I'd never really think of Americans having a genealogy obsession, several of my fmaily members are really into it though. I suppose all the immigration and internal migration probably does make it more of a chore and thus a quest if one takes an interest. Most Americans can't even name any second cousins, or maybe one or two out of the ~100 or so they probably have from their ~4 great-grancestor lines, they just think their cousin's kid is one, so it's kinda a pet peeve.



I think the guy's asserting a lot of generalities here and trying to claim a final product that's more accurate then those generalities were, even though the uncertainty and error grows as we couple them together. His points essentially, where they are even true of the group but not all humanity, revolve around cultural changes in technology. They are either false or trivial, and he's building a major social commentary off an assumption that they are ironclad and accurate, and it always bugs me when someone effectively claims scientific precision without doing any science, even if we all do it all the time. I'm happy to go over why those individual points are effectively garbage but I think if anyone looks at them and starts really trying to define them as some measurable quantity they'll see they're pretty meaningless. Take #4, "Implying That College Would Guarantee You a Good Job"... what does that even mean? We tell people all the time that there are no guarantees in life, and no kid could possibly grow up believing that all degrees are equal in monetary value. That statement that people make always boils down to "Valuable skills are called valuable because someone values them enough to pay you for them more than for others, if you acquire them and have a piece of paper to prove it, you will have, all things being equal, a better paying job" that's what everyone means when they say it, that is essentially absolutely true and trivially obvious. Valuable skills are called 'valuable' for a reason. So #4 amounts to "We told you the truth", look at the whole outdoors one, and forget the social grumbling about kids not being physically active enough or getting enough 'fresh air', that's nothing to do with indoors, that has to do with bad parenting. Throwing a transparent dome over a forest would make it 'indoors', that wouldn't fundamentally change much. What we really mean is kids don't get enough exercise sitting in front of a TV, and may not be gaining certain other things as a secondary result. I don't think two friends playing a competitive video game or watching an educational TV program are losing out on anything besides exercise.

As for generation being a fiction, it's not that there isn't such a concept, it's that it's not got arbitrary cut offs. You can say, accurately, that Elvis massively impacted a whole generation, the whole culture but specifically a certain age group. But an event five years before or after that might be shared strongly my the middle of the Elvis group won't impact the younger and older members in the same way. There's no useful, discreet concept like that where generation is concerned. People who were strongly effected by a specific events or series of connected events, like the Moon Landing, were often strongly influenced by a similar event, JFK's assassination, and RFK and MLK. It is fair to point out something like that and say it most impacted an age range, but it's not a tight grouping, and it definitely isn't 20 years on the dot by magic, and to try to translate that clearly into an effect on people 20 years younger is simply to demanding too much accuracy from too broad a product where both factors have huge margins of error. I'm not denying the effect is there, though I dispute the effects, I'm just saying it's like weather forecasting, most of the time you can not simply look at a series of events and forecast very far ahead usefully from them, nor can you look backwards with the results and claim much more accuracy. It's like claiming it rained today because 373 days ago there was an eclipse, that eclipse really did impact the weather but the comment remains sheer guesswork, especially since it isn't raining everywhere.