Today’s post is by a friend and renowned aging expert, David Wolfe. It is a continuation of I’m Listening, which was posted on April 23, 2007.

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When my daughter Stephanie was about 7, she looked up from the comics she was reading over breakfast one morning and asked me to listen as she read the Calvin and Hobbes strip aloud. Calvin was complaining to his imaginary tiger friend that “they” don’t name a generation “until you get really old – like 20.” Stephanie then exclaimed with a quizzical look on her face, “Daddy, I don’t understand. Isn’t a new generation born every day?”
I repeat: She was just 7 when she pointed out the obvious that most of us never see. Instead, at least in marketing, we gather in our minds large groups of people born over a 15, 18 or some other arbitrarily selected number of years and give them all-to-clever names. Once we have done that, we then start making monstrously broad generalizations with no more foundation than mere opinion.
I was conducting a workshop in 1996, the year the first boomers turned 50, when I asked for two volunteers, one born in 1946 and the other born in 1964, the calendrical bookends of the boomer “generation.” As a balding man with a bit of a widened girth approached the podium, followed by a trim, well groomed 32-year-old, someone from the audience got the point and shouted, “They’re twins!
To drive my point home deeper I asked each man to tell us about what he wanted to do over the next five years. The 32-year-old’s response revolved mainly around what he wanted to accomplish in his career to which he confessed devoting 12 hours or more daily on an average. The 50-year old essentially said, “Been there, done that, and now I’m into easing up and simplifying my life.” Each was at a very different time of life, with different aspirations and goals, yet both were boomers sharing any number of attributes according many people in research and marketing who are not the least bit reserved in saying, “The boomers are like this…Boomers think that… To be successful in boomer markets remember that they were shaped by the same events growing up, etc.”
While I use the term boomers, because with everyone else using the term it simplifies communications, I avoid attributing boomer-specific behavioral attributes, values and attitudes to that 18-year age cohort because it just doesn’t work for me.We label things for practical reasons, but do so at the risk of inhibiting critical thinking and ending up assigning more meaning to a label than reality justifies. The meanings assigned to the label we have given the 78 million or so people born between 1946 and 1964 have been enlarged far beyond the rational boundaries of its significance. The label senior is another label we’ve done the same thing with. We assign attribute to seniors with too little regard for the fact that as we grow older, we tend to become more individuated – that is, less like our peers. I have taken on the job of challenging the common usage of generational labels and the connected idea of cohort effect – attributes that purportedly define an age cohort. I believe that generational labels and the inflated importance accorded cohort effects often blur or obscure altogether critical truths while giving life to myths about people’s behavior. Stated another way, generational labels and focusing on cohort effects impedes critical thinking.In the nest post, I’ll discuss age perceptions gaps – the deep chasm that often exists between people when reflecting on the attributes of older people.

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