Yet another factor that’s contributing to massive changes in our world: Gen We.
Demography has interested me since way back when I read Boom, Bust & Echo in high school (it was one of the only books I read in high school), but this newest generation is really getting fascinating…
Myself, I was born right at the absolute lowest point of the Baby Bust in 1978 — right on the edge of both Generation X and this new generation. I’m sure it must have some kind of effect but I think there’s also a danger of over-analyzing this stuff. Is ‘socioanalysis’ a word? Well it should be, and it deserves every bit as much skepticism and scorn as ‘psychoanalysis.’
But marketers, journalists, consultants, think-tankers, and academics need to generate theories and narratives or they’ll starve. So we hear that “this generation went to market, this generation stayed home, this generation had roast beef, this generation had none, and this generation…
This generation — the Echo Boom, children of Baby Boomers, Generation Me, Generation Y, the Millennial Generation – is getting more attention than all the rest have combined.
The simplest explanation for all the attention is that demographic research has grown sophisticated and mature. Older generations are largely either lost or locked-in. But the kids are still very much in play, and the competition to figure them out and win them over is fierce.
The other reason is that designers and producers have already generated huge technological capacity (and even greater intentions yet to be realized) just waiting to be developed and turned into new applications and uses. The most ambitious creators tend to be drawn to youthful markets because that’s where the most adventurous activities and styles are most likely to be adopted.
And then of course there’s the simple fact of size. It’s a big generation with a lot of influence and buying power.
There’s already a substantial body of literature on the generation currently in their teens and twenties. (The authors of Generation We define it as the 95 million Americans born between 1978 and 2000.) Generation Me by Jean Twenge and The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein are two other books that have received a lot of attention. Much of it (as you can tell from the titles) is not very flattering.
Tammy Erickson has been a more positive commentator on the new generation(s). I’ve been following her Harvard Business Press blog, where she mainly discusses hiring and employing (and retaining and rewarding) younger people today.
An especially pertinent post was on how to name the emerging generation that is just turning 13 (or almost 13-and-a-half by now, I suppose):
I think the Re-Generation has a number of appropriate associations:
Reality – This generation will come of age in a world that is grappling with some difficult, inconvenient truths. They will form a mental map based on a world with finite limits and no easy answers.
Realists – Theirs will be a generation of pragmatists, raised by their down-to-earth Gen X parents to consider trade-offs and long-term balance.
Restraint and Responsibility – Necessary postures for them to adopt
Renewable energy, Recycling, Reducing carbon emissions, and Resource limitations – Challenges they will face
Self-Reliance – Their X’er parents’ dominant trait, along with Resentment that older adults have been poor stewards of our world
Recession – Hopefully not something they’ll face throughout their formative years, but demographics alone make it likely that economic conditions over the next decade will be more conservative than the upbeat decades past
Rethink, Renew, and Regenerate – The challenges for this generation
What she came up with is the “The Re-Generation, or Re-Gens for short.” Functional and meaningful — especially considering what has happened since she wrote that (in July) — but doesn’t quite seem to click. I thought about it, slept on it, thought about it some more, and still couldn’t come up with anything better.
Then a few hours ago I found this video, via 3 Quarks Daily, via Andrew Sullivan who related it to his incredibly prescient essay in The Atlantic on Obama and the post-Baby Boom age (published in December 2007):
This is the critical context for the election of 2008. It is an election that holds the potential not merely to intensify this cycle of division but to bequeath it to a new generation, one marked by a new war that need not be—that should not be—seen as another Vietnam. [...]
The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man. [...]
Obama, simply by virtue of when he was born, is free of this defensiveness. Strictly speaking, he is at the tail end of the Boomer generation. But he is not of it. [...]
At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.
With that in mind, the “Generation We” seems like it could be an adjunct to the Obama campaign (e.g. proposing a massive ‘moonshot’ program of energy innovation… and notice, as an aside, that by invoking Kennedy the Baby Boomers still have a lot of influence: Tammy Erickson pointed out elsewhere that Generation Y actually looks to their parents a lot more than might be assumed).
Of course, getting back to politics, it could just as easily work the other way — Obama just as likely attached himself to the emerging demographic and our values.
While I don’t buy into a lot of the socioanalysis, I can’t wait to see how all of this plays out. Definitely fascinating — yet another hugely influential factor when trying to get a sense of the future.
Btw, don’t mistake Generation We as a grassroots movement. On one level it’s a couple of old guys trying to sell a book. But that’s not to say there isn’t also a lot of insight and information and inspiration to glean from their work.
Those of us born in the late 70′s and early 80′s can fall into either Generation X or Generation Y (aka Generation We). In many ways the onus is on us. We’ll have the toughest go. If the new generation turns out great we’ll be too old to share the credit. Meanwhile, if the new generation turns out to be a disaster we’ll be lumped in with them and have to share the blame.
On the positive side, we’re young enough to adapt yet old enough to know better – just wise enough to know when not to adapt, or at least wise enough to ask questions.
Are we ready?
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