Generations are often defined through decades, as if reality is shaped by a particular decade, and as if external influence organises itself according to a constructed timeline. Now that technology is forming generations at an unprecedented speed, or just new tendencies, things look a little different.

But patterns can also emerge from decades, so this approach to generations is not entirely without basis after all: the hippies of the 70s and yuppies of the 80s, generation X of the 90s. These are not unfounded claims. But is the idea of generations perhaps the ripples, while the lines between the ages and millennia are the waves of the sea?

The idea of generations relates to the fast disappearing time periods, demanding a pattern, a label, a meaning.