Because every other "generation" is about 10 years and yet somehow "Millennials" are an almost 25 year gap. Notice how it's "Older Millennial, younger millennial, etc". You don't use those qualifiers with the other generations because they are appropriately sized.
Millennials should be 2-3 named generations. It currently refers to 80's kids, 90s kids, any kids alive when 2000 happened, and early Aughts kids(probably because the last name sucked and no one wanted to use it). Too many generations wanted the claim of "I was the first generation of the new millennium" and everyone co-opted the term even when it didn't traditionally apply(newborns because they were closest to the date as opposed to when their major development occured is part of that stretch)
When I was growing up, the definitions kept changing.
I was born in 1986, and while in primary school I was told that makes me GenX. So I grew up thinking I was GenX. Then in high school, my teachers said actually anyone born after 1985 is GenY, so we're definitely GenY.
Then when year 2000 came around people started talking about a new generation of people who would "never remember the 20th century", or "never know a world without the internet", basically people born after 1997 so they grow up completely in the 2000s. They called them Millennials.
From then on the usage of "millennial" kept growing, starting to see it everywhere. Mostly by boomers complaining about millennials.
Around 2012 I stated seeing some youtubers around my age referring to themselves as millennials, I thought it was a joke, or a bad understanding. Then people started referring to me as a millennial. Someone who's whole childhood was in the 90s, how could I be a millennial, it defied the definition.
So I imagine my shock when I find now they've removed all trace of the usage of GenY, and retroactively applied "millennial" to mean anyone born after 1985. So maybe I am a millennial? I remember staying up late to celebrate with my parents and make sure our computer didn't crash at midnight on new years eve in 1999. I remember wondering why dragonballz wasn't on TV when the news was showing footage of American skyscrapers in 2001. Are those the things that make me a millennial? If so then what about the original definition? Those born 1997 or later won't remember those things, so now they're Zoomers? All this business makes me so confused.
The bit you're getting confused by, I think, is that some generations are just bigger than others. The boomers were by their name sake a big generation. Millennials are essentially boomers' kids ... and so they’re bigger than both Gen X and Gen Z.
Most "generational" definitions span about 15 years, sometimes more. EG, Boomers: 1946-1960
There are sensibly defined micro-generations typically at the borders between generations.
EG, "Jones Generation": 1960-1965 ... "young boomers" ... they had a distinct life experience from "core boomers" not too different from that of X-Gens. Vietnam and 60s happened while they were children, Reagan was their 20s, not 40s, etc.
Xennials are notable here because they're the transition between X-Gen and Millennials (late 70s to early 80s) ... probably what you're thinking of as "older millennials". What's interesting though is that the relevance of Xennials is that technological changes mark the generation ... they're essentially just barely young enough to count as part of the internet generations but not old young enough to be ignorant of the pre-internet times. Which just highlights that how you talk about generations depends on what you more broadly care about. In the west, arguably not too much political upheaval has occurred since WWII and its immediate consequences (basically Boomer things) ... and so the generations are distinguished on smaller and probably more technological scales.
Notice how it's "Older Millennial, younger millennial, etc". You don't use those qualifiers with the other generations
Of course you do. I, a young millennial, have a lot more in common with my old genZer sister than she does with a young genZer born in 2011. It's an important distinction because we both didn't get smart phones until we didn't have smart phones until late teens at least, while young genZers weren't even born when the iPhone was first released.
My parents are young boomers. For my dad that means he never had to worry about getting drafted like his older boomer brothers.
Because every other "generation" is about 10 years and yet somehow "Millennials" are an almost 25 year gap. Notice how it's "Older Millennial, younger millennial, etc". You don't use those qualifiers with the other generations because they are appropriately sized.
Millennials should be 2-3 named generations. It currently refers to 90s kids, any kids alive when 2000 happened, and early Aughts kids(probably because the last name sucked and no one wanted to use it).
If you ask me, these generation labels are bullshit and just a way to put people into a stereotypical box and make them an "other". Not much better than astrology.
It's inherently an american concept, which is what also annoys me as some Europeans have started importing the concept even though it makes little sense (I don't really think it makes sense in the US either but the fact that it is imported is just extra stupid).
I think people just love putting other people in boxes. Consider people complexly instead.
Well, in that case, maybe this is interesting to you. I ran a user survey last year for my instance and anyone else wanting to answer and one question was age. Here's the age group graph:
The y-axis is number of respondents, x-axis is age group. Obviously this only applies to the people that responded to the survey and thus might not apply in general to the fediverse, but it's probably an indication. And, well, it's mostly smoothly distributed without any major gaps or humps (slight hump at 30-34 but not sure if that's statistically significant).
