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No doubt you’re already familiar with the concept of generation within families. Your grandparents, parents, children, and children’s children all make up a distinct generation in relation to you. But each of them also belongs to a diffuse category of their peers, grouped together based on when they were born and what they experience during their lives. Social scientists have studied generations—in theory and more practically—for millennia. More recently, thinkers like August Comte have argued that generational change is the engine behind social change. More specifically, each generation entering into a new life stage at more or less the same time is the pulse that creates the history of a society.

