I was born in the middle of 1970. That’s after the boomers, but what is that generation called? What easy-to-understand label has been applied to carbon units created in that year?
I always thought that was “Generation X”.
I was born in 1970 and always considered myself as part of Generation X.
Others I have heard were the Star Wars generation or the MTV generation.
So I thought, but it feels like that label is always applied to phenomema from “after my time.” Or, I’m just so terminally unhip that I have no clue about what my generation is into (not hard to believe).
Tail end of the Xers – most Xers are actually older than us, not younger.
-born 1975
Xers are a small cadre (we were born during the so called baby bust, a time when few babies were born) and are known to be cynical about marketing. In fact, by reputation we actively resent being marketed to. Marketeers mostly decided it wasn’t worth the effort and moved right along to younger, more impressionable consumers, known as “Gen Y” or “Echo Boomers” (because they are the kids Baby Boomers had later in life) which is a HUGE cadre.
–>Grew up reading “American Demographics” at the kitchen table. 
The generation between Generation X and the Echo Boomers never really got a name (aside from the stupid “Generation Y”), and so the “X” label has sort of creeped into the name vacuum. There are incoming college students who think they’re still part of Generation X, because they haven’t heard any other name for their generation, even though they were born a decade later than the true Xers.
Additional question…what would the birth years be for Generation X?
So sonce I was born in 1988, which generation would I be a part of? I was under the impression that I was too young to be Gen Y.
Although 1959-1980 is also given.
I would assume that you are part of Gen Y. I was born in 1980 and always assumed that if anything, I caught the last straggelings of Gen X - but even that was doubtful.
In reality though, I don’t think that those born from 1979-1985 fall into any Gen. Maybe Gen X.1?
My ex boyfriend was an Xer. He was born in 1973. He remembers a time before MTV. He saw Star Wars in the theater. He actually watched that space shuttle explode, with the rest of his class (Obviously I didn’t. Didn’t even know it had happened until about 10 years later).
I was too young to appreciate much about the 80’s (not that there was much to appreciate). I remember mostly what happened in the early 90’s and later and I think it was right around the early 90’s that the stupid Gen X name first appeared. Since I was only 10-13 around that time, I didn’t think they were talking about me.
To me Gen Y is the generation fo Britney Spears, Hansen, and the Olsen Twins, etc. I was too old to appreciate any of those.
So, call me one of the Gen Lost.
You, my friend, are an Echo Boomer.
Gen X usually described as those born 1961-1981.
When did I shift from being the tail end of the baby boomers as defined here as being born between 1946 to 1964 to becoming a Generation X-er? :dubious: I was well into adulthood the first time I ever heard Generation X!
I was born in 1962 (the youngest of 4). My oldest sib was born in 1947.
Really? I was born in 1979 and remember watching the Challenger disaster at school and then having my Mom make me watch it on TV as soon as I got home.
Well, for a parallel, I was 7 when the Berlin Wall came down. I can’t tell you a thing about it–no stories of watching it on TV or anything.
January 28, 1986 I was 6 years old and in Kindergarten. No doubt they didn’t think a bunch of 5 year olds would understand what they were watching. Both of my older sisters watched it with their classes. I was older than my classmates as I was born in early January (had to turn 5 by Dec 31 to start kindergarten in '84). But I probably still wouldn’t have understood.
However, even if my teacher had shown it, I wouldn’t have known. I was out of school for January with a fractured skull. There was no way I would have been watching TV. It was months before I was able to even walk without getting vertigo.
I am surprised my mom didn’t talk to me about it though. She is a huge fan of War and Disaster (maybe fan isn’t the right word). I knew more about the Holocaust than people 10 years older than me, by the time I was 6.
Why the overlap? Baby Boomers were born up until 1964.
I always think of Boomers as those old enough to have started to think and discover things independently, outside of the world of their parents, about the cultural rebellion of the 1960s: in other words, they were at least 13 or so by 1973, when the first energy crisis hit, the economy contracted, and suddenly the Sixties were over.
I was just a little too young for that, being born in 1963; my memories of the time centred around life at my parents’ until the mid seventies, when I started to explore the workd on my own. When I started going to friends’ houses, it was already around 1975, and I mostly remember hearing disco rather than cultural revolution on the radio.
When, in mid high-school, I started branching out into my own music, it was rock and new wave, not Sixties rebellion that I discovered. Toronto’s hippie hangouts of Yorkville and Rochdalle College were long gone by the time I started to walk the streets of the city.
Eventually in 1981 I went off to university and then college, settling into electronics school, and the synthopop and computer culture of the early eighties drew me in.
My first intellectual love though was and is the ecological ideals of the mid-seventies. What with the way my life is progressing, though, the whole computer thing may have turned out to be an extended 25-year detour.
I have sometimes thought that I was born either 10 years too late or twenty years too soon.
I’ve seen that definition before, but 1959 seems a little too old for Gen X. I was born in 1958 and identify with the boomers as much as I can with any arbitrarily defined generation. Subjective though these things are, I can’t imagine anyone born one or two years after me, in 1959 or 1960, having lived through a time sufficiently different from my own to be labeled a different generation.