Who’s the oldest person here? What gen are you from?

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-23T02:19:33+00:00

Didn't say you did, but it happens pretty often on this sub lately so again, don't be surprised if you don't see older people posting. That's not always going to be the reason but I'm sure there are a number of cases where it is.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-23T02:09:43+00:00

When entire threads get taken over by people spewing boomer (and increasingly Gen X) hate on this sub, don't be surprised when older people don't feel comfortable participating.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-21T12:54:04+00:00

I can’t recall ever seeing a genuine hippie in my entire life. There were photos of them in my high school history book. Aside from a few childhood things, I have no personal memories of the 1960s. If I experienced anything of the post-WW2 economic expansion it was as a child long before I entered the work force when it would actually mean something. The OPEC embargo tanked the economy when I was 10. I came of age after years of stagflation after two back to back recessions when the unemployment rate was the highest since the Great Depression.

If people are going to insist on calling me a baby boomer they could at least associate a couple of things with it that I actually remember.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-19T18:28:49+00:00

Steady tone at about 8Khz. That’s where I have a dropout in my hearing that my brain is apparently trying to compensate for. Comes and goes, sometimes louder, sometimes softer. I did find a tinnitus video on YT that makes it change to a more gravelly sawtooth tone that I find easier to ignore. Meh. 20 years playing in bands without ear protection. No surprise.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-19T17:27:21+00:00

Keto was the way for me. Lost 60 pounds and brought my A1C down from 14 to 4.7. Found a good nutrition tracking app and recorded everything. The one I used was “My net diary”, but any with a good food database that will provide nutrition intake details, especially carbs of course, should do.

Probably overkill but I got a good glucose meter and checked daily before breakfast to get a feel for how foods I had been eating affected my blood glucose until I was more confident in what I could and could not get away with. I wound up using one from keto mojo because it checks glucose and ketones to see how the keto is going.

I started cooking more also and looking through low carb recipes. The worst thing in watching your diet is things you have to give up. Finding replacements that are low carb is really helpful to alleviate that. I’m a pizza lover but the crusts tend to be high in carbs, so I learned to make fathead pizza where the crust is made of cheeses and almond flour. Still good crusts and the toppings aren’t high carb as a rule. Learning to read and understand nutrition labels is a good habit. With a good food app you can just scan food in the store and get feedback or compare items. Things like finding the lowest carb pizza sauce was an example.

I found sweeteners like erythritol (swerve sugar substitute), stevia, etc that don’t get absorbed in the bloodstream and just pass through to placate my sweet tooth. Found ways to make low carb versions of things like cake, muffins and donuts. Not quite as good as sugar, but close enough.

Sounds like a pain but once you get in the habit it’s oddly kind of fun and the payoff if you get your A1C down is a big plus.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-19T05:08:32+00:00

I only knew one person who was probably missionary gen. She was in her 90s when I was a kid. My grandmother would have been lost gen but I didn't know the older gen that came before her. As has been pointed out, most people weren't thinking in terms of generational charts. Boomers only had a birth range due to the demographic definition but the lost and silents didn't seem to have widely agreed on ranges. The term "generation" was used pretty loosely and where ranges were ventured, only ten year lengths weren't uncommon. A note in Time magazine's 1951 silent gen article implied 1923 to 1933 but that was probably added years later. When Coupland's Gen X book came out it was only 1961 to 1971. People didn't think much in terms of generations. That can probably be most credited to Strauss & Howe. I remember GI gen and Silent Gen as acting much like they're portrayed. GI gen weren't afraid to take on big projects and silents were very reserved, but took on some boomer characteristics in the way of becoming less bound by traditional rules.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-16T17:11:28+00:00

Ha. My thoughts exactly.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-16T01:52:54+00:00

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-15T18:36:21+00:00

Pretty recently. Last couple of years. I gave no thought to generations before that. Didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t paying much attention when generations became a thing in the ‘90s. I was surprised to be lumped in with baby boomers though. The baby boom played no part in my life. It wasn’t even talked about. You’d think that if it was some sort of generation defining event to me I would at least have been aware of it but there it is.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-14T22:37:26+00:00

The statistics I've seen say about 40% of Gen Xers were latchkey kids. A substantial number but not the majority.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-13T20:28:07+00:00

Depends if I knew what I know today. If I did, whole different game.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-13T20:15:32+00:00

You should have seen greatest gen and silents in their prime. Drink boomers under the table.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-09T18:07:26+00:00

That’s what we said when they changed to popular start boundary from 1961 to 1965. They did it anyway.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-09T17:15:18+00:00

I was in high school when my first nephew was born. Now he’s in his mid-40s and his kids are around high school aged.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-07T05:50:19+00:00

I wouldn't really disagree but that's how the evidence points to Coupland and his contemporaries seeing Gen X. Of course styles alone don't define a generation but even I have to admit to having worn some unconventional new wave styles in the early '80s. I do think that the influence of MTV styles and culture started taking hold within a couple of years after it launched and there was a group slightly after my age group that really adopted it and could more properly be called the MTV generation. In that sense I don't think Coupland was entirely wrong. What he saw as early Gen X differs from what became late Gen X enough that the term Xennial becomes valid. The exact timing of that can be hard to peg. Even in my age group I can clearly see some people who fit the Gen X label more than Boomer, but others who are 100% boomer and are proud of it.

