What do you think of Generation Y?

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It makes you about 30 years old.

ruveyn

I am in the Gen X range. I can't characterize a whole generation but I can characterize the people that I have met from both generations. The baby boomers that I have met like to think of their generation as the "last generation to do.......whatever" entirely too much for my tastes. I learned how to write papers using pen and paper and without a word processor and spell checker like many others my age. And we had to do it uphill, in the rain, both ways just like ruveyn. But, I think this is just a tendency for people as they get older.

Generation Y people that I have met seem to expect immediate success in their chosen endeavors and are very open minded and in many cases just open minded for open mindedness sake. I was kinda like that when I was younger so it may have something to do with age.

Gen Xers are next in line for the management positions if not already in one (yes, thank you) with there being less quality applicants compared to the numbers of Baby Boomers when it was there generation's time, so things are looking pretty good.

I wonder if my 11 year old son will say the same thing about your generation?

Almost certainly.

ruveyn

Here in the U.S. people of my cohort (and to some extent I personally) helped run the Soviet Union into the rocks. I will not apologize for that. It was a GOOD thing. We ran their legs off. Good-bye Marx, Good-bye Lenin, Good-bye Stalin and most of the other Red Fascist Thugs. Contrary to what Marx wrote, history was on OUR side. In addition we prodded the Chinese into becoming somewhat capitalistic. You will notice that nowhere in the world is Communism on the March. It is nearly dead. And the few places where it is taken seriously such as North Korea are squalid cesspools.

And if you want to piss and moan about environmental problems write to the Chinese to stop building coal burning electrical power generators. They are putting them up at the rate of six a year.

ruveyn

I assure you they matter. The are living far too long and draining huge amounts of resources away from people who need them.

I actually was contributing my share of resources to the population at large, until the company that took over our contract got rid of anyone over 45.... When I get a job, I'll go right back to pulling my own weight...

Ok - Technically, the Baby Boom is anyone born between 1946-64. Which always made me wonder, people born in 46 were having kids in 64, are they both Boomers? In the generations before that (Greatest, etc), maybe things didn't change fast enough to put 18 years in a single generation.

X is 65- either late 70s or early 80s.

Y is their kids

Millennials (honest, that's the name they came up with) are the latest. Most of them are still in grade school at best...

But as I said before, it's so 5 minutes ago divvying up people based on when they were born.

1. what is with everyone signing each post with their name?
2. I refer to the $9 trillion debt your generation imposed on us, the depleting of medicare and social security, vietnam, pretty much causing all of the modern problems in the middle east, need I go on?

I was born in 1926. I have never found myself in agreement with any generation in general and especially not mine. I bear no responsibility for the multitudes of idiots that are, in one way or another, involved with human activities and have found I am unable to influence opinions of anybody. I assumed that a good many people in this site have had the same experience.

being born in 1986, i suppose that makes me Gen X? <.< (Amusing since there's a Yu-Gi-Oh machine family called the "Genex" <.< )

Is that supposed to be a good thing? You're the ones who are getting the crooks into power!


Most people I know prefer physical books and I am certainly not in your generation. Not only that, but a lot of people here have some knowledge on philosophy or history despite the fact that only a few are elderly.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 16 Jul 2009, 12:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Since you are taking personal credit for the collapse of communism, are you taking personal responsibility for the death squads in Central America or the napalming of children in Vietnam??

I think it's ridiculous to write as though any given person born within a certain timeframe can take either credit or blame for everything happening in the world while they are a certain age. "Generations" don't do anything except have birthdays within 20 years of each other. A "generation" doesn't start a war nor does a "generation" protest a war. Specific individuals who may or may not have birthdays near each other start and protest wars. Same with all the other nonsense supposedly done by a "generation". Individuals do things. Not generations. And the entire idea of a generation is rather absurd to begin with. I find it absurd to think that a person born in 1946 has more in common with a person born in 1964 than they do with a person born in 1945. But since you can't describe a generation without describing a beginning birthday and an ending birthday, that's exactly the absurdity that people must embrace in order to accept the concept of generation.

People often say "the Baby Boomers protested the Vietnam War". Actually, most of them didn't. Only some who were adults actually took part in protests. And those who were born in the early 60's (but still defined as Baby Boomers) were actually little children at the time of the protests. Sticking children and adults together in the same generation is a necessity for people who don't want to come up with a new moniker every 5 years, but it does make it absurd to think they were actually doing things together. And of course not everybody who is the same age- or even within 5 years of the same age- does the same thing. At most they use the same technologies and react to the same national and international events. But to think that they all react the same way (or are affected by the technology the same way) is nonsensical. It's nonsense that journalists love to promote because it makes for interesting magazine articles. But it's nonsense nonetheless.

I think I'll have to agree with Max Planck when he said:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

It seems to hold true for many things in life, not only science.

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Last edited by xenon13 on 21 Jul 2009, 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not sure that's entirely clear; humans are highly social animals with likely a degree of distribution of thought etc. among the many elements of the society. It would not be surprising at all to find emergent properties of some collection of communicating humans. Humans may not be a super-organism, but that doesn't mean that ignoring higher level structures entirely is a sensible way to approach things.

To assume generality from generations is not much different from racism.