Professor Niraj Dawar is advancing a new theory that could change the way we think about generations. He argues in the Harvard Business Review that labels such as ‘millennial,’ ‘Gen-Xer,’ and ‘Baby Boomer,’ are defined only by dates and not by shared traits – so that the terms have lost their descriptive meaning.
These ever-shifting age brackets came into the vernacular as a quick way to describe the way huge groups of people live, spend, and vote. But Dawar argues that the labels now only signify age, and group members may not have any shared traits (besides being born within a certain span of years).
“This segmentation scheme is perhaps marketers’ most successful product. And it is, unfortunately, mostly nonsense,” Dawar explains. “For example, is it more informative to say 30–40 year olds or Gen Xers? Calling them Gen Xers presumes that there is something generational about their characteristics that will remain constant as they traverse different age groups. But most often the label is used as a substitute for an age bracket.”
In short, all millennials started the game of LIFE around the same time, but we are now scattered across the playing board. If you are, for instance, on a square that says “change career path, draw new card” – you have more in common with others on that same space (no matter when they started playing) than you do with the people who started playing when you did.
No categorization system is perfect. Dawar notes that “the cutoff dates for the generations…are entirely arbitrary.” A 34-year-old is considered a millennial, but is that person more similar to a 35-year-old Gen-Xer or another millennial who is ten years their junior?
Lumping everyone born in a 20-year period together allows people to take the intellectually lazy route of treating each generation as monolithic.
Right-of-center millennials know this all too well. It’s frustrating and inaccurate for the conservatives among us to be generationally lumped together with the special snowflakes screaming for safe spaces.
So if the labels currently in use aren’t detailed enough, would other social markers be better?
Trying to categorize young people by gender or religion is likely a futile effort, since millennials are least likely to be practicing a religion or to consider themselves bound to traditional gender roles. These things still impact our lives in concrete ways, but they have less sway over us than they did for our parents and grandparents.
Dividing us up by political party would be a useless endeavor because millennials tend to reject those labels. Group us by party, and you’ll leave out the 48 percent who don’t identify as Republican or Democrat.
Education level and income bracket can help us drill deeper into the ways that people live on a day-to-day basis. Location is another crucial component: The salary that affords someone a comfortable life in St. Louis could leave them struggling in San Francisco.
What unites millennials is not just our birth dates, but that we are a generation of people who believe each has something special to contribute – though we resist being categorized with one another. Dawar highlights the fact that age-based labels have very limited descriptive ability. Besides our birthdays, it seems that the only thing that millennials have in common is our perceived uniqueness.