This exactly. At the broadest range you can say there are certain qualities that are more prevalent in one age group compared to another age group, but at the individual person level those trends are meaningless. Any individual person can be conservative or liberal, be caring or selfish, be x or y.
They are arbitrary but they at least serve as marking posts for real generational trends. I'm not sure there is much benefit in trying to find any categorization that isn't arbitrary, so long as the generations are large enough.
At some point, a clever media article increments the previous letter, or since everything was not planned well from the beginning and the letters have run out, stamps a poorly conceived label on a group of people.
These 'generations' are based on ambiguous date cutoffs, are engineered retroactively, and don't really align with any actual zeitgeist of a period. Because discrete vs continuous and other reasons. But any good scapegoat requires a convenient label.
Begun, the generation wars have.
The older generation is blamed for the world's problems since they were 'in charge'. The younger generation is blamed for being impulsive or wild, just not working hard enough, and maybe having too little respect. Also toast wrecks the economy or something?
The older generation is perplexed by the fracas since the people who were actually in power were supposed to be taking care of the big problems, while they were working a job, raising kids, and hoping to retire some day. They had no direct power and could not make decisions of a magnitude that would change much of anything in society.
The younger generation is equally perplexed because they have little money, status, or power, and are also working a job or three, waiting to start a family perhaps, and have often given up on retiring someday.
Everyone has been fed a steady diet of fabricated hopelessness, dysfunction, and outrage from the media for decades.
Only a few will realize the whole 'generation' thing is fabricated to keep you distracted. Who benefits from the scapegoating, infighting, and status quo? Someone is driving it, and benefiting from it, but it is not you.
The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology. There’s also been a growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.
The millennials watched several thousand people die on live television when we were kids and then everything went downhill from there. I was in high school in September 2001. Old enough to just barely understand what was happening, too young to do jack shit about it. Frightened, we looked to guidance from our Gen-X and Boomer teachers and elders. They told us to sit down, shut up, do as we were told, and everything would be fine. By and large, we did. By and large, nothing, not one fucking thing, ended up fine.
I say this to illustrate that this is why, and how, we are the DOOMER generation. We got piled on with the baggage and bondage of manipulation and lies from the Boomers who climbed the social ladder and then pulled it up behind them, and their Gen-X toadies who rode their coattails half way up hoping they wouldn't get noticed and shaken off to land back down here in the dirt with the rest of us.
And the thing that sets the Zoomers apart is that you witnessed this happening, every single crucial step of the betrayal from every authority figure from the president on down to the homeroom teacher, and by gods... You Learned.
Zoomers, in my view, seem to possess a preternatural hyper-awareness that any promise made by anyone who has something they can take from you is good for nothing. Some people say "Zoomers don't give a shit" like it's supposed to be an insult. HA. No. I see what's really happening. They're jealous. Giving a shit was a mistake. It was a mistake we Doomers made. And I am pleased, if not in awe, when I see Zoomers not falling for the bait. You have largely withdrawn yourselves from the rat race, and now it's running out of rats. Maybe now those fucking rats can finally starve holed up and isolated in their mazes. You, meanwhile, may very well build a better way to live. And whether or not I get to participate, I love to see it.
dunno man. maybe that hyper-awarness shit is true, but i am overwhelmed by it. i fucking hate this government, the bullshit that they feed us, the lies, the invigilation, all of it. it makes me sick. this world sucks so fucking much and i feel pretty hopeless about it, which is infuriating. i wish i was born earlier
Having no hope is, in my opinion, better than having false hope. You aren't waiting around for some external savior to recognize that you're struggling and swoop in to rescue you. You know that anything you get will arrive to you only by clawing it from the cold dead hands of the elders.
Yeah it sounds bleak but realize this: THEY don't know that.
THEY, those fucking parasite boomers in their ivory towers, think you're just like the millennial doomers who will roll over obediently and then do no worse than look sad and make sad noises when we get cheated ALL OVER AGAIN.
When they turned their back on US, we stayed docile, simpering, begging.
When they turn their back on YOU, you are going to stab them thirty six times, slash their throats, and dig out their organs with a shiv fashioned out of one of their precious participation trophies, and eat them raw and howling.
... Or at least some of you will. And I for one hope that when it starts happening, we doomers will either stay out of the way, or for ONCE in our FUCKING LIVES stand up to protect you from the death throes of the worst generation.
You have it in you. It's growing. Keep feeding it.
I'm also Gen Z and this was me for a while as well. Something that really helped me is not focusing as much on all of the million things going wrong that are way out of my control, and taking smaller steps wherever I can to try to make things better. That shift in perspective has made a lot of things more manageable and less overwhelming even if I still ultimately have the same negative outlook on everything that's going on right now.
Yes, watching people die on tv does sound much worse than being drafted for Vietnam or living with the daily thought that Russia had a bomb and we could all die any day.