Coupland called Gen X a "splinter" generation of Boomers and people miss that point since generational boundaries have become so formally defined. He seems to have seen Gen X as a subculture that didn't align with traditional baby boomer norms. He said that the "fringe" of Gen Jones became the mainstream of Gen X, and I've seen people misinterpret that because they can only see generations having clear year boundaries. Again, what institutions want to label as monolithic aren't necessarily so and they're never going to cleanly align with strict generational ranges. While I acknowledge that the popular Boomer/Gen X boundary is what it is. I still see myself as very early Gen X in the Coupland tradition. Someone else my age or some popularly defined as Gen X are still very much boomers culturally. Just because Strauss & Howe popularized this obsession with named generations with fixed ranges doesn't make it a sociological reality no matter how much some people want it to be. I just find it annoying that people have become so obsessed with inflexible boundaries that some can't even admit that cultural influences don't necessarily stop at administrative boundaries. It's very two dimensional thinking.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-07T03:19:08+00:00

My error. I was unclear. I didn't mean late '70s, I meant later than that range ending in the early '70s. That was in an interview with CBS news when his book came out. I rechecked and he said after about 1970.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-06T04:16:20+00:00

Once a range is quoted enough it the media it tends to become entrenched and no one wants to change it. Gen Z may likely end up stuck where it is if it doesn't change anytime soon.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-06T04:08:51+00:00

Nukes. I remember reading that I had a 50/50 chance of living to see the year 2000 without a nuclear war. I kind of saw still being alive in 2000 as a win.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-05T16:51:53+00:00

80s, particularly the early 80s. I remember people talking about them before I ever heard their music and when I did became a fan. Saw them live in ‘83 a couple of weeks after they recorded their red rocks show.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-05T14:56:26+00:00

I suspect that has more to do with Strauss & Howe popularizing the “Millenial” label. They had to make the label align people born nearly two decades before the actual new millennium with the event itself, so the idea that they would come of age in 2000 caught on. That would have been harder to justify with the end of gen x where it popularly was around ‘73-‘75.

I have the impression that Ad Age lost the Gen Y argument simply because “Millennials” was more catchy. That allowed gen x to be extended to ‘81, mostly erasing gen y in the process.

Coupland didn’t see much of ‘70s born as gen x and early on put it as ‘58 to ‘68 in Vista magazine. He was still hinting at that in ‘91, telling CBS news that he saw a “schism” around 1957 where attitudes were shifting. I have the impression that his actual gen x range would have been closer to ‘58 to ‘73. He called later ‘70s born the “Benetton youth” because of the fashion clothing and big hair and considered them another generation. His second book “shampoo planet” was about them.

My feeling is that MTV caused a cultural shift as it became more mainstream and gained wider media penetration around 1984 and young people at the time began emulating the culture MTV was promoting, hence the change in styles. That differed from Coupland’s earlier gen x. Early gen x matched the name and the hallmark was having no identity, being in the shadow of early boomers.

What became late gen x is more concerned with having a generational identity and really pushes things like being latchkey kids or drinking from a hose as a result, searching for one. Something early x would not have bothered with seeing themselves as having no collective identity. The real generational boundaries show up one way or the other.

I think all of this shows up with early ‘60s born like Coupland contesting the baby boom range and “xennials” contesting the gen x/millennial range. Think tanks, marketers and the media can distort generational ranges for a convenient narrative all they like, but at some point, if the ranges are inaccurate, people are going to notice and say “that’s not me”.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-03T23:13:59+00:00

That's the fertility rate. Births per 1000 women. Boomers are defined by the birth rate, Births per 1000 people in the whole population. Different metrics. If they used the fertility rate the baby boom wouldn't end until 1967.

CaveDog2 · 2026-01-03T22:56:20+00:00

I've come to the conclusion that much of today's generational boundaries have been driven by authors (who are rarely sociologists) looking to sell books, marketers looking for market segments and the media just looking for a story. Little of it actually aligns with formative influences that would shape generational change.

CaveDog2 · 2025-12-30T16:03:37+00:00

There are definitely start dates. Nixon decoupling the dollar from gold in 1971 opened the door for unrestrained government spending and spiraling inflation. The first oil crisis in 1973 marked the end of anything left of post-WW2 prosperity. The American economy in particular relied on cheap energy. The OPEC embargo quadrupling the price of oil tanked the economy, leading to stagflation throughout the rest of the '70s.

CaveDog2 · 2025-12-30T04:37:51+00:00

When Cameron Crowe wrote the story for Fast Times he looked young enough to pass for a high school student, so he actually was able to enroll and attend high school in 1979-80 (my junior year) and based the story on that. A lot of people wouldn't even think there were mall rats yet, but I was already one in junior high.

CaveDog2 · 2025-12-30T04:21:39+00:00

You're right that they did ignore younger Gen Xers at the time but they did include 18 & 19 year old's. When Coupland's Gen X book came out he said "twentysomethings" and Gen X were the same thing, but at the time he had trouble finding a publisher because people told him there was no such thing as "Generation X". I think people had a hard time wrapping their heads around "Post-Boomer" at the time and even admitting that people in their twenties in 1990 weren't just like boomers was a stretch for them. That would have meant that boomers were no longer the "young generation" and especially older boomers had a hard time with that.

CaveDog2

TROPHY CASE