Rethinking Generational Frameworks

Generational labels are meant to explain cultural shifts, but more often than not, they just fuel internet discourse. And no generation has felt this more than Millennials—the internet’s favorite punching bag. Boomers call them entitled; Gen Z calls them cringey. On TikTok, mocking Millennials has become a sport, with the most common targets being their participation trophies, obsession with Harry Potter, saying “adulting” unironically, calling pets “doggos,” and their penchant for the “millennial pause.”

In the early 2000s, as businesses across industries began to feel the impact of the first digital-native consumers, generational talk helped corporate America align on understanding demographics through the lens of unique coming-of-age experiences. Today, however, we recognize a fundamental reality—one with significant but often overlooked implications for marketing and audience understanding: the world is more divided than ever. When we talk about generations as groups of people with shared cultural experiences that evolve through different life stages, we must acknowledge that the world is no longer so unified. A better comparison might be Netflix’s concept of “taste communities,” where they identified 1,900 distinct audience segments.

Unlike 10–15 years ago, today’s audiences aren’t transitioning through life stages with the same collective experiences or worldviews as previous generations. Social and political divides have been deepened by personalized algorithms, further fragmenting cultural touchpoints. What was once a group of 80–100 million people with a shared cultural context is now, arguably, 80–100 million individuals with unique vantage points and social reference points.

Coincidentally, generational naming has reached the end of the alphabet with Gen Z. Instead of assuming that “Gen Alpha” will capture a shared reality for the next cohort, perhaps we should reconsider the value of these generational frameworks. Even the Pew Research Center, just a few years ago, announced it would be moving away from traditional generational definitions, acknowledging that life-stage might now be a more reliably defining characteristic than generational belonging. After all, if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that the modern landscape of social identity transcends the limitations of generational labels.