NOBODY WAS DRAFTED INTO VIETNAM WHEN THEY WERE FUCKING TWELVE DIPSHIT
AND, MOTHER FUCKER, YOU DO NOT GET TO INSINUATE THAT THE "DUCK AND COVER" CARTOONS WERE SOMEHOW MORE TRAUMATIZING THAN CODE GRAY DRILLS, LET ALONE SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY DIRECTLY EXPERIENCING ACTUAL FUCKING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS
FUCK. OFF. IN. HELL.
at least Vietnam veterans could afford a fucking home when they got back
You know what, STAY fucked off. I don't need filth like you in my feed. BLOCKED.
I like the "Oregon Trail generation" name someone mentioned earlier too, I might lean into that one more in the future. Remember playing Math Blaster on an Apple Mac Classic in elementary school computer lab? Then you were there too!
I like to use Oregon Trail generation too. It’s the perfect label for those of us who essentially had computers inserted into our childhoods at some point.
Computers pre-date us by a lot, obviously, but it’s more about the mass market computers (and home video game systems) that normal people could access.
You know what's kind of funny. Both my parents identify as Gen X. Both of them are actually Baby Boomer's. With the pre-requisite feral children. But I'm a millennial and it's kind of funny that having grown up basically a feral child my generation doesn't get to claim that.
Huh… I never thought of that in this specific way.
When we were kids, and I was born 1994, our parents both had to work to acquire enough income to afford things, making us rely on ourselves. Parents did not pay that much for babysitters back then, no? And us kids weren’t being watched by GPS or something 24/7.
But it’s a tight window, and it depends on the family how long it stays open.
I know some people born in 1997 who are like this, and others who aren’t.
Knowing about 2girls1cup, 1man1jar, that creepy car zombie coffee advert, other shock content… we were desensitised to gore and shock content. We played on MS Paint for hours.
Our parents did not know what we were doing, and it was… I’d say it was good.
During the debates my wife made a joke that Biden is so old he’s not even a Boomer. We then gave each other a look and pulled out our phones to check. Turns out it’s true, he is from the “Silent Generation”.
I grew up without cell phones or Internet until my teen years. Remember watching the OJ trial whenever I was home sick from school.
We were really worried about Y2K, which would have been a disaster if not fixed ahead of time.
Had to work on 9/11, and remember what airports were like before all the added security.
Also had to work - pushing groceries to people's cars while the VA sniper was rolling around the area shooting people in parking lots.
I remember people smoking cigarettes fucking everywhere. There were cigarette vending machines.
Our 2 and 3 liter bottles had an extra plastic piece to make the bottom flat. I don't think they were making them with feet like they do today. The bottoms were round, requiring a plastic shoe to create a flat bottom. Sometimes the bottles had a metal cap.
Hardly anybody wore seatbelts. Gas was under $1/gallon when I started driving.
Parents are baby boomers but had me really late. I used to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in my Super Mario themed tightey whitey underwear when I was like 4 years old…
I remember in my small town leaving the house on my bike when I was 5 years old at sun up, and being gone playing with friends until the street lights came on, because that was when dinner was ready. I could easily have killed myself or been kidnapped, my parents didn’t see me for 12+ hours at a time.
I’m from Oklahoma and I remember the walls of my schools Gym shaking from the Murrah Federal Building bombing.
I was in Middle School and remember lots of high schoolers having gun racks, with hunting rifles, in their trucks parked in the student parking lot. And it was normal.
I was in A+ classes at a community college while in high school and watched a live stream of the TODAY show as the second plane hit the WTC tower…
I’ve watched the world go to shit, I have a kid that just turned 18 and I’m angry that they won’t get to live in a world that even resembles the one I grew up in.
If you weren't old enough to understand what was happening when watching the twin towers fall and grasp the gravity of it while it was happening, you're a Zoomer. (And that's a good thing)
Young millennial here. My first memory relating to 9/11 is vaguely being told it was the anniversary of some event that happened the previous year in 2002.
It really wasn't (at least not directly—the aftermath of it certainly was) the big generarion-defining thing Americans like to think it was. The impact on global diplomacy (not least of which is the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), the increased security theatre when travelling on planes. That's certainly a defining generational experience. But the event itself is much less so.
I'm early Gen Z with a kinda poor family. So I had CRT's and old VHS but also grew up on the internet.
I feel an extreme gap between me and people a few years younger. I graduated in 2018 so I was some of the last people to have a traditional highschool experience. Before Covid, Zoom, and Chatgpt.
I also mostly grew up with computers instead of phones so Im only just now getting into TikTok, I'll likely never truly revolve around it like many others (both older and younger than me).
I'm gen X. I definitely feel that Boomers are from a different world. I felt we got a shit deal but that just got worse for millenials then gen Z. To me, I feel like I can relate to generations that followed me. They're pissed off and they should be.
