The top 1% really skew the income average from the median.
As born in 1962, I should be a “Boomer”, but I have far more GenX characteristics so I think I was born during the cultural transition.
I'm no sociologist, but I think there's a very strong case for heavily blurring the boundaries on generational distinctions. I think it becomes even more prominent when specific events or developments have a very significant impact on society.
With Baby Boomers, for instance, a man born at the beginning of the boom could have entered grade school during the Korean War, been drafted to fight in Vietnam, returned home, and started a family even as the youngest Boomers were in grade school.
The idea is not in any way original to me, but I think there's a major difference in cultural experience between the early Boomers for whom the 1960s counter cultural movements, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam were things encountered as teens or young adults and the late Boomers who came of age as Reagan was entering the White House.
Generation X doesn't seem to have coming-of-age defining set of events on the level of of the 1960s, and the whole "MTV generation" idea is kind of "meh" IMO.
Things start to show a stronger divide with the late Gen Xers and early Millennials (sometimes called Xennials or some other term) due to technology. This group didn't grow up with much computer or updated telecommunications technology, but they did begin to encounter it as they were coming of age (i.e., as teens or young adults).
I recall reading one thing describing a characteristic of late Gen X (or Xennials) as being the last set of people to remember what it was like to start dating prior to the widespread use of cell phones, when you still had to call a land line that a family usually shared.
I was born in 1986, and I definitely remember the experience in high school of relying on a land line to talk to friends or romantic interests. The internet was starting to take hold, but we still only had dial-up. The choice was to talk on the phone OR to get online. As I got into college, broadband became more of a thing, and cell phones became more of a factor. But even then texting was still the kind of thing that would cost you 10 cents per message, unless you had a plan (and they were expensive!). Smart phones didn't really have as much of a foothold until the late 2000s. This doesn't even factor in 9/11, either, which was obviously a culturally-defining moment.
My experience is most definitely not like those of the later Millennials. They didn't go through the technological transitions that have driven major cultural shifts, but I did. But, unlike Gen X, I encountered these changes before I became an adult.
I feel like I have little in common with the later Millennials, and Gen Z seems like it is from another planet.
I can't even imagine how Gen Z appears to those who are from generations before me.
('36!)
