1962

The comic is dumb-- that's obvious. But I want to talk about that bitchy little preamble, where Randall "Nostalgia is Stupid, Unless It's About Something I Like" Munroe says that "generations" are arbitrary. If you pay attention, you'll notice that only people from objectively terrible generations, like the Boomers or the Millennials, take issue with grouping birth cohorts into generations*. It's not arbitrary, because people who are roughly the same age at the same time will tend to have a similar outlook on their experiences. The impact of 9/11 on people my age (woops, almost said "my generation"!) is very different from its impact on our parents-- but even we weren't dumb enough to eat Tide Pods. Throughout history, cultural moods come and go, and they do so in waves corresponding to the coming-of-age of each generation. This has been especially true in the 20th century, as the expansion of mass media enabled cultural moods to arise, consolidate, and burn out with greater and greater intensity and synchrony: consider the totemic grip of 1968-69 on the Boomer imagination. One of the key characteristics of human thought is that we try to make sense of different things by searching for things they have in common: by formulating generalizations. Sure, grouping people by a 10-20-year range of their birth year is a crude one-- not all Millennials are vile degenerates-- but one of the biggest factors determining how you will react to a given event or trend is incontrovertibly your age.



*Especially true of Randall. Always an object and never a subject, a "me" but never an "I", he is powerless to assert his own identity against any generalization, because he doesn't have one.