Mondays with Mike: What’s in a number? Not much.

I turned 60 last year. Other than my 16^th (I could get a driver’s license), 18^th (I could vote), and 21^st (I could drink liquor legally), I had never paid much attention to the numbers. But 60 kinda got me. So, I did something to remind myself I’m not dead yet—I went to Japan and road tripped with our nephew Brian. Staying in hostels, walking around Tokyo, and seeing a Japanese metal festival reminded me that I’m still 25 inside. But outside, 60 meant unequivocally that I’m, as golfers say, on the back 9.

That’s our nephew Brian and me at a Hanshin Fighting Tigers game at Jingu Stadium, the oldest baseball stadium in Japan.

Of course, I have been on the back nine for awhile. The number 60 just made me more aware. But eventually, I remembered that it’s just a number and it doesn’t really say a lot about me.

Still, we cling to generational labels and stereotypes. Being 60 makes me a baby boomer. But that term has always bugged me. Or at least the notion that it says anything about me. My sister Kris, only five years older than I am, also qualified as a boomer, but she had a substantially different experience than I did growing up. There’s an 18-year range that labels us as boomers. That means a wide variety of experiences—from music you listened to as a teenager (one boomer could be weaned on The Lettermen or Elvis, another on Janis Joplin and The Doors), to whether the Vietnam War was more than controversial—it was a matter of life or death.

And that generational thing doesn’t touch stuff like where you grew up (Alabama? Minnesota? South Side of Chicago? Evanston, Illinois?). So many other factors have always seemed to me to be more important than age.

So it was satisfying to read an op-ed in the March 6 New York Times titled: ‘Millennial’ Means Nothing. Here’s the lead paragraph:

The Pew Research Center announced last week that it will define people born between 1981 and 1996 as members of the millennial generation, embracing a slightly narrower range of years than the ones used by the United States Census Bureau. It would have been better, though, if it had announced the end of what I call the “generation game” — the insistence on dividing society into groups based on birth year and imputing different characteristics to each group.

The writer, an economics researcher at Australia’s Queensland College, focuses initially on the emptiness of stereotypes about millennials:

To see what’s wrong with the idea, take a look at American millennials. In seemingly endless essays in recent years, they’ve been derided as lazy and narcissistic or defended as creative and committed to social change. But these all sound like characteristics that the old have ascribed to the young since the dawn of time. Similar terms were applied to the “slacker” Generation X and before that, the baby boomers.

He adds:

Much of the apparent distinctiveness of the millennial generation disappears when we look at individuals rather than aggregates. Black millennials, like their parents, overwhelmingly vote Democratic. By contrast, 41 percent of white millennials voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That’s lower than the 58 percent of all white voters who went for Mr. Trump, but it makes more sense to attribute the difference to individual characteristics and experiences rather than a generational attitude.

Moreover, the writer holds than none of the popular generational tags really tell us much. And he throws a bone to us 60-year-olds:

Some may argue that the generation game, if intellectually vacuous, is basically harmless. But dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.

Which is all to explain, I guess, why I felt a greater kinship to those young’ns who were out on the street Saturday for than I do to some of my contemporaries. Here’s to kids of all ages.