibility have more in common than either has with their "own" generation.

That psychographic, behavioral, cultural connective tissue cuts across age lines with insight birth year buckets can't touch.

This is where the opportunity sits for marketers, investors, and operators alike. How many marketing plans and pitch decks say "targeting Millennials" as if that phrase does real analytical work, when it actually obscures more than it reveals?

Businesses built on genuine behavioral and community insight, rather than demographic pattern-matching, aren't just better marketed. They're more defensible, because they're built on how people actually behave, not on which decade they were born in.

Generation labels are for fun. Or historians tracing the long arc in-depth. As a marketing shortcut, or really any meaningful insight, I’d put it right up there with astrological signs.

The audience you've been trying to reach was never a generation. It was always just specific, complicated, dimensional people.

Go find who and where they actually are.

________

The Immortal Words: Phillip Pullman is a children’s book author who believes that children deserve quality literature, and that there isn't a clear demarcation between children's and adult literature because people are too complicated for simple labels: "It would be nice to think that normal human curiosity would let us open our minds to experience from every quarter, to listen to every storyteller in the marketplace.”