Memo Martínez Pinzón

It has come to my attention that many people are unclear on the concept of "a generation". They don't know what the generations are or why such a concept has meaning. I've considered this idea deeply for a few decades and thought I'd quickly drop my sense of the matter. This is a very quick writeup-so don't expect much. A human generation is not defined by chronology and is not an arbitrary thing drawn up by historians, demographers or anthropologists. The best way to understand it is by means of the concept of the "zeitgeist" - or the "sprit of the time." The idea is that a zeitgeist is a real thing (as real as a culture, a language or a sports team); that people who live in a particular zeitgeist are meaningfully formed by it; and that zeitgeists change over time, often discontinuously. So, for example, you are not a boomer if you were born in 1946. You are a boomer because your childhood was defined by the post-War zeitgeist and not, for example, by the post Kennedy zeitgeist. Literally, there was an actual change in the nature of reality that occurred somewhere in the mid 1940's that made life after that point different in the same way that a mass shift from everyone speaking French to everyone speaking English would make life different (kids brought up in the latter era would speak English as their mothers tongue). And then, there was an actual change in reality that occured around the JFK assassination that led to what is effectively a "different world". Those who were infants in 1963 or born thereafter, were formed by that different world. And this makes a difference. The zeitgeist changes in a variety of ways. We have minor (but real and significant) changes like the shift between 2006 and 2008 or 2023 and 2024, but the ones that matter are the major ones that come about once every . . . generation. WWII (probably pearl harbor). JFK. The Challenger event. 9/11. Covid. If you lived meaningfully before such an event you remember that something subtle but deeply real and important just changed at that time. You felt that you had woken up in a new world. That is because you did. This then defines our most recent generations. You are a boomer if you were formed as a child by the post-WWII zeitgeist and remember the JFK portal. GenX was formed by the post-JFK world and remembers Challenger. Millenials were formed by the post Challenger world and remembers 9/11. And so on. Notice that this theory easily takes into account that top down forces are real but not evenly distributed. Just like language, if you were born in Slovakia and moved to Ohio when you were eight, you'll have a different relationship with english than the locals. Yep. And still you are immersed in english in a way that is real and important. Same with the zeitgeist. The rain falls on everyone - differently. Now there is a deeper theory that tries to diagnose the particularity of each zeitgeist and the effects it has on people as a consequence of their developmental moment. Once again, we can say that the developmental stage of childhood is both general and particular. If you learn a language from infancy you will have a different experience of it than someone who learned it in adulthood - and this will be the same for every child. At the same time, every will have a different experience of the language they learned. Again, this is not a really difficult concept and as you can tell with my examples is common along a number of kinds of things, not just generations/zeitgeists. So if you were a child of the 1980's you had a different developmental relationship with that zeitgeist than someone who was in their 30's. The vibes of the 80's spirit would layer onto you differently. Not least because you had no previous layers to interpret and integrate them. So we have roughly two core drivers: the actual zeitgeist of a given moment and its movement over time; the differential developmental moments of people as they encounter these zeitgeists. Together, these build to a generational signature that has reality and real force in the larger cultural field.