You see a 40 year old man. You know, greying/balding, a bit of a spare tire around the midsection, and married with several kids, including teenagers.
Imagine him at home during his High School years. What do you observe?


1. What kind of music is he listening to?
2. What is he dressed like?
3. What decade is it?
4. What generation is this 40 year old part of?
5. What major war did many of his peers fight in?
6. How good at computers is he?
7. If he were a computer programmer, what programming languages would he likely know?

Well, the answers might surprise you.


If you answered

1. Alternative 90's and other 90's pop music
2. 90's fashion
3. The mid 1990's
4. Generation X
5. 2003 war in Iraq, Afghanistan
6. Comfortable, but a bit more "balanced" in computer dependence compared to younger generations. Whole life is not tied to computers.
7. Visual C#, Java, PHP, C and C++, Javascript (i.e., quite relevant, popular, modern ones)

You'd be correct!

If you answered "1950's", "1970's", "1980's", or any other decade, then you made a very human mistake.

And if you answered "Baby Boomer" for #4, you are WAY off. This man's PARENTS were Baby Boomers! And we're not talking barely (among the youngest Boomers, or among the oldest), we're talking right in the middle.

And if you answered "Vietnam" for #5, you're also way off. A 40 year old today (which is 2016, in case you forgot) would have been born in 1976. He wouldn't even be a full adult until 1997.

If you answered "Assembler, BASIC, COBOL, Fortran" or any other ancient programming languages for #7, you made the same mistake.

Change is difficult for humans, especially constant change.

For example, how many of you are completely comfortable with the fact that a child born in 1995 is now 21 years old, and is completely considered an adult who can drink, vote, smoke, die in a war, engage in legally binding contracts, etc.?

I suppose this phenomenon is the stuff that Mid-Life Crises are made of. You wake up one day 65 years old, but you say to yourself, "Sure, I'm 65, but I still haven't served in World War 2, nor did I live through the Great Depression. Why do people keep making jokes about me being in World War 2? I wasn't even born until the 1950's!"

It's as though your numerical age is nudging you into a generation that you don't belong to, so a part of you feels like it's wrong. In your mind, a 65 year old is a WW2 veteran, but you realize that you are, indeed, 65. So you reluctantly take your place among the "other" WW2 vets and survivors of the Great Depression -- but something doesn't feel right. You can't remember anything about the Great Depression or WW2. That dissonance between your age-era bias and the calendar is what makes you feel weird.

Likewise, it was customary for men to wear hats in the 1920's and 1930's. So that generation often continued to wear hats even into their old age. But when a Baby Boomer becomes "an old man" is he magically going to adopt practices of a previous generation? Of course not. That's what I find interesting about age and generations. What will Millennials be like when they are 40? When they are 60? Completely different from 40 and 60 year olds today, I assure you.

Likewise, it was customary for men to wear hats in the 1920's and 1930's.  So that generation often continued to wear hats even into their old age.  

Conventional wisdom is that surviving hatters blame the U.S. presidential administration of the youthful & stylish Jack & Jackie Kennedy for eliminating the customary manly wearing of hats.  Altho' that revolution in men's style didn't catch on with everyone he hosted, notably his peasant-born adversary Nikita Khruschëv.

But when a Baby Boomer becomes "an old man" is he magically going to adopt practices of a previous generation?  Of course not.

But you missed what might be the best counterexample:  I can't be the only Baby-Boomer who thought "I hate wearing a neck-tie!  When our Baby-Boom generation takes over from the Depression-W.W. II generation, as surely as the Sun rises in the morning, we'll make ties as socially obsolete as spats and hats. And good [expletives deleted] riddance!"  Sigh.

But have neck-ties disappeared from white-collar workplaces?   Only on Casual Fridays (or whatever day an employer has blessed for such informality).  Otherwise, the absence of ties on men is still widely considered "unbusinesslike"

• .

Except when extremely rational people, e.g., computerists, meet their peers in reputedly laid-back places like Silicon Valley.  Or to a lesser degree, in places where the climate is hostile to such quaint adornment, but where white-collar employment was rare

• until after W.W. II, e.g., Florida.  But in historically formal places, e.g., New England & New Yawk, I suspect that even computerists are expected to wear ties at work (perhaps someone up there would provide an update).  I also suspect that the spread of "air conditioning" to near universality in First World workplaces & transportation artificially revitalized the neck-tie, delaying a change in custom that I still believe is overdue.
  
  -------
  Note *: IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. (r. 1914--1956) famously reacted to a pale-blue dress-shirt (tho' worn under a suit jacket, and with a neck-tie) as unbusinesslike for an IBM salesman, who was promptly fired (so the cautionary tale went).
  
  Note #: Except for accountants, bankers, lawyers, and government.

Here is what I'm talking about: <https://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2020/>

I've discovered that it's actually quite entertaining--downright fun--to compile such a list for technical folks in your generation.  But doing so blabs your age, which you were plainly trying to convey without it being revealed in plain text.

Yet others in this topic seem to have been clueless that you were not presenting a quiz that was seeking the first submission that could display the correctly calculated numeric answer.

Thanks, Alligator Dicax.  I was wondering about my age. So glad you were here to point it out.

Moi???   I  did nothing of the sort.  I've certainly never claimed to know anything about your age.

Furthermore, I draw a complete blank when I try to identify anyone in CathInfo to whom it'd make any sense at all to redirect your remark.