These agitations are disparate in trigger, scope and effect, but are bridged by their spearheads – Gen Z.
Generation labels continue to be focused on American contexts and experiences.
Indeed, how were generation labels first coined, what socio-cultural factors underpinned these formations and why are the age brackets so seemingly arbitrary?
Their book Generations described American history as a repeating cycle of generational types on a fixed schedule.
Stein then slapped that phrase on Hemingway and the American writers around her in Paris where she lived.
A rash of protests have rattled south Asian countries in the last three years – Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh in 2024, Nepal in 2025 and India this year. These agitations are disparate in trigger, scope and effect, but are bridged by their spearheads – Gen Z. Generation labels continue to be focused on American contexts and experiences. They often take unkindly to being fitted on to other cultures. (Featured image: HT)
The term, used broadly to describe people born between 1997 and 2012, spent years being tossed about as shorthand for a generation of young people with bottomless appetites for smartphones, social media and a unique lexicon. Now, it rattles governments across the world.
Beware the kids with the smartphones and endless stream of memes. But where did the term Gen Z come from? Indeed, how were generation labels first coined, what socio-cultural factors underpinned these formations and why are the age brackets so seemingly arbitrary?
Also read: 'Gen Z are our own, protesting doesn't make them anti-national': Mohan Bhagwat
Social generations: Where the idea came from The idea that a society divides into generations is nearly 150 years old. Nineteenth-century French and Italian thinkers tried to fix a generation’s length at a set number of years. German historians argued instead that a generation was a shared way of seeing the world, not a span of time. Karl Mannheim, a Hungarian-born sociologist working in Germany, rejected both.
The underlying thinking and modern foundation of generations goes back to his seminal 1927-28 essay Das Problem der Generationen, translated into English in 1952 as “The Problem of Generations”.
Mannheim argued that a shared birth year does not make a generation, a contention that bucked years of academic thinking from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather, he argued that generations were structural positions – class, for instance – that expose them to certain experiences without determining what they make of them. They form only when an epochal event, such as a war or an economic collapse, reaches people while they are still young enough to be shaped by it.
The American writers William Strauss and Neil Howe took the idea mainstream in 1991, though along a separate path from Mannheim. Their book Generations described American history as a repeating cycle of generational types on a fixed schedule. It also gave the word “millennial” wide currency.
But at first, the labels came in retrospect and by chance, rather than through science and logic.
The Lost Generation, born between 1883 and 1900, was the first to get one – in a French garage, if American novelist Ernest Hemingway were to be believed.
In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes that the owner of a French garage lost his temper with a young mechanic who had been slow to repair fellow American writer Gertrude Stein’s car and dismissed the whole cohort of young men as “a lost generation”.
Stein then slapped that phrase on Hemingway and the American writers around her in Paris where she lived. “You are all a lost generation,” she famously said, referring to a generation bred and scarred by World War I. Hemingway printed her remark as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, and the label attached itself to the cohort that came of age in the war.
