Do you think the generation names like gen z millennial etc apply to non American?

14 comments

1. They don’t even apply that cleanly to Americans. They’re very broad categories mostly used for marketing and inflammatory headlines.

   Even a lot of the research around generational differences mostly collects a specific age or age range and the generation stuff gets tacked on later.

2. Millennial certainly does.

3. I hope not. The stereotypes that are attributed to each so-called generation are a stupidity.

4. I’m a non-American. The boomer generation definitely does. Other than that, *sooort of* but not really, even though lazy journalists really, *really* try to make it work.

   People who came of age in the 80s are sometimes known as “Thatcher’s children”. I guess they sort of correspond to Gen Xers, but the stereotypes are a bit different.

5. Generational terms are really arbitrary.

   Some make sense. The Silent generation were those who grew up during the Depression but were too young to serve in WW2. Boomers are born after WW2. But then it gets fuzzy.

   Some say Zoomers start at the age where you can’t remember 9/11. So born after 1996 or so. Two problems with that: One, for most younger kids who do remember 9/11, life really didn’t change in any noticeable way even if they remember the event. It was a tragedy and it upended politics, but 12-year-olds aren’t paying attention to that stuff.

   And two, it’s very American-centric.

   So the answer is probably not. They may work. But it may be something completely different depending on the events that shaped your country.

6. I know some generation names don’t apply in many countries but I feel like Millennials should at least.

   One of the biggest hallmarks for Millennials is the Internet and access to information. It’s native for them. Even I, born at the tail end of Gen X, didn’t grow up with the Internet. I could kinda sorta use it when I needed something in high school but to me, “the Internet” was chat rooms for socially awkward. I think growing up with the Internet happened around the same time for most of the world, and that’s a big part of the Millennial Generation. So that one, yes.

7. Yes, I have sometimes seen these used for non-Americans, but generally speaking, many countries and cultures often have their own unique names for respective generations.

8. You certainly could and some people do.

   It makes some sense for countries that are experiencing similar demographic trends and less sense for those that are not.

   Generations are entirely artificial. Humans don’t breed in generations. As a result, these labels always have their share of utility and drawbacks. Applying them to other countries can easily be done (just compare birth years) but runs the risk of using generational markers that aren’t particularly relevant to the country in question.

   [edit – the largest reason that generational talk is considered slightly more valid than astrology is that the US did go through a massive demographic transition following WW2 making generational markers easier to point out.

   [https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/us-population-pyramid-2020-infographic-1024×791.jpg](https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/us-population-pyramid-2020-infographic-1024×791.jpg)

   If this chart was smoother, most people would put less stock in generational markers, but you can see the various generations just looking at this]

9. I think that’s a question for non-Americans.

10. Interesting question! Probably not. I mean, let’s say China, there’s probably people who lived through Mao’s famine and those who didn’t. Then there are the people who became middle class (and up) after the 90’s. And of course, only children due to the one child policy, the “Little Emperors.” Then there are city people vs. farmers. I would imagine China has their own categories, maybe not based on arbitrary generational cutoffs. (In fact, I find our generational categories to be kind of stupid.)

11. No. These are 100% Americanisms

12. Honestly, no.

    They barely apply to most people in the categories- people keep having to refine and define them to fit more edge-cases. The social pressures that supposedly made Generation X, for example, latchkey children wouldn’t necessarily apply to someone from an Asian, African, Latin-American or even European background.

    For instance, a child born under China’s one-child policy would be about 44 years old now- early middle-age, not too far off from my own age-cohort. But they’d be subject to pressures I wouldn’t have had growing up, have different opportunities and limitations, and would end up with a different outlook than mine. I don’t think “Gen X” applies. Let alone cutesy side-groups like “The Oregon Trail generation”.

13. Maybe in very recent years. But in the past, no way. It’s one of my pet peeves

    Those labels are very American-specific, based on the cultural developments and economy of the post-World War II United States, which was unlike just about any other country in the world at the time. It’s intimately tied in with American suburbanization (including the continuing migration from farms to more urban areas), the surge of babies being born into that prosperous world (hence *Baby* Boomers, not Boomers*) and the position of the United States on the top of the economic heap practically by itself for a number of years. No other country relates to that and no other country had generations defined in the same way by those factors, because one led into the next. It’s a joke to try to directly apply them anywhere else.

    * It’s not just an age, it was a demographic bubble that had a profound effect on the development of US society

14. No, and it shouldn’t be either. The U.S. census bureau defines the baby boom era from 1946-1964. This boom was for specific reasons in America but doesn’t necessarily apply in all regions and countries. Think about India after independence from Britain. That must be a major event that affected the generations around that time in specific ways. What about China after the implementation of the one child policy? On and on.