I made an indignant speech in my Norwegian class last night but because I never know if I'm really saying what I intend på norsk, I'm going to repeat it here (more accurately if not eloquently & på engelsk).
One of the other students has a new job that involves marketing to young people & we got to talking about generations: Gen X, Gen Z, Millennials & the like ~ distinctions that seem to matter only in terms of targeted selling. I wanted them to know that we Baby Boomers got our name organically. There were a lot of us & it was sudden (a baby boom, from returning WWII soldiers). We were against the Vietnam War & we were truly on opposite sides, with a chasm between our elders and us: a generation gap (et generasjonsgap). Also, we weren't friends with our parents. We didn't wear the same clothes or listen to the same music. We didn't live with them once we were out of school. I'm not saying we were so great just that we really were the first generation that was distinct from what came before.
The indignation was because I needed my classmates to appreciate that we were serious. It wasn't a generation about stuff. Call yourselves whatever you want but do understand that it's an artificial distinction. There's no gap between 1980 and 1981. Nothing happened to distinguish 1995 from 1996. However, 1946 was the first post-WWII year. It WAS different. It DID start something new.