For as ubiquitous as generational influence is, we have little shared understanding of what makes a generation … a generation. Yet, the information is available and knowable. Here are some basics:
First, we need to understand that generations, like people, have a life path. —
- They are born.
- They have a childhood.
- They come of age.
- They move into young adulthood.
- They move into midlife, they move into elderhood, and they die.
Generations, like people, have a desire to shape the world, to leave their mark on the world, to be known for something.
And this creates a sense of urgency around what they want to do at that time in life … what they want to fix and how they can make the world a better place.
William Strauss & Neil Howe (authors of many books on generations) describe three core things that define a generation —
- Shared age location in history
- Common and shared beliefs and behaviors
- Shared sense of perceived membership in a generation
1 – Shared age location in history
Think about COVID-19 (an outerworld event that affects all age groups) and consider how the event impacts the generation in each phase of life —
- Childhood
- Coming of age
- Young adulthood
- Midlife
- Elderhood
Same event but very different experiences, depending on what age you and your generation are when larger outer events happen.
2 – Common and shared beliefs and behaviors
We need to remember when we’re talking about people born over a period of roughly 20 years’ time, you can have tens and tens of millions of people in each generation, so there’s a lot of room for individual expression and variation … for fuzziness around the edges of definitions.
It is equally true that each generation has a core personality, a core archetype. Which means these core, shared beliefs and behaviors can show up in many ways across generations such as wildly different attitudes around —
- Risk-taking and entrepreneurialism
- Trust in government
- Family, parenting and child nurture
- Fads and experimental lifestyles
- Civic engagement
- And much more.
3 – Shared sense of perceived membership in a generation
The third thing that generations have in common is a shared sense and perception of being members in the same generation.
You may be quite different from your generation’s core personality. Or you might land smack dab in the middle of it and identify very much so with it. Either way, people look to their own generation for alignment. Everyone does this, whether they’re focused on it or if they just do it in the back of their minds.
Endowments & gifts to society
All generations have both negative and positive endowments that they leave society. Each generation also has excesses and deficiencies that future generations feel it’s their job to correct and fix.
And so the cycle continues!
