Because when you were born correlates with your cultural experiences and therefore your behaviors. Not always, bit broadly. And if you try to define groupings for those years, you can see clearly defined generations, that were really clear with the baby boomers, who were the American children of American soldiers coming back from world war 2, and then their resultant children, generation y/the "millennials", named thusly for coming of age around the time of the millennium.

Like sure, it's all social constructs. But, so is language.

Baby boomers generally got some of the biggest economical booms in history, along with the population "boom" of their births. But that was only if you were able, white, cisgender, heterosexual, and male. The civil rights movements of the 50s, 60s, and onwards were both possible but also necessary because of the empowerment of those demographics.

But also, because of that general success, a lot of baby boomers (cishet white men) took on the behavioral traits of being largely pieces of shit. Not all, just like "not all men". But, it's enough of a pattern of entitlement and sexism and repression and psychosocial behavioral resultant of lead poisoning, that that's what the baby boomer generation is kind've seen as, now, regardless if any individual does or doesn't fit any of those things.

And so, we can largely group and label the generation and attach it to a current age group and try to predict or explain behavior.

Unfortunately, this is also discrimination in many cases where it isn't true. Personally, I try to avoid profiling entirely because the habit is gross. But, I would be lying if I said I didn't clearly see a solid pattern. I know, that they're just people like the rest of us, and if we were in their shoes, we would entirely end up just like them. But then that again brings it to it being generational, and not just age.

You think I like being reminded and disappointed when people end up fitting their negative stereotypes? You think it's easy to try to be a good person against my own upbringing? It's not. But we have to try. And working to understand is a big part of that. More people need to ask "why", and, I know you were asking rhetorically, but you were close enough that I think it deserves recognition. So, good on you for that.

Whatever the millennial generation ends up being known for, I'm curious. But until then, we can't give up trying to make ourselves, the world, and each other better. Because once you give up.... Well... We can never give up.

"Why not?" Etc etc.

I know we don't know each other very well, but... Can I have your stuff?

As a millennial, it, too, is insane.

Which begs the question: who thinks this is a needed thing and a good idea? Who is pushing this agenda?

I hear that - I was around when Arche and Fido-net and BBS'es were king. You want my id? Great I'll just fax it to you.

It's to do with the amount of people that were killed in WW1, essentially the sheer number of people that died during the war resulted in a generation nearly ceasing to exist.

Going into WWI was a bad time to be coming of age.

Personally, I don't know.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation :

The Lost Generation was the demographic cohort that reached early adulthood during World War I, and preceded the Greatest Generation. The social generation is generally defined as people born from 1883 to 1900, coming of age in either the 1900s or the 1910s, and were the first generation to mature in the 20th century. The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s.[1][2][3] Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation."[4][5] "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early interwar period.[6]

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Western members of the Lost Generation grew up in societies that were more literate, consumerist, and media-saturated than ever before, but which also tended to maintain strictly conservative social values. Young men of the cohort were mobilized on a mass scale for World War I, a conflict that was often seen as the defining moment of their age group's lifespan. Young women also contributed to and were affected by the war, and in its aftermath gained greater freedoms politically and in other areas of life. The Lost Generation was also heavily vulnerable to the Spanish flu pandemic and became the driving force behind many cultural changes, particularly in major cities during what became known as the Roaring Twenties.

Later in their midlife, they experienced the economic effects of the Great Depression and often saw their own sons leave for the battlefields of World War II. In the developed world, they tended to reach retirement and average life expectancy during the decades after the conflict, but some significantly outlived the norm. The Lost Generation became completely ancestral when the last surviving person who was known to have been born in the Lost Generation or during the 19th century, Nabi Tajima, died in 2018 at age 117.[7]