Strauss-Howe generations are true-democratic analogues of imperial (“Victorian”) or elected administration (“Thatcher era”, “Clinton administration”) eras.
People who complain about statistical flimsiness miss the point. The ceremonial marking *causes* the identity formation.
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Ie you don’t have a certain personality because you were born in a certain year and we’re therefore shaped by specific consciousness shaping events.
You *decide* to identify with a collective consciousness narrative based on your birth year. It’s like citizenship, not ethnicity.
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Your natural, unchangeable trairs (birth year, ethnicity, birth gender, birth religion, skin color) give you opt-in access to certain shared narratives, and you pick a few that fit. I self-selected into generational identity narrative because I fit the cliches of GenX well.
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It’s a bit like the sorting hat except at a meta level. Your opinions matter before the sorting hat declares you to be GenX/Myers-Briggs INTP/Scorpio/Year of Tiger, and then you let the stories you pick shape you a bit from then on. Personal cultural product-market fit.
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They are tools. If people use them as descriptive, great! But that's not how people apply these descriptions to themselves. Sadly, most people see myers-briggs, generational-theory and horoscopes not as descriptive but as predictive.
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This is so clear to those of us on the edge. Being born 6 weeks prior to the Millennial cutoff was a gift. All the X-ers had already self selected and I was too old to participate in every Millennial rite of passage.
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Me too. Born a very late Boomer, I felt not much cultural sympathy for the whole ‘60s thing. Very pleased to identify with early-cohort Xers.



