The earlier Gen X’ers at least got a chance to hit their early adult life milestones during the Clinton-era prosperity of the '90s, especially those who were in on the dot-com boom. That was a prosperity of a kind which has not been seen since and might never be seen again, so I think that’s what the writer in the second link had in mind.
OK, this is just too rich.
Nobody can decide on which generations go when. Nobody has a consensus. Most of this thread is about a complete and total lack of consensus on who’s part of which generation and even which generations exist.
Therefore, everyone’s definitions are equally valid. Therefore, everyone’s definitions are equally bogus.
So what’s your position? “Nobody can agree, so therefore you’re inarguably wrong”? This stuff makes the quantum measurement problem look simple and well-defined.
And you’re calling me weird.
I think people periodically get that pessimistic feeling, and it eventually ends up being disproved. I noted earlier that in 1991 (also during a recession) that was the malaise being expressed as the central idea of the book Generation X, which was of course right before a decade of boom times. Go back another decade before that, and check out what Roger Ebert had to say in his review of the (brilliant) 1981 film My Dinner with Andre:
You can go roughly a decade before that, and it’s the Arab oil shocks that make everyone think American life is going down the tubes. Etc. Maybe this time will be different, but I doubt it. I suspect that at some point, the post-Millennial generation will also think the Millennials were the last ones to get served at the capitalist buffet before the door slammed shut. And then the generation after them, same deal. (Unless by that point we’ve gotten to the point of robot-supplied abundance that makes everyone so rich it’s absurd to think that, in which case the malaise will flip around and be seen as a product of too much easy living, and not enough “grit”–or whatever the fashionable term of the day is.)
The generation debate is so far into SWPL territory it hurts.
Mine is a girl with fake nerd glasses and dyed anime hair who intagrams her lunch or a dude in skinny jeans wearing ironic redneck attire like flannel shirts and trucker hats.
LOL, I love those images.
But good point about the SWPL thing. Millennials are far browner than previous generations, so that is particularly unfair when discussing them.
I’m part of that prosperity wave, but it hasn’t been easy for most of my age cohort.
We graduated college into a huge recession.
Got five years of a great boom economy - and it was awesome - but we didn’t have the savings to maximize it. Most of us were starting out. And many of us bought into the new economy, so we adapted lifestyles not savings. It isn’t like we had savings in 1995 to stick in the stock market to take advantage of the boom.
Then we got the dot com bust and 9/11. For many of my age cohort, they have never recovered.
We stabilized, hit another recession in 2008. This one wiped out the value of our homes and our 401ks. Now we are in our mid-40s, our 401ks just recovered eight years later, hopefully still clinging onto employment, and if we are lucky, still owning a home that is no longer underwater.
So yeah, we got five years of unprecedented prosperity. And two big recessions that wiped that out for a lot of us.
For a few of us, we got lucky. We managed to parley that dot com boom into careers, managed to get something like career stability (though nothing like what our parents knew). Rode through two recessions relatively unscathed and are doing ok. My husband and I are like that. We are the lucky ones.
There will be another economic boom. If you are really lucky, it will happen when you are at the peak of your career - not at the beginning of it like the early Gen Xers. And if you are lucky, you will manage to pull out before the bust, or the boom will have been for nothing.
It’s less funny than eye-rolling when they’ve done studies to show that Gen-X is the first generation since the early 1900s to make less money than their parents.
And that’s kind of bullshit considering how many of us were only in high school and college when Clinton was in office. The economy wasn’t booming when I graduated from college in 1999, nor was it three years later when the youngest Gen-X kids did.
Generational Theory was started by Strauss and Howe. Anyone who discusses it uses their definitions of the years. So there most certainly is a consensus.
Millennials are those born 1978-2000. I think on some level it is just fear among media personnel to have to admit that the oldest millennials are close to 40, because that means the people doing the reporting (who are older than millennials) are even older.
Heh, good point.
'78-'82 seems to be a grey area: GenXY, Gen Catalano, etc.
I consider myself a Millennial and I was born in 1986. I don’t really remember a time in my life without access to computers. We didn’t have one in the house until middle school, but my classroom had them since about the 4th grade. I’ve taken numerous typing classes in school. In high school AIM was the thing.
But I do feel as if I’m on the older edge of Millennial. I have more in common with my students than I do with my older brother.
You are definitely a Millennial, but let’s see if in two or three years the media is still defining you as such.
Born in 1982, right on that transition. Since the media wants to define by technology, we had an IBM 286 by the time I was about five, but that’s because of Dad. Didn’t have a cell phone until college (summer between freshman and sophomore year) and only got it because I got sick of using calling cards and finding pay phones (and the sheer cost of using a calling card at a pay phone) when traveling. I remember the days of dialup, and of using a local BBS and also companies like CompuServe and Prodigy.
Most of it from the media is pretty silly. I do agree that they’ve been calling people in their 20s “Millennials” for the last decade. It’s been ten years since I graduated undergrad, seven since I got my MS, and I’ve been working ever since. Besides, I’m a chemist, so my career is kinda an outlier anyway.
So ten years ago you were a Millennial in good standing, but now, not so much.
I was born in 1981, which in most schemes seems to put me right on the cusp. I generally have more in common with the Millennials than with Generation X. My childhood was extremely geek, and my family were early-adopters of a lot of technology that defined the lives of people younger than I am. I grew up with it, same as they did. The things that defined GenX? Not so much.
I recognize a lot of the cultural touchstones of Generation X, but they weren’t an integral part of my life as a kid. I was too young to hang out in arcades during their heyday, or to watch MTV back when they were still the hot channel for music. I’m told I had a Cabbage Patch Doll, but I was so little I have no memory of it. My parents bought the NES – I certainly played with it, but so did they, and the point at which the video games became irrevocably MINE wasn’t until the mid-90s, when I got a Playstation.
I don’t particularly find the media depiction of either generation very flattering. Even articles about the “strengths” of GenX/Y/whatever tend to be rather backhanded. The greatest cultural divide, regardless of age, seems to me to be people who consider interacting on the internet to be socializing, versus people who consider interacting on the internet to be indistinguishable from watching television alone in the basement for hours on end. I am firmly with the kids on this one. Internet people are still people. Hence, people who don’t know how old I am will usually assume I’m a Millennial.
Aren’t these labels somewhat arbitrary? There are certain historical events that can mark a whole generation, such as the great depression or the Vietnam war, but is the turning of the century one of those? Is someone who was born in 1965 really different from someone born in 1966, or is there a continuum of cultural change with few meaningful dividing lines?
Again, mostly by the media. By the researchers in generational theory, he and I and others are considered Millennials.
To add to Wesley, not even admitting they’re Millennials would make them feel older, but in some cases, they don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re Millennials, growing up, and facing issues that affect them.
You could say the same about decades or centuries, but it’s still useful to be able to make general characterizations of those kinds of time eras: “the 19th century” or “the Eighties”, etc., even though obviously 1899 has more in common with 1901 then it does with 1801, and the same goes for 1989 vs. 1981 vs. 1979.
I’m going to call you a “Global Teen” then. Feel better?
OMG, earlier in the thread I talked about how people used to make the same error with GenX, using that label to mean “teens and twentysomethings” even when it was no longer apt. But I hadn’t seen an example in the wild for several years… until today, on ESPN, Brad Gilbert referred to a 21-year-old tennis player as “Generation X”! Uh, no, Brad: that would be your 50-year-old self! LOL