Skimming the Generational Fringes

A peek at the “microgenerations” that fall in-between our main generational cohorts

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Half a year ago, I wrote an informal overview of the eight most recent generational cohorts found in America’s history. These eight groups represent our best-documented socio-historical categories, and they may not reflect new information we discover…or unborn generations in future decades and centuries.

In that piece, I’d delineated these eight generations as follows:

• Hemingrebels (aka “The Lost Generation”)
• GI-Gens (aka “The Greatest Generation”)
• Traditionalists (aka “The Silent Generation”)
• Baby Boomers (aka “Boomers” or “Leapers”)
• Generation X (aka “Xers” or “GenXers”)
• Generation Y (aka “Millennials” or “Echo Boomers”)
• Generation Z (aka “Zoomers” or “Centennials”)
• Generation AA (aka “Alphas” or “Coronials”)

Since each of these cohorts spans a period of approximately 15–20 years, there are inevitably going to be people born “on the cusp” of two adjacent generations. Today, I’ll explore how those “microgenerations” can be defined based on the two groups between whom they build a sociological…