The Decades Theory and Generational Labels

Some pop philosophizing from 'Dazed and Confused' and a reimagining of our Gen nicknames.

For the I Like to Watch Podcast, Donnie and I recently covered Richard Linklater’s 1993 classic Dazed and Confused and there is a fifteen-second moment as Cynthia, at an outdoor party at night, opines her Decades Theory:

“The fifties were boring. The sixties rocked. And the seventies—oh my God, they obviously suck. Come on! Maybe the eighties will be radical.”

The fifties were boring. Really? The birth of rock and roll, Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Catcher in the Rye, the Brinks Robbery, Jackson Pollock, The Twilight Zone, and the McCarthy Hearings boring?

The sixties rocked. Any of us born during that decade or since—Linklater arrived in 1960, I in 1966—have certainly been told that, peddled a righteous, lofty pedestaled , and mostly horseshit version of that historically bounteous epoch of peace, love, and understanding by our boomer parents, who insist that just because we missed Woodstock and the battle against the dual oppression of both the Civil Rights struggle and Vietnam, nothing we experience will ever quite get us our rewards in heaven.

Maybe the eighties will be radical. That’s the punch line not only in terms of the adjective but also with our knowledge of what the eighties were actually like. Ronald Reagan. AIDS. Just Say No. The air traffic controller’s strike that gave the president the power to destroy unions. The Challenger exploding mid-air. Chernobyl. MTV. Thriller. The McMartin satanic pre-school panic. The explosion of fake anorexia nervosa among teen girls.

Not better or worse than other decades but certainly not radical.

That’s the fun of the theory. It points out the simple fact that we need to aggrandize the decade just before our own in order to explain why the moment we are in is so full of complexity. We also tend to do this as a way to define our generational differences.

The idea that the people who make up a generation share certain attributes dates back to the mid-19th century, and most cohorts from even before that time have been given retroactive nicknames. We didn’t become obsessed with the labels until late in the 20th century.

The woman who should perhaps be given credit for starting the trend was novelist Gertrude Stein, who reportedly first coined the term the Lost Generation to describe the people who were born roughly between 1880 and 1900 and who had lived through World War I. That phrasing was popularized by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, the epigraph for which quotes Stein saying, “You are all a lost generation.”

From these minor beginnings, we now have generational categories that seem to define exactly who people are based exclusively on when they were born. They’re sort of like astrological signs, casting individuals into large groupings in some sort of mystical horseshit to explain why someone born in July is aggressive or someone born in February is elusive.

• Greatest Generation: Born 1901-1924.

• Silent Generation: Born 1925-1945.

• Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964.

• Generation X: Born 1965-1980.

• Millennials: Born 1981-1996.

• Generation Z: Born 1997-2012.

• Generation Alpha: Born 2013-2025.

Using this list a few observations can be made:

1. The label maker became stunted after the Baby Boomers. Generation X sounds cool but is really only a definer of a random generation rather than something specific about the cohort. Following it up with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, it loses its cool.

2. Each subsequent generation is shortened. The Greatest Generation is twenty-three years, Gen X is fifteen years, and Gen Alpha is only twelve years.

3. These are quite specifically American labels. No one Chinese, born in China in 1900 is a part of The Greatest Generation as utilized.

4. This task of marking each generation is about the replacement of one to the next, the obsolescence of the old and the next group coming up to bat.

5. From a macro view, it seems a defining difference is that for each generation, the future looked brighter in the past.

I’d suggest the following list feels more in tune with the reality of each generation and recognizes a consistent twenty year gap per moniker:

• The Lost Generation: Born 1900-1920.

• The Nazi Killers: Born 1921-1941.

• Rock and Rollers: Born 1942-1962.

• Cynics and Slackers: Born 1963-1983.

• The Internet Generation: Born 1984-2004.

• Generation Screen: Born 2005-2025.

The Lost Generation was born into a rapidly changing world. New technology (including practical use of electricity and air travel) were being introduced all over the country. This generation bore witness to the second Olympic games, the west had been “won,” and America had established itself as a world power. They came of age (loosely defined as sixteen - eighteen years old) with the first global war and over 116,000 young men died in combat. By the time this generation came of age, the world was suddenly larger and made less sense.

The Nazi Killers were born in the Great Depression. Their most formative years were defined by want and followed by a government intervention that helped eradicate that poverty with the New Deal. By the time the youngest of this generation came of age, they were being drafted into the second world war. Those in the later end came of age during the most fruitful period in the country’s history following the post-WWII economic boom.

Rock and Rollers (formerly Baby Boomers) had a generation defined by rock and roll and more specifically high school. Secondary public education existed in the 1800’s but wasn’t universally codified, mandatory for all, until the mid-1940’s as was the formal study of adolescence, just before James Dean changed our perception of it forever. Yes, this was the generation that witnessed the assassination of JFK, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the escalation in Vietnam, and the Summer of Love.

Cynics and Slackers were born into this period of social change, a new national distrust of the government, and the results of a sexual revolution that suddenly changed the nuclear family dynamic. They were the latchkey kids, the last generation to be told to go outside and not come home until it was dark. While the films of the previous generations glorified the traditional family, the patriotism of war, of a very specific and conservative worldview, this generation grew up on the twin impulses of the anti-establishment films of the counterculture and the mega-blockbusters about rebels in outer space. Effectively coming of age during a time when greed was considered a virtue and presidential blowjobs were cause for a national crisis, this generation was sold conflicting portraits of what it meant to be an American and they responded with a massive ‘go fuck yourselves.’

The Internet Generation, born in the midst of the existential crisis of their older siblings, also jumped into things with the coming of the world wide web. This seemed in the early stages to be a boon to mankind and communication but quickly became a disruptor for everything from dating to economic opportunity. The oldest of this group were seventeen-years old when some Saudis hijacked a couple of planes and flew them into the World Trade Center.

Generation Screen is obvious. The smartphone debuted when these guys were four. These kids have never known a world without multiple screens that dictate everything from their dating life, their economic future, their social groups. TikTok, disinformation, and Donald Trump eclipse their formative years. And we wonder why they’re so insane.

As a card carrying member of the Cynics and Slackers, I feel like it fits perfectly. My generation seems to have been overlooked in a lot of things and maybe it’s due to our ‘go fuck yourself’ attitude. As a man of this generation, the dichotomy of balancing the lone savage of John Rambo with the soft liberalism of Phil Donahue is nothing short of a recipe for identity crisis. We are all equal parts Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, Ellen Ripley and Claire Standish.

The 1980s (when we came of age) was an era of tremendous population growth around the world, surpassing the 1970s and 1990s, and arguably being the largest in human history. During the 1980s, the world population grew from 4.4 to 5.3 billion people. I could tell a member of Generation Screen I used to get 10 CDs for a penny in the mail, and I'm can’t be sure if she thinks I'm lying about what a CD was, what a penny is, what the mail is, or all three. We witnessed the first space shuttle (designed in part by my namesake), the ascension of Michael Jackson before he became an Asian woman, both Punk Rock and New Wave, and the dawn of video games via Atari.

The eighties weren’t radical, they were lunatic.