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Getting Younger By the Moment

The New York Times, 12/10/08

Abstract:

Speaking as someone born the same year as Barack Obama, I was very happy after Election Day to hear various political analysts and TV commentators describe him as our nation’s first Generation X president.

This could be a critically important development for all of us born in 1961. It could be the loophole we’ve been waiting for, the one that gets us out of the baby boomer generation and gives us another shot at being young.

“It’s so great to be a member of Generation X,” I said to my husband last week on my 47th birthday. He’s 51, a member in good standing of the baby boom generation...

“...If you’re Gen X, then I’m Gen X,” he said.

“You can’t be Gen X, you’re 51,” I snapped.

But later, after he tottered off to bed at 9 p.m., I worried that he might have a point. Who decides these things? I had always assumed that demographers, in cahoots with pollsters, come up with these generational distinctions. Surely they were based on cold hard numbers. If you were born in the years from 1946 through 1964, you are a baby boomer. At least that’s what J. Walker Smith of Yankelovich, the polling company whose founders were among the first to use the term, said.

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