When did we start to think of society primarily as a collection of age cohorts? Take any recent attempt to capture the people of Britain and we tend to be shown a block strafed with three great horizontal divides: one canyon between 58- and 59-year-olds (generation X and boomers), a second great rift between the ages of 42 and 43 (millennials and gen X), and yet another unbreachable gap between 26 and 27 (gen Z and millennials).
Within each block, by contrast, you will be told that a group encompassing some 15 years and all levels of society is practically homogenous. Members of generations are accorded the same agenda, the same set of advantages and disadvantages, and even – like a new branch of astrology – the same personality. “I’m not a millennial,” a friend told me recently, though his date of birth put him smack within that cohort. What he meant, it turned out, was that he thought of himself as a stoic.
