It’s ok. I was born in '78, but someone else can have my nostalgia for the '90s. I’m not using it.
I’m Blaster Master’s age and feel pretty similar. It’s interesting (to me, obviously) that there are things that I connect with from Gen X more because I have a brother 5.5 years older than me; on the other hand, there are things I connect with from Millennials more because of things like getting our first computer when I was 2 (since “growing up using computers” is often given as a Millennial trait).
Whoa-hoh, you had the actual tamagotchis? Ain’t you fancy! I had a DinkieDino (aka rakuraku dinokun!).
This is interesting to me. I was born in '81, so I guess I’m some sort of hybrid. In my case, the combination of being around brothers and cousins who were all 10-20+ years older than me, and the fact that we were poor and never had the latest toys or technology in my house, I identify more with gen X. I’ll try not to hog all the nostalgia, though. 
I was born in 72. I sort of consider the 1980s as “our” generation. That’s when we grew up as kids and that’s what defined our thinking about the world. We were in our late teens and twenties in the 1990s. Mostly what I remember from those times is making the transition to adulthood and a lot of Singles / Reality Bites / Chasing Amy style post grunge existential angst.
Sort of like nostalgia for a time back when we use to have nostalgia for the 80s.
My older sister (born in 1969) gets huffy when I claim to be a child of the 80s (I was born in '77). For years we’ve fought over this. Truth is, we are both right. But I think my sister has a better claim than I do. Yeah, I was literally a “child of the 80s”, and this shouldn’t be discounted.
But your teenage years are when you have developed a stronger sense of identity and ownership of cultural props. I was a passive participant in 80s pop culture, not having any disposable income nor any desire to be fashionable. I knew all the songs on the radio, but I didn’t own any records or CDs. I was definitely in the 80s, but not of the 80s.
But I started actively consuming culture in the 90s. I know what 90s clothes look like because I remember going to the store and buying them. I am nostalgic for 90s music because the 90s were when certain songs started to become my jams. They became things that I could own and play over and over and over again on my Sony Walkman, whereas 80s music was just my father would play on the car radio.
When it comes to stuff like nolstagia, there are no limits or rules. Like for some childhood stuff, like TV shows and cartoons, my mind definitely goes back to the 80s before the 90s. But when it comes to “claiming” a decade, I gotta say I’m a child of the 90s. Which means my sister is right to claim the 80s as hers.
I’ve always thought the decade that is imprinted on you is the one you experience through your teens. Age 11 through to 20. For me that is the entirety of the 80s, so that’s my era. I only remember half the 70s, mostly with disinterest and alarm, and the 90s is about when I started to lose touch with music and fashion, so I, as a Gen X, am an 80s nostalgic.
IMO, Gen Xers are unambigously the offspring of Boomers. (born 1970-1990 roughly) I was born in 1978, but I’m much more nostalgic for the 80s than the 90s. I have few fond memories of my adolescence.
This. I was born in '76, and thinking of the eighties just takes me back to my happy childhood. I never liked the 90s, even while I was living them. Didn’t care for most of the music, hated the fashion, etc., plus that time of so much transition (from high school to college, from college to “real world”) was stressful and sometimes downright miserable. So it’s 80s nostalgia for me! I still listen to 80s music on a regular basis, although I keep up with current stuff, too.
For me, when I think of the 80s I think of Michael Jackson and neon and the Cold War and Duran Duran and She-Ra and Cabbage Patch Dolls, Varnet shirts and puffed up bangs and Rubiks Cubes and Ronald Regan. So mostly pop culture stuff, but some bigger-world stuff in there, too.
Monstro, I’m glad there’s at least one person who feels what I’m saying!
ETV78, I have never seen anyone group people born in the late '80s or even mid-'80s with GenX. '81 or '82 is usually the cutoff.
My dates are negotiable. My basic point was Xers are the kids of Boomers.
Personally, I’ve never really thought much of the Millennial term as it applies to generational grouping. I was born in 1981 - which should be the namesake year for us, since I actually graduated high school in 2000 - but it always seemed to me the real cutoff would begin somewhere about '85 or so. Although I was young and have foggy memories of the 80s, I can definitely remember fear of widespread nuclear war with the Russians, and I recall watching footage of the first Gulf War on TV at night.We didn’t have cable TV until I was 14, and didn’t have an internet connection until I was probably 16. To me, the general description of “Millennial” is someone who grew up naturally on the Internet - someone who can’t really remember a time when they couldn’t just google something to figure out an answer and had to look it up in an encyclopedia instead. These kids nowadays, running around with their Iphones and their twitter feeds? They don’t feel like my generation - I feel a lot more connected to folks born in the ten years before me than I do to folks born ten years later (although that may have a lot to do with being in my early thirties, owning a house, running a business, etc.). If I was more of a tech-lover, and came from a family like zweisamkeit’s where we had computers from an early age, I might see myself more as part of the next generation. But I always thought the media loved the Millennial title so much they forced it to fit a couple years ahead of its time.
