When I first started writing I was expecting to send this to you in January, so a lot of the below has an awkward air of looking forward to the year ahead. I might not send another email for a while because I’ve really failed to do much reading recently but let’s see! I’ve got a few hundred words about intellectual property that are becoming dated very quickly, since it was de rigueur when the mouse went public over a month ago.

on Generational Essentialism as an emblem of how not to

Please excuse the lack of references in this item, I’m just reeling off ideas and no I can’t back them up!!

This minor Guardian article about how much house ownership relies on receiving an inheritance happened to be the first thing I read in 2024, at some point after the hogmany haze had lifted and I felt like I ought to be reading anything. It’s a very brief off-the-cuff bit of the usual commentariat column inches and while I’ve got little to tell you about the actual subject of the article, other than yes housing inequality is bad and it’s getting worse and I’m looking forward to reading Nick Bano’s book on the subject when it lands next month (spoiler there is apparently no actual housing shortage in the UK), there is a lot I’d like to branch off of this, and then wildly branch off of that, disappearing into tangential indulgence. The last paragraph of the Guardian article:

In the meantime, we should try to do away with superficial divisions between generations, and seek solidarity along more meaningful lines than the year we were born.

This felt like a little notification ping for the year ahead, signaling that in these mainstream spaces there’s some emerging (if passive) opposition to that long-accepted blunt homogenisation of vast swathes of people from different economic and cultural situations into largely arbitrary and entirely unassailable categorisations based on the year they were born. I generally lend this process (of taking generational shorthand like gen-x or millennial, and explaining or proscribing behaviours through this lens) the catchy term generational essentialism as a pointed and literal description of what it is and a hint at how it works, but we might just as functionally call it astrology for advertising executives¹.

What interests me here isn’t the specifics of generational demographics, but how we came to mythologise a flawed metric through some poor cognitive biases, and then more crucially how there might have developed some pushback to this. In other words, how does a piece of bad reasoning become popular, and how can it be fought against?

Generational essentialism is a field I’ve always felt sceptical of, even back when my age bracket was the good one that you wanted to be in. To my mind it’s a conflation of causation with correlation: a western generational identifier like boomer is a useful shorthand for describing a collection of correlative identifiers. These identifiers form a web of relations, a bit like tags or hyperlinks, which allows popular commonalities to be specified, like English people born in the 1940s are likely to enjoy Strictly Come Dancing. This is why it functions so well in a field like advertising, where the prime concern is basically just majoritarianism; where cause is of far less primacy than simply allowing popular commonalities to emerge from the data.

This data isn’t being used to alter the situation in question or to cause a change, it’s an observational effect that’s only being used to inform another correlation: that this person within this bracket might be predisposed to spending money on this product. This analysis is fine if you just want to know where to most effectively point your ad dollars; it’s not fine if you want to, say, develop a philosophy for younger people’s tendency to rent rather than own a house.

A person rents a house and is gen z, versus a person rents a house because they are gen z. I think the problem with the latter really is in how true it manages to sound while not really having a solid foundation. There’s a complicated network of causes someone may rent a house, most of which will correlate with each other, and many of which will tangibly correlate to the year the person was born. However if we make the leap to label a correlative factor like the year she was born as the cause itself, we incur an essentialism; that is, we imply that something about being born at that moment created an innate, uncontrollable quality in her, it is in her essence to rent and therefore that is the cause.

And this feels familiar, right? For any of us: boomers are racists, millennials have an uncontrollable predilection for avocados at the expense of their Help to Buy ISAs, gen x are transphobic, gen z have autism from looking at an iPad. Any of these correlative pieces of data, even if rooted in some nugget of reality, are transformed into essential, determinative qualities, ergo a neatly-packaged reason for the occurrence of an event. This not only works simultaneously as both a blanket excuse for poor behaviour (it’s not his fault, it’s just who he is) and as a condemnation beyond redemption (it’s his fault, it’s who he is), but is also a convenient deterrent from tackling the messy and complicated legitimate causes for an event that would take a lot of time and good critical thinking to understand.

Why do we so regularly fall into this correlative trap? I dont know! jeezo

The best path I have to follow to try and unravel it is: perhaps generational essentialism, like any other kind of essentialism, is so easy and enticing to perform because of apophenia. It satisfies an evolutionary itch for pattern recognition, even if the pattern is corrupt or hallucinated, the same way something like eugenics does for a fascist. I reckon I’d relate it to conspiracy theorism, and the comfort that’s found in hallucinating a pattern of controlled and purposed events rather than tackling the brutal reality of virtually unfettered and indeterminate chaos that belies the events occurring around us.

Why am I talking to you about this; it seems barely relevant to anything else I’ve emailed you about? Basically, I think that there are a lot of similar cognitive misfires happening, and I’m looking towards some sort of a guide for constructing philosophies with which we can better process future events, that sidesteps or pushes back on these cognitive errors. I wonder if they are linked in some way to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimisms, but while these errors are all detrimental in some way, not of all of them present as positive aspirations. Generational essentialism is emblematic of lazy, dysfunctional and very popular forms of critical thinking, and I don’t really believe we can leave space for low-effort analyses like this in 2024, or in the years to follow. Why?

1. This line is just here to test whether my brother, who I think might be an advertising executive, reads these emails. ↩︎