Internet generation, progenitors of current online brainrot. Came too early to experience the 90s in all its glory, and too late for running console-quality games on a 6mm thick mobile device.
At least we have the 2010s to claim for ourselves. Those were pretty cool.
I hate these generational divides. Are we really supposed to think that a person from 1982 and a person from 1994 (both millennials) have more in common than a person from 1994 and one from 1997 (one millennial and one zoomer)? It makes no sense.
If I had to answer, I guess the closest would be Zillenial: born around the mid 90s.
Gen X. The generation that couldn't be arsed to programme the video recorder or cooker digital time-clock, but knew how to.
There were a lot of power cuts in our (UK) youth and we remember saying to ourselves, "Ok, so that's how it's gonna be, huh?!". Still kicking arse and taking names.
We were the grown-up's TV remote control, with our 1200 bits per second magnetic tape storage for BBC B home computers (from the later ARM boys), before we got 360kB 5" floppy disks.
Tech doesn't phase us (yet); AI is a better average conversation than a spouse.
Also Gen X UK person here, I remember in the 90s when that hurricane made it over from the US, and we had no power for 9 days.
My dad went full survivalist, we ate nothing but baked beans cooked on a camping stove, and he got this portable black and white TV from somewhere that we could watch for an hour a day because it ran off a car battery lol.
Greetings fellow traveler! [I'm an early model X - late sixties].
Are you taking about the Michael Fish, 'There isn't going to be a hurricane.' blunder? Sevenoakes became Oneoak! 1987 perhaps? I really don't remember that, would you remind me, please?
I'm talking about the 1970s strikes which cut power to the whole country for sets of three or four days; Ted Heath being reacquainted with the role of the electorate before they all became Tony Blair-esque dopey smiling useless clones in 1992 ish (until we found out about Major-Curry (hehe!)). Going shopping with candles on trolleys, thawing food in the freezers.
Early Gen X. Just gotta say, the term.baby boomer was tossed around when I was younger but I never heard the term generation X until the 90's, maybe late 90's.
I'd be cautious that behavior, common experienced events, technology shifts, etc define categories and not the other way around. If the boundaries for generations are arbitrary then inclusion is just as arbitrary and not defined by behavior since behaviors can spread across multiple labels. We all want to belong, but tribalism can be a useful tool to divide humanity against itself. Historic generation labels where distinct boundaries can be observed and defined in an historic context makes sense to me, contemporary generational labels seem like divisive nonsense to me.
I'm right in the Millennial/Gen Z transition, mid 90's. I struggle to associate strongly with either group as I missed most of the important Millennial stuff but I was too early for a lot of zoomer stuff.
That might be me. I'm a millennial by age, but I have always been keeping up with the newer tech. My father worked for Microsoft so we always had the new stuff as soon as it was available. And I'm a weirdo little autistic trans girl, so I didn't really socialize that much with my own age group even when it was an option.
Young millennial. And yeah, I think it’s not the most stark and clear cut, but older millennials had hope once it was just dashed upon adulthood, gen z grew up with everyone getting that they were hopeless. Us young millennials though, it was awkward as a 13 year old trying to explain to my parents that I was doomed.
But I definitely have more in common with someone a few years younger than me than several years older
This separation into "generations" is such bullshit. It's just another way to divide the haves from the have-nots. If you blindly believe that generations define you, you're the problem. You're making it easy to be controlled and find another person to concentrate on while your rights, your liberties, your opportunities, and your privacy get slowly taken away from you.
I'm born in 98' so I'm right down the middle but generally classed as the last of the millennials.
I feel a lot closer to zoomers, but where I'm from, I think the people who have fast-tracked adulthood with kids and mortgages are textbook millennials where as layabouts like myself share a lot more spaces with young adult zoomers.
I'm already needing to remind myself that some of the deepest internet brainrot like skibidi toilet is not a new phrase but a meme of the hour started by generation alpha and then carried by confused millennials.
I'm a cusp Milennial-Gen Z but I identify more with Gen Z values in my country, possibly because I was introduced to computers and the internet at a young age, even in a developing country.
That's so lame 😔 you mean my years of reading books, playing original Pokemon games on java phone, reading Barefoot Gen manga and loving Down the Waterfront were wasted because I came to exist at a time when my entire generation is from Ohio?
apparently my high school epitomed the Xer slacker stereotype for the middle of it.. They have these signs along the fence listing accolades and awards for different teams and clubs. There is this gap that goes between the late seventies and the early nineties. Outside of that there is something for like every year. Then I know for my year there was a half hearted attempt at a 25yr reunion I think from pressure from administration to some of the folks who had been student council or such. Anyway it imploded likely cause folks like me said they would not go.