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It is a pleasure to be sorted into a particular generation because assortation, if it is not hierarchical or invidious, is naturally pleasant. Advertisers know this. They know that offering to tell “Which X are you?” or “What kind of X are you?” tempts us. And something loves to displace the faults of human nature to contingent phases of it. Sentences that begin by naming “these days”, “this country”, or “our society”, generally become intelligible only once they are understood to refer to human beings as such. The generation provides another locus for such displacements. Then such awful questions as “Why are we here?” can be rephrased in cozier terms like “My generation has no sense of purpose.
