47 - What’s Your Favorite Band?
And what does that have to do with sushi?
We share the world with people born in seven different generations. This may or may not be unprecedented. It’s certainly unique in an era of mass communication and personal interconnections among members of those generations.
The seven concurrent generations are:
Greatest Generation - born 1901 -1927
Silent Generation - 1928 - 1945
Baby Boomers - 1946 - 1964
Generation X - 1964 - 1980
Millennials - 1981 - 1996
Generation Z - 1996 - 2012
Generation Alpha - 2013 - Present
Think about the first 20 years of life for people born in each of these generations. Think about how those people developed attachments to objects and experiences during those first 20 years. Specifically, think about the music each generation listened to as we grew up, formed social identities, went to school, dated, partied, got jobs, maybe married and had kids.
If I asked each of you the question: “what’s your favorite band?” I’m almost certain your answer would be one from the era in which you spent your first 20 years.
Imagine asking someone from Gen Z that question. What are the odds that they’d say, “The Carpenters?” Million to one? More? Ask the same questions of a Silent. Think they’d say, “The Ramones?”
My guess is that a very small percentage of us would cite a band that became popular in an era after we were 20.
Think about that. I’m a Baby Boomer. Thousands of bands have appeared and recorded songs…some of them great bands and great songs…after 1967. My favorite band is The Beatles. Not surprising. The Beatles first appeared on American radio in December, 1963, right in the peak of my adolescence. Sixty years later, I’ll still listen to “I Saw Her Standing There” and just smile!
And, I love Steely Dan’s music. Their first record was released in 1972. I little outside my arbitrary 20 year window, but close enough for me to dive into the band’s great combination of melody, harmony, and….maybe most of all…enigmatic, ironic lyrics.
As music evolved into newer genres, I found myself less inclined to choose to listen to newer groups. The Police are still part of my rotation, but, not Nirvana. Or, Pearl Jam. Or, Radiohead. Nope.
I had also “aged out” of intentionally listening to a lot of bands by the time hip hop arrived. Oh, the occasional Run DMC song, maybe. But, not Public Enemy or NWA.
Now, why this trip down memory lane? To remind myself, and all of you, that our preferences for many things in our lives are formed and solidified in those first 20 years of our lives. And, once formed, they are pretty difficult to change.
Psychologists have noticed this!
“Openness to Experience,” one of the Big Five Personality Traits, gives us a glimpse of how flexible each of us is in this regard. If you like music and score very high on Openness, chances are you’ve listened to some bands from outside your 20 year formative period. Not just once or twice, but chosen to explore their music. You check out the new music charts in search of creative artists who speak to you. You might even have recent favorites.
If you score very low on that dimension, chances are you don’t purposefully seek out new bands. You might see someone on a late night TV show and think they’re interesting, but the odds are they won’t replace your early-life favorites on your playlists.
This might seem like a common sense reality, but if we think about it for minute we’ll see that we are all missing out on a lot of great music! Our established preferences have created musical “no fly zones”; whole genres of music that we never get a chance to experience because we’ve “disqualified” them as “not for me.” (Guilty as charged regarding “country.”)
Now, take these music insights and apply them to other areas of your life. Like food. When’s the last time you tried a food item from an unfamiliar national or regional cuisine? It used to be hard to find authentic Asian fast food, but a trip to a local Asian supermarket (remember when they didn’t exist?) often also means discovering a food court with an amazing array of carry-out stalls serving unfamiliar items described in their native languages.
Will most of us try any of these odd looking dishes made from ingredients we’re not used to? The chances of you doing so is very highly correlated with your score on the Openness to Experience trait.
Just as we might have discovered that we really do like some of Billie Eilish’s music, reluctant Silent Generation members might also find that they’d actually choose to eat sushi…if they pushed their Openness to Experience just a little outside their usual boundaries and actually tried some.
For me, the learning is, there’s a lot of joy out there, if we give ourselves a chance to find it.
(Oh, and if you’d like to see where you fall on the various Big Five Personality traits, here’s a free version of the test.)