The Z Machine

I very strongly disagree with the manner in which our pop culture both misunderstands and then subsequently "misuses" generation names. First to note, these are not hard and fast categories. It is not like the naming of a generation comes from either an official need to do so or a traditional framework that happens according to certain parameters. Every state has a state bird, every U.S. President has some favorite snack on record, pretty much for the sake of lightheartedly knowing weird trivia like Ronald Reagan was the jelly bean president. It's as if to say, "We've tracked it before, therefore it's a thing we should always track." I’m not against that, but that’s not how it works with naming generations.

Widely started with Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation" giving rise to that phrase popularly being attached to those who fought in WWII; referring to a generation by a collective name was neither something we'd traditionally tracked, nor something that was even a sociological measure. The name of a generation is basically a meme, repeated enough times that everyone knows the ad hoc reference. It’s a matter of multiple authors or speakers through multiple platforms throwing different names against a wall and not even anticipating which will stick. We treat the names of generations (and even what we might numerically consider to be half-step generations) as if there is science to it, as if there’s a cut-off date where one officially begins, and another officially ends. We treat the act as if there is some sort of official process a body of similarly aged persons is filtered through to arrive at a factual result. There is nothing official and almost nothing resultantly factual about it. Sure, it’s somewhat helpful to collectivize voting blocs by age and, if you do you, you’ll need a manner in which to refer to them in conversation. But beyond that, the name of a generation, the span of time it supposedly covers, and the manner in which we come by a name is all traditionally happenstance by design.

Some of the names that happened to stick (Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Me Generation) generally did so in presumed relation to observable and pan-applicable commonalities shared by the persons said to be part of that bloc. Greatest Generation, as a title, was a broad capture, associating folks by who’d lived in The Great Depression and then fought in that world war. Though broad, that was an easy one to understand because, globally, no one was untouched by those two world events.

Flimsily trying to use that touchstone as what makes a generation, the commonality factor, then we had the narrower commonality of Baby Boomers, people born in large numbers soon after the war when soldiers returned home and started families. I mean, I am quite certain that with very few statistical outliers, all those people had something more in common throughout the longest lives in recorded history, than the mere timing of their births, perhaps even predominantly so. While not everyone in that group would have been a greaser or a rock ‘n’ roll fan or a target for McCarthyism, that generation could have just as easily been named The Tail Fins Generation or the TV Generation or The Desegregation Generation. How bizarre the stretch to need to start naming groups by birth brackets and how much more bizarre the almost accidental stretch for commonality to reach the name “Baby Boomers?”

I begrudge no one their attempt to add a literary moniker to a group. But the rest of us have lost the plot. Naming a generation, as is now a new tradition, carries about as much weight as being born under a given constellation. It’s a forced preamble. When you hear of a generation by name, your mind would do well to temporarily rename it in your head to something like The Scorpio generation before discussing it. Do not draw suppositions from these titles.

In fact, if we put that happenstance design under a microscope, in absence of the, say, every-digit meaning that goes into something like a social security number or, say, a system by which we know when the ensuing year will be the Year of the Monkey; the few “practices” you can conclude that go into naming a generation are thus:

1) They tend to be based upon a perceived commonality

2) They tend to be named after-the-fact, often by people not part of that generation

3) While there is an unconscious acceptance of the name, the way there is of a meme, people belonging to that generation generally do not get to pick and choose their own group moniker.

4) We call it a whole generation, as if global, but the chosen names tend to be situationally limited to Americans.

Fast forward to the name that stuck with my generation, Generation X. There are scant few born later than us who even remotely know that Gen X was the name that stuck to us as Coupland’s book was trying to follow this oh-so-loose commonality tradition. We were called Generation X supposedly because there was no, one single commonality between us. The X was like an unknown in a math equation. In fact, “Generation X” was an older phrase borrowed from previous generations, back then meaning disenfranchised youth or alienated teens, a phrase originally intended to separate out a body of persons from the larger generational bloc; which, almost ironically, was first applied to the same generation we now call boomers. Shorthand, “Generation X” as a term was meant for “greasers,” but never stuck. Decades later, post Me Generation and/or Silent Generation, Coupland’s version stuck during a period of time when everything out of Hollywood was made to sound more exciting by use of an “X” (X-Files, American History X, the origins of Netflix, the film for Malcom X, X-Men, The Matrix, and for those who get the Stargate meta-reference, “Wormhole X.”). This newer version was a sort of anti-commonality describing mainly kids of the 70s and 80s as having no, one, big, shared factor that would define us in distinctive parallel against other groups, named or unnamed.

So, this is where the misuse and misunderstanding comes in. Gen Y and Gen Z were then “chosen” to follow Gen X, misinformedly so, as if there had been a Gen D, Gen E, and Gen F. There were not. The scotoma-adjacent grand explanation for the appearance of the new terms is a repeated, meme-driven supposition that the practice is derived from an implied sequencing, like naming this year’s hurricanes in alphabetical order or sticking decimal points after new releases of computer applications. Again, this had never been. Such ignores all four, now frequented, ingredients to how generations take on names: perceived commonality in the title, not getting to choose your own generational group name, an American focus, and getting named in some semblance of hindsight. That’s before we even mention that “Gen Y” and “Gen Z,” likewise, lack much of the “throw it against a wall and see what sticks” quality, among several options, as had been the case for others since we’d started the practice.

