Wow — I had no idea I was a “Cusper” — never heard the term before this article by Marian Salzman.
After strutting and tub-thumping and preening their way across the high ground of politics, media, culture and finance for 30 years, baby boomers have gone from top dogs to scapegoats in barely a year.
As baby boomers lose their authority and appeal, generational power is shifting one notch down: to cuspers (born roughly 1954-1965), who arrived in style in 2008 with their first truly major figure, Barack Obama (born 1961).
Yes, it’s true. I now have a president who is younger than I am. Yikes! But at least he’s the same “cohort” as I am. I’ve always considered myself on the tail end of the Boomers — I’ve seen that listed as around 1961 or so.
Cuspers, the age cohort that have been living in the shadow of the boomers, now have even more reasons to stake out their own separate identity and values.
It’s taken a long time for this rising demographic to be recognized as a distinct generation in its own right. They’ve been called “late boomers” because they missed the formative boomer experiences of the ’60s, such as civil rights and anti-war protests.
They’ve been called tweeners or cuspers because they straddle the divide between Boomers and Gen X. American social commentator Jonathan Pontell has worked hard to establish their identity as Generation Jones.
Hrm. Well, “Cuspers” is kind of a dorky term, but I’m willing to accept it, I guess. However, isn’t an 11-year age cohort a bit sketchy as a “generation” to track people by?
Whether we call them cuspers, Generation Jones or Generation Obama, there are enigmas and paradoxes within this generation and its fans. They respond to Biblical imagery, but they’re not dogmatic in their faith.
They value traditional notions of family but see men and women as equals in parenting. They go back to older American values — civility, community, responsibility — yet keenly embrace technology and use the Internet naturally.
Well, that all applies to me.
The cusper generation is as much an ideal as it is a demographic group, and that appeal extends well beyond the birth years that define it. Watch out for tweets (messages on the Twitter platform) that proclaim “Ich bin ein cusper.”
Oops. “Cusper” just “jumped the shark.”
I have always seen a generation mean 20 years, so baby boomers are in the ’45 – ’65 grouping, and Gen X starts in ’66 – ’86, Gen Y ’87 – ’07.
Now I can see an arguemnet made that the 5 years to either side of the gaps being like a combo plate on the end of one generation and the beginning of the other.
And, of course, generational generalisms hold as much rigorous accuracy as do most stereotypes.
I think the main reason for narrowing down the “generations” is that it lets people sell more books on the subject.
That is a good point. 🙂
The funny thing is that I’m in the Gen X group (1968), but I generally don’t identify with the supposed characteristics of Gen Xers who generally seem to be people @10 years younger than me.
THe validity of the generational generalities is suspect in the first place, but I wonder if the rapid rise of computer technology hasn’t created more segmentation within those groups than there were in past generations . . .
For instance, my high school actually had a computer lab with DEC mainframe and dumb greenscreen terminals where we learned to program BASIC. By SOphmore year in college I had a PC (woot, 1st gen Mac!) and I clearly recall when my professors stated they’d no longer accept hand-written papers. A couple years either way and the story would be very different.
I typed my high school papers on my folks’ old portable typewriters. I received a bright, shiny Smith-Corona for graduation and college, complete with interchangeable cartridges for different color films and correction, and used that to type my papers into my senior year. By then, folks were using the mainframe text editor to do papers, hampered only by the crappy dot matrix printers and wide paper (and most profs’ unwillingness to accept them). Actually, writing users guides to using the mainframe for word processing was part of what got this history major into the IT world …
I was born in 1962 and never felt like a Bomer or an Xer, so I’ve been glad that our lost generation finally has a name. But not “cuspers”! Ecch. After all these years of being denied a collective name, the last thing we should get is name that defines us by our neighbors, ie. we should be defined by who we are, not who we aren’t.
Moot point, since cuspers has never caught on at all, while Generation Jones has already established itself as very popular with a national following. I’m proud of our generation and of the name that emerged for us: Generation Jones.
Google cuspers and you’ll see that virtually nobody uses that term for the generation between the Boomers and Xers. Cuspers was proposed as a name for this generation 10 years ago when Boomers and Xers were the two dominant generations, but it never caught on at all, and anyway, doesn’t even make sense at this point, since now people between GenX and GenY, and those born between GenY and GenZ, are called cuspers.
By contrast, google the term Generation Jones, and you’ll see that it’s gained a big national following…it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from numerous top publications and networks (New York Times, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) are specifically referring to Obama, born in 1961, as part of Generation Jones.
Interesting. I will pop a new post, now that my brief research has borne you out.
Cuspers is the term which is most often used to describe those of us who are in-between Generation X and Generation Y. Admittedly, those who on in-between, or on the cusp, of all generations are called Cuspers, but the term is mainly used for those on the cusp of GenX/GenY.