They earn the name locust generation for a reason.

Great post.

I don't even feel like I belong to any generation. I'm sort of too young to be a Baby Boomer and too old to be Gen X.

People similar in age tend to have similar desires and experiences. So you market to those desires via experiences. Reinforcing that commonality via pushing people into "generations" is also very helpful for marketing.

Our generation's small size means we weren't really marketed to. Sure, we got the usual "Make your parents buy you this toy" thing when we were very young, but in our adult lives the marketing was towards the boomers. There's just more of them.

Think about what happened to the commercials in a big sporting event. When we were younger, there were lots of commercials about beer, with guys surrounded by attractive women at massive parties.

Then time moved on and the groups got smaller, and it was less of a raging party and more about a smaller group of friends.

Then time moved on and the beer commercials gave way to insurance commercials and ads for Cialis. Because "sexy" changed from a horde of bikinis to two bathtubs. Or something.

Then time moved on and the commercials went to Depends and Cialis.

Then millennials turned out to be a big generation. So the beer ads are back with raging parties....mixed with Depends and Cialis ads.

We could just keep downing beers without having to take time out to go to the bathroom.

I have been mentioning this issue in posts a few times.

We had to navigate a job climate post-Reagan, and once we found a job it was for lower pay and benefits than those who were older. Then we were told that we complained too much!

Once we started to gain a little traction, 9/11.

I don't know about anyone else my age (45), but only by sheer determination am I now starting to see some hope.

I just jinxed myself, didn't I?

Good times.

If only I had organized my third-grade class, we could have stopped the Greenspan commission.

When I was in grade six (1982/83), my science class had a unit on "Environmental Crises." I remember it with strange clarity, in part because I'd never heard the plural of "crisis" before that class, so the word was novel for me.

Among the topics discussed were:

Population/Food Crisis
Greenhouse Gas Crisis
Fuel/Energy Crisis
Clean Water Crisis

and others.

The point is, this was also the first time I ever heard the phrase "it will be up to your generation to find solutions for these crises." Even at the ripe old age of 12 I was able to see this for the scam it was: adults were washing their hands of all responsibility for problems that they'd clearly identified, if not caused outright, and they were handing them off to the next generation with little more than a pat on the back and a wish of "good luck to you."