These so-called Gen Y-ers are mostly people aged in their 20s and early 30s. Most of them are working, but they do so in an environment where job security is often tenuous, or felt to be so. Many of them are doubling work with study to try to grab some kind of future security, and often as not working longer hours than required to prove they are worthy. At the very same time their hours are so crowded, many of them experience both biological and social anxiety about using the years available to them to become parents. Yet housing prices during their lives have roared so far ahead of increases in wages that their ability to scramble together a worthwhile deposit for a permanent roof over their heads is at least daunting. Not a lot space for entitlement within all that. The most preposterous premise, however, is that all these people should be rounded up within an artificial construct called Generation Anything.

They are tradies, professionals, students and unemployed. They are from wealthy families and poor families and middling families, and they're orphans, disabled, immigrants, indigenous, straight, gay, brilliant, dull, married, single ... It would be little surprise, thus, to find some who are entitled, precocious, demanding and rude, just like ... forever. But to generalise about a generation, you might just as well declare that a snake-handling southern Baptist and a High Anglican and Mormon are the same because they're all Christian, or a Sunni and a Shiite can't be distinguished because they're Muslim. Criticism is a vaulting pole to those in quest of feeling superior Tony Wright And anyway, whoever heard of one generation withholding criticism of the next? Criticism is a vaulting pole to those in quest of feeling superior.

It wasn't until the 1970s that I learned my friends and I belonged to a generation with its own name. We were baby boomers, a term not used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, until some reporter at the Washington Post, scrambling around for a catchy catch-all, came up with it in 1970. It made no sense to any of us when we figured out eventually what it was supposed to mean. People born between 1946 and 1965, apparently, when a post-war, pre-Pill burst of childbirth occurred. All very interesting. By the 1970s, my mates and I had spent our entire youths trying to figure out where we belonged and where we might end up. We felt we had little in common with kids born after the 1950s, let alone as late as 1965, who were aged five when we were entering young adulthood and facing, as young men, conscription. As for those supposed to be part of our generation but who were born in the 1940s ... we couldn't imagine what it must have been to be born so long ago. It was the Stone Age. And anyway, we were country kids. We could only dream about what made city kids tick. And those of us from farms were a subset, different to country townies.

Some of us had tried, variously and without conspicuous success, at being rockers, Mods and surfies; some had given a shot at being Sharpies, and we'd morphed into uncertain attempts at becoming hippies, all of it in the awkward cause of trying to fit in to a world that didn't feel all that booming, even if the job market then was a lot easier than it is for this mythical Gen Y now. The only grand reference to an age that might bind us was My Generation by the Who, and the thing that made it special was that Roger Daltrey stuttered, as if suffering angst, just like us, when he sang the words "I'm not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation/I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation". This all-encompassing "Boomer generation" thing was obviously a fraud to those of us down on the ground, but sociologists, pop psychologists, demographers, filmmakers and writers loved the snappy shorthand. Especially writers. Tom Wolfe went all the way, writing a whole book called The "Me" Decade, which was about the 60s in the United States but which has been misconstrued and misused ever since to slur boomers everywhere as narcissists, one and all. Now Generation Y is copping the treatment. Precocious. Demanding. Entitled. As if they didn't have enough apprehension to fill their crowded days and nights. Just like my supposed generation. And every generation cascading before and since, as judged by the one ahead of it.