NEXT AVENUE - SPECIAL SECTION
What Matters More Than Age Generational framing obscures the far larger role that class, along with race and gender, plays in shaping our lives.
Age plays much less of a role in shaping our paths through life than we think it does — far less than social factors like socioeconomic status, geography, ethnicity and gender. Falling into the "generation trap" distracts us from deeper questions of power and privilege.
Applying a generational lens obscures the multitude of inequities that exist within age cohorts and also cut across them.
Both the 1% and the 99% are made up of all ages. Net worth increases with age because people tend to acquire assets over time but maps far more closely to education level (a proxy for class). This reflects the legacy of systemic racism as well as the gender wage gap, which cuts across all age groups and demographics and widens significantly for women of color.
If we want a more equitable world, we have to wrestle with these commingled aspects of identity and opportunity and give age no more than its due. Another problem with making claims about an entire age cohort —whether about how much one "generation" has in common with another or how little —is that it invariably results in crude generalizations which undergird all prejudice.
Plenty of olders are in better health than millions of youngers. Saints and sinners come in all ages. And so on.
The only characteristic older people share, along with diminishing physical capacity, is ever-increasing heterogeneity: the longer we live, the more different from each other we become and the less our age reveals about us.
How to Think Less Generationally Let's break the "generations" habit unless we're using the term specifically —to describe immigration trends, for example, or family trees or genetic patterns. Try "age group" instead or "age cohort" if you want to sound like a demographer.
Try "mixed age" or "age-diverse" to describe events that involve an age range, instead of letting "intergenerational" do all the lifting.
Try describing what people are doing or saying or listening to instead of using their age as a key identifier.
Instead of referring to yourself as a boomer, Gen Xer or Millennial, try Perennial— writer Gina Pell's witty suggestion for what those of us who don't want to be constrained by generational moats start calling ourselves. Generational framing serves marketers, reactionaries and vested interests — but not Perennials — or the public good.
Read more stories like this on NextAvenue.org
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