Indeed! I was born in the last year that pollsters usually categorize as defining the baby boomer generation. But I didn't grow up with typical Boomer experiences. It was my parents who experienced Leave it to Beaver values amid an explosion of working-class prosperity.

I grew up with an energy crisis and the Republican destruction of organized labor – listening to music by hippies and war protesters, coming gradually to understand the working class standards of living were falling rather than rising.

So I get it that labels don't always get it right.

I think it's always tempting to define ourselves by labels, even to seek labels out that we believe work well for us.

But I think that's inevitably a reductive process, sometimes helpful but often not.