Gen Y, if there is such a thing, whether referred to that way or alternatively labelled as millennials, are only passively referenced, without any more meaning or identity than being in direct shadow of another generation, or in an even narrower, boomer-like, birth proximity to a specific, but almost numerically mundane date. They have a date-name that linguistically prescribes everyone born for about 99 years into a single millennial status, despite the arbitrary and wildly disparate year brackets assigned them, those generally topping out across all barely overlapping OPINIONS somewhere in the late 90s. It’s all accidental, but nonetheless hogwash! The youth of Gen Y and Gen Z deserve better.

Further, the quick-to-stick presumption that there is only sequencing and no meaning in naming a generation, the precept that gives us “Gen Y” as a term, effectively erases the once au courant and poignant gravitas of “Gen X.” It is as if what little identity GenXers would take from that title has been erased and forgotten. We were on track to be predominantly called The Slacker Generation, The Latchkey Generation, or the MTV Generation, the lot having to do with the perceived breakdown in family values and work ethic, all names that we seemed to accept as we grew up and proved them ironic or wrong. Yet we happily accepted “Gen X” and its actual meaning as this sort of badge. It was as if the observation of our collective dissimilarity was an indication that we’d finally reached a flexion point in American freedoms. We were an unboxable, undefinable, je ne sais quoi, accepting enough of all peoples that no one trait rose to the top as widely applicable. It is a name that we continued to proudly embody well into our adult years. It was a name that simultaneously flipped the script from previous groups, while coming about under the same accepted conditions.

Now, sequencing it into a small, meaningless enumeration, Gen X is suddenly not the last fortunate generation to have had deeper meaning in its label, mine even against a powerful backdrop of disproven prejudgments, but instead the first generation in our ever-more-passive acceptance of thinking as if we are machines. Do we need to name generations? No. Nor do we constellations or ships or songs. But there is this inherent marginalization that comes from ascribing a namelessness to any person or any group. And when that namelessness has the absent-minded power to look back from a forced void and thrust that emptiness onto other people, ideas, and mainstays, it’s not just a misunderstanding…it’s a revisionist history, a poorly applied presentism that seeks to define the past in terms of today, including the baseline premise that today’s definition is zero sum. This is not the act of being misinformed as much as it is the black hole equivalent of what it takes to remain uninformed.

My 16-year-old, born in 2007, and my 11-year-old in 2012, have a full-out argument about once every four months as to whether or not they belong to the same generation, always followed by the conclusion that they do not, and the ensuing, unavoidable “why my generation is better than yours” debate in anger. They are only four-and-a-half years apart. And it’s no wonder when they are pulling their evidences from varied teachers, citing varied look-ups, all with sporadic assignments of year brackets and pop confusion about which name might belong where on a timeline. Plus, there’s all the misapplications of similar look-ups across YouTube voices and TikTok videos. “Why” never comes into it.

Is it not more useful to append those new labels and instead talk about the possibility of a Pandemic Generation, tracing their collective gap in education and/or income out into the results of seasoned adult lives? How about the Generation of Political Divide, the slews upon droves of children in the millions raised during the most politically divisive and longest sustained 50/50 split in our governance in history? I could list a hundred possibilities, none of which changes who an individual is, what they face, or how they overcome. The point is that the blind and uninformed acceptance of a non-existent system yielding meaningless names, works against anything that would allow an applicable name to stick; works against that last bastion of passive, unilateral agreement that is everybody looking up from a book or paper or a broadcast or even an Instagram post and silently nodding to themselves, saying, “Yeah, yeah, that’s us.” One cannot hope to use a benign placeholder, now, and expect something better will automatically arrive to supplant it in the collective psyche. In a world where no 18-year-old can be provided the impetus to cross-reference beyond scanning the first couple sentences in each of the first two Google hits, the placeholder is their answer, their truth, their go-to, even when they do not know what the heck they are talking about. People have formed a comfortable, cognitive dissonance from their informational sources that functions much the same way that we’ve overwhelmingly distanced ourselves from our food sources. Using the term "Gen Z" is little different from ordering something from a menu that just says, "Meat."

Generations are strange, as we view them, collecting folks together in groups not by their true time on this Earth, but ultimately by their first twenty years. That’s quite the narrow gap in which to debate a shared start date and end date, particularly when there is disagreement. Then sometimes we skew the results around some linchpin commonality the way redistricting can either positively solidify voting blocs or disenfranchise them with an arbitrary line down the middle. The best thing we can do is to stop referring to present and future generations by letters and numbers and systems, and instead let them craft the umbrellas that will hang over all their heads until a decent, studied hindsight can identify what color that umbrella should be.