I was thinking about how generations are named, and how having a generation named based on the years we were born is really dumb. It also feels really dumb to have generations named by the people in the generations that came before them. I was thinking about the name "The Greatest Generation" and how that couldn't have been coined before it was earned(?), which led me to think that certainly members of the greatest generation must have helped name or at least have helped make popular the name for their own generation. I was about to say the name stands in stark contrast to the rest of the named generations, but then I googled it and realized the one after them is called the Silent Generation, and that had to have been a largely retrospective naming as well. Then the Baby Boomers is mostly just a historical fact, so it could have been named either as it was happening or afterwards. And Gen X/Y/Z and Millennial are all just vapid, nebulous names that could have been given to any group of people (in the case of X/Y), or any group of people coming of age circa the year 2000 in the latter case. I'm sure that X/Y has more meaning to it than I'm giving it at face value, but still, we should be able to come up with and popularize better names than these. Especially for the Millennials, we should earn a name and then claim it for ourselves. Maybe the reverse is fine too. ;)