Give generational stereotypes the flick

There are some generational commonalities born from sharing historical experience but that experience tends to be of a cataclysmic order and it affects almost everyone in a nation.

This is rare. In the last 100 years only World War One, the Depression and World War Two are of that magnitude. Living through those events, especially as young people, produced some common attitudes to life. The lessons they learnt were harsh and they tended to be conservative in outlook, although not definitively so.

All of this generation X and Y palaver gives someone a job at a university researching how the Boomers possess qualities of R, P and Q and Gen Y is like, you know, totally brain altered by, you know, celebrity culture.

The problems faced by people in their teens and 20s today will require the kind of intelligence and 'roll up the sleeves grit' displayed by past generations. I commend their individuality not their age cohort.

People are not statistics. We are not brands. Character is shaped by how we cope with adversity. How we respond to conflict cannot be measured by statistical analysis or meaningless and arbitrary classification.