For some time now, I’ve been observing a growing trend: people referring to themselves by generational labels – Gen Z, Millennial, and so on. It shows up most strongly in certain age groups, where these labels are used to validate preferences, justify choices, or explain behaviours and likes and dislikes.
I am going to try and write this without recourse to the Sanskrit technical terms. I might just signify in bold where I would normally use the Sanskrit technical terms, for their clarity.
Originally, these social categories were simply sociological tools – a way of understanding how large groups of people are shaped by shared economic conditions, historical events, technologies, and cultural atmospheres. They were meant to illuminate patterns in collective experience, not define individuals. (Personally, I have never bothered to focus on the calendar boundaries of any such group; I have only been listening to the noise, on occasion, with curiosity).
But it’s evident that once marketers, HR departments, and political strategists realised they could use these categories to predict preferences, the labels slid from neutral descriptors to tools of segmentation – ways of shaping consumption and targeted advertising and mechanisms for adjusting messaging to exploit the proletariat’s anxieties and aspirations.
Generational divisions then became less about genuine human understanding and more about manipulable consumer blocs and another means of self-identification.
The issue is that these divisions describe probabilities, not identities. They are useful as broad data, but they have no inherent authority over how any one person must think or act.
This week in class a comment came up about how, if you practise yoga sincerely, you already sit somewhat “outside” the mainstream. That insight echoes something found throughout yogic literature. There is a well-known saying:
“What is night for all beings is day for the yogi;
what is day for ordinary beings is night for the yogi who sees.”
This is not poetry for its own sake. It is a concise psychological map describing two radically different orientations to reality.
For the outward (“worldly”) -facing person, what society validates appears as “day” – the obvious, the culturally inherited structures of meaning, are taken as real. The “day” is everything that can be pursued, displayed, performed, or consumed: roles, preferences, affiliations, identities, generational labels, political tribes, online postures. These provide a sense of location and belonging, and for most people this is enough.
But for the Yogin, “day” is something else entirely – the moment the inner field becomes illuminated. When conditioning, preference, fear, craving, and bias are seen clearly as they arise, not defended as identity. And what society treats as “night” – introspection, restraint, discrimination, non-alignment with the crowd – is precisely where the Yogin is most awake. The Yogin is attempting to turn the whole apparatus on its head.
This is why generational identity becomes a subtle trap. Not because it is evil or bad, but because of the way the mind uses it. The categories themselves are harmless. What the mind does with them is the issue.
Modern individuals happily say, “I’m Gen X, Gen Z, a Millennial,” and then justify behaviour, preferences, and even values by appealing to these categories. These are what are referred to as “imputed qualifiers” – social constructs with some descriptive utility for sociologists, but with no absolute status in “Reality”.
They become traps when people use them as a substitute for inner work, a way to outsource understanding of themselves to cultural templates. In yoga language, this is mistaking the superimposed for the Real. From a yogic point of view, the whole enterprise rests on a false premise. While generational segmentation encourages identification with likes/dislikes, consumption habits, and social narratives, the Yogin would make the point that:
- these labels feed the ego (constructing another identity)
- they strengthen outward orientation
- they obscure the deeper movement toward clarity and inwardness
- they keep one situated at the level of outward experience rather than liberative inner experience
Again, these categories are not bad, or “evil,” but they operate firmly in the domain of conventional reality, and often distort the movement toward “the Real”. From a yogic perspective, such categories obscure the deeper truth that the Self is not reducible to external demographics or conditioned trends. To that extent the concept is a trap. They simplify the human psyche into predictable consumer categories, reinforcing outward-driven identities rather than inward freedom.
How so?
When someone says: “We Millennials hate phone calls”, “Gen Z doesn’t commit”, “Boomers can’t handle tech,” a descriptive trend becomes a psychological boundary. A statistical pattern becomes a personal excuse. External conditioning becomes self-applied. It no longer needs to be imposed from outside – the individual now reinforces it from within with auto-conditioning.
Yoga names this a “limiting adjunct” – the superimposition of something unreal upon the Self.
Internalising any external identity category pushes one deeper into identification with temporary markers, conditioning, and herd mentality, as opposed to recognition of one’s individuality, and the deeper truth that one is not the role that one plays. Of course Tom will argue the point because he firmly believes “Making films is not what I do, it is who I am! Generational identification creates yet another layer of this “limiting adjunct” (where one identifies with their prowess, their sports team, their role, their 6 pack abs, their skin colour etc) – masking the “deeper Self”.
A tragedy.
Generational identity is merely the newest garment handed out by culture. And culture always hands out garments.
Just so none feels the need to react adversely, because they very much enjoy and thrive on their labels, enjoying immense satisfaction from their team allegiance, political gods, and social props, I am not condemning anyone nor suggesting that they are wrong, or failures, or automatons. It’s just that to be clear, none of this labelling is a part of, or helpful in the practice of yoga. What is daytime for ordinary beings is nighttime for the yogi ……..
You are free to use generational labels as social shorthand, but remember, they describe conditioning, not identity. Yoga is the art of seeing through conditioning, not justifying it. So, if you catch yourself explaining your tendencies by saying ‘I’m Gen Z’ or ‘I’m a Millennial,’ pause for a moment – that’s precisely the kind of identification yoga would recommend you examine, not adopt.”
Yoga is the art of noticing when we are taking the easy path of explanation instead of the harder work of self-inquiry. Ultimately, the real concern for the Yogin is not the labels themselves, but the lack of discernment that normalises them. The result of insufficient discernment =
- lack of discernment between Self and non-Self
- lack of dispassion (disinterest in the world’s narratives about oneself)
- over-identification with external qualifiers
- dependence on group identity to explain personal tendencies
- a subtle fear of standing alone without a category
None of this is wrong. It is simply unexamined.
For someone practising yoga, the movement is in the opposite direction:
- fewer labels
- fewer external narratives
- fewer borrowed identities
- greater clarity and inwardness
- understanding oneself beyond conditioning
“So perhaps the invitation is simply this: to notice when we are living by the world’s ‘daylight’ – the obvious narratives, the easy explanations – and when we are turning toward the yogi’s ‘day’ instead: the inner clarity that comes from careful seeing. Generational labels will continue to circulate; culture will always offer fresh identities to wear. The world thrives on such things, and there is nothing surprising about that. But if you intend to practise yoga, consider this deeply: the practice invites a different movement altogether – one that returns you again and again, to what is not borrowed, not inherited, not imposed. Yoga asks you to see through the noise, rather than settle into it. And in that seeing, one quietly steps from night into day.”
– Richard