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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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adam ruins everything has a video about how the 2000s made us stop talking about decades and switch to refer to generations instead which caused us to lose the concept of a shared culture basically, and segregated us instead.
we have clear ideas about fashion, music, art and design when we think about the 40s vs 50s or 80s vs 90s for example, but no one really knows wtf the 2000s vs 2010s were about.
Ironically, he also did a rather famous talk where he dismantles the idea of generations being anything more than a construct of marketing.
you mean appropriately, right? i don't see irony here.
Oh, sorry, I misread your first sentence there. Yes, appropriately, then. I read it as him influencing people to stop talking about decades and start talking about generations.
I don't know if that really started in the 2000s, though? Maybe it really got adopted by a lot more people, I don't know.
I seem to remember seeing lots and lots spilled ink where self-identified boomers were wringing their hands over what to do about Gen X and their aimlessness (before the Gen X thing was really firmed up, we were called baby busters, slacker generation, twentynothings, MTV generation and probably some other names I cannot remember now. I like Gen X a lot more and the book is actually quite good, even though I think it better describes Generation Jones as filtered through a Canadian than my age group. ).
I remember seeing Gen X writing things about how they had a bleak future (many of us entering the workforce during a recession), that the contract between employee and employer was broken in the 80s, that Gen X was not going to collect Social Security after the boomers took it all, that the idea of working 50 years for a company and being repaid with that loyalty with a good pension and gold watch at the end of it was long over when we were still kids, etc.
This seemed to quickly shift to hearing/reading more Gen Y moaning about the boomers and boomers complaining about Gen Y, probably because both groups having larger numbers than Gen X.
So maybe that's what Adam was pointing out - that it wasn't so much only the chattering classes and marketers adopting these positions, it was also much of the people themselves...I definitely feel that of almost any "generation" that boomers were probably one of the first that were so studied and so regimented and probably had a lot of commonalities that were formative, at least early in life. I seem to remember Timothy Leary - who was of an older generation, but hugely popular with boomers and he learned to cater to them, I think - commenting on that to some extent. He might have even mentioned the Dr. Spock thing.
i think you're misunderstanding the video from the few sentences in which I tried to give the main point. he doesn't say generations were invented in the 2000s.
he's saying in the previous millennium we used to have definitive ideas about decades that were distinct and memorable: we know what most people listened to, what they wore, and in the age of TV, what they watched. every decade had its own characteristics and it applied to almost everyone. when I say picture a 30 year old in the 70s, you can picture what they look like: what they wear, their hairdo and facial hair, even glasses, and the colors of their clothes.
for some reason the 90s is the last decade to have this. there was a lot of talk about the millennium come 2000s but not much about the 00s. maybe it was awkward, maybe something changed but we don't have 00s, 10s and 20s referred to as decades the same way 1920s or 1980s are. there's no iconic, clear fashion that belongs to the 10s. instead the media started referring to "gen z fashion", "gen alpha fashion" or whatever. which is not really how fashion works. in the 80s, pretty much everyone had big hair and shoulder pads, across generations. now it's segmented.
not only that, but now there's no TV as there was back then. you pick your streaming service and binge watch a show instead of collectively watching a show every week. there's nothing like Seinfeld or MASH anymore. basically there's no shared cultures and experiences anymore.