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Music Videos

I’ve started a new waste-of-time project. I’m posting one music video to mastodon (@mbarron@mas.to) each day. The only rule about what’s included is that I like the song. Though, in typical fashion, that means the videos are heavily pulled from about, oh, six years immediately before, during, and after my college years. \_(ツ)_/¯

(As I’ve said to many people: I’ve got all the world’s music at my fingertips and I’m still listening to the same 500 songs I heard in college).

You can follow along on mastodon or find the whole playlist on YouTube.

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The Rise and Fall of generations

My previous post showing the definitions of different generations was in service of creating the chart below. This chart illustrates the “rise and fall” of generations across their lifecycle. As a new generation is born, it’s share of the population increases. Once a generations births have ended, there is a very long tail as people in that generation slowly die and new generations are born.

The data from the chart below comes from the U.S. Census bureau. I was able to use yearly population estimates from 1980 onward, but prior to 1980 the data comes from decennial Census PUMs data (hence why, for example, Gen X looks it starts in 1970–instead of 1965–and why the baby boomers have such an odd slope between 1960 and 1970). The Census Bureau does not publish birth year, so I estimated birth year (and thus generation) from age and year of estimate. There will thus ‘slop’ in my estimates but they should be close for my purpose here.

Chart showing the generational distribution of the U.S. population from 1940 - 2021
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Defining the generations

Generations is a very… imprecise… sociological concept. People just sorta look at a rough cohort of ages and say “yeah, you all are a generation.” Start and end points (as well as labels) just sorta coalesce out of the ether.

Nevertheless, they have their use and certainly are cemented in the popular imagination. I’ve been doing some reading on generations and really appreciated this diagram and article by Pew Research. But I wish it went a little earlier and a little later. So I made my owner version, *heavily* influenced by the Pew version.

A diagram showing generation birth year starting with the Lost Generation (born 1883 - 1900) and ending with Generation Alpha (Born 2013-2030).