Why can’t people be nostalgic for more than one decade? I was born in 1976 and have fond memories of the 1980s as being a kid and doing kid stuff. I first kissed a girl in 1989.
The 90s also have memories for me as I went from a teenager to an adult.
I got married and had a child in the 00s.
I went back to law school and will get a JD in the 10s.
All different experiences and I will look back fondly on all of them.
You are the only person I have ever heard define the term in this way. By this standard Kurt Cobain and Janeane Garofalo are not Gen Xers, but Michael Cera, Lady Gaga, and the cast of Glee (the actors, not the characters) are.
Generation X has typically been defined as the generation that came after the Baby Boomers, not the children of the Baby Boomers. A lot of Millennials (often defined as starting with the kids who graduated high school in 2000, so those born 1982 and later) are the children of younger Boomers.
Yep. It’s all fuzzy, but around 1965 - 1980 is about right. Like I said, I think the “sweet spot” for Gen X is somewhere in the 1970-1973 range. You can probably go ± 2 or 3 years on the end year. The earliest I have ever seen a Gen X cutoff is 1976. That feels a tad early to me. The latest I’ve seen is 1983. Any birth year 1985 or beyond is WAY too late to be considered Gen X.
I agree with you, Lamia. “Echo Boomers” are Millennials as I see it.
I think the beginning/ending year for any generation is always going to be a bit fuzzy, because the answer to “Are you old enough to remember this event?” or “Were you into that band/TV show/movie/game?” is going to vary depending on the individual. Phrasing it as “Were you born before/after this event?” allows one to set firm dates, but someone born the day after such-and-such a historic event really grows up in the same world as someone born the day before that event – and in most cases this would be true of people born even a couple of years apart.
TLDR: Each person could be considered part of at least two generations which overlap each other, to allow for shades of grey.
I have come up with a workable system for musical eras which I wonder if I could tweak to generations. Every song/album is part of two musical eras: the late/early part of a decade, AND the middle/turn of the decade. So late 60s psychedelia can share an era with early 70s mainstream psychedelic-influenced rock, and Led Zeppelin IV can share an era with Dark Side of the Moon, but not so DSotM and late 60s. Similarly, the first wave of postgrunge can share with the first wave of popular pop punk in the mid-90s in that they’re both mid-90s, but early postgrunge does not share an era with popular nu-metal/rage rock of the late 90s/turn of the 2000s. But the first pop punkers do share an era with the rage rockers, etc etc. [For me, this works well for music because when a song is more than 4 years away from another, it feels like it’s firmly from a different era no matter how musically similar it may be. Which is why grouping music by decade is problematic because the early part never feels similar to the late part. But you can’t of course simply arbitrary cut off the date at 1974/1975 and be done with it.]
I wonder if the same can be applied to generations. So those who came of age in the 90s and 2000s are both part of the “internet generation”, but for lack of a better word those who were not in middle school in the 90s would not be part of a “grunge generation” to pick an arbitrary and inaccurate word off the top of my head. Maybe “dialup generation”? Whereas the dialup generation shares in common a lot of the 80s cartoons with the firmer members of Generation X, but were not alive for the late 70s. Then linking backward we can obviously extrapolate that some of the late Boomers and early Gen-Xers had “growing up in the 70s” in common.
This seems pretty spot on to what I’ve experienced.
I was just having a conversation with my husband about this as my friends lately have been downloading Tamagotchi apps on their phones and he practically had no idea what it was. I found this impossible. He was born in 1982 and I was born in 1986 and yet when I listen to him talk about nostalgic things, they are more in line with the things my ex was nostalgic for and he was born in 1975! Though this seemed ridiculous before, it’s starting to make sense. I too thought Millennials and Gen Y were two different generations, but am now confused.
It just seems like the late 90s and early 2000s were such a rapidly changing time that only a few years makes a massive difference compared to the other generational shifts. My husband graduated high school in 2000, there was no Facebook, no Myspace, dialup was still king, but only four years later when I graduated things were much different, the internet was a much more massive presence in socializing and daily life.
Ludovic, your approach to generational taxonomy is rigourous and impressive–kudos.
Followrivers, interesting points about the rapid changes in the early '00s. Also texting became far more prevalent for teens over that span, right?
I always thought there was a pretty big techno-cultural leap back in the late '70s to early '80s due to the rise of touch tone dialling and answering machines, cable TV and VCRs, microwave ovens, video games, CD players, and home computers. But then there was kind of a decade-long plateau until the Web…or am I forgetting things?
You know what they say about the 1960s: in terms of the images that are conjured by that name, they didn’t really start until about 1965. Oh, sure, the Beatles had already exploded onto the scene a year or two earlier, but at that early point they were still being regarded as the decade’s “answer” to Elvis Presley.
I was only 12 at the end of 1970 but I’ve always been drawn to late '60s music, styles, and visual arts, even if I certainly wasn’t old enough to understand everything going on around me. It wasn’t “my” decade, but then it isn’t entirely not my decade either. My attraction to the music began when that music was new; it didn’t begin as a nostalgic thing.