I think this is a case of the individual variation I mentioned earlier. I’m only about a year older than your husband and I certainly remember the tamagotchi fad of the late '90s. I was in high school at the time and while I never had or even wanted a tamagotchi I remember several friends my own age did have them and I played with them a few times. It’s my recollection that they were a much bigger deal for kids who were in elementary or middle school then, but I think it would have been unusual for someone my age to have had no exposure to tamagotchi at all.
They’re just two different names for the generation after Generation X. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say Generation Y in years, though. I work in academia and only ever hear the undergrads (who during my career all would have been born in the late 1980s-mid 1990s) referred to as Millennials.
I was born in 1955, and I remember people (my age) when, in their 20s, had a nostalgia for the 50s — when they were barely born!!! I think it’s some weird way of seeming sophisticated, older than your true age.
Google “Generation Jones”. These are people who don’t nicely fit in Boomers or Xers.
My mother was born in '48, making her a young Boomer.
But her youngest sister was born in '65.
In some ways, she’s hip like a Gen Xer. But she can’t relate to the whole latchkey kid, MTV dinner upbringing stories that my siblings and I have.
My nieces and nephew were all born in the 90s. If I ever have a child, they would not likely perceive themselves as being in the same generation as my nieces and nephew, even though they all sit on the same lateral position on the family tree. But generations are much more complicated than simply who’s the children of whom.
Maybe back when people had kids really young that would generally be true. But for instance, I am 43 years older than my youngest child. We are not in adjacent generations. If someone was born in the latter half of their generational cohort, even their first child would be likely to be in a generation two steps after theirs.
Interesting, ratatos. I guess that’s the flipside of in the 90s there was a room of big-band music and old-fashioned dancing by hipster types. Or I guess not flipside really, but a way of getting into something that is older than your generation.
I really wouldn’t be as annoyed, I think, if millennials were getting into '90s culture and learning about the stuff that older people were into. Like if I went back and got into the political history of Watergate and the funky sounds of Parliament and so on (which I have to some degree, and in particular have discovered early '70s filmmakers). But they are just focussing on the child’s eye view of the '90s; and if that is the main representation of the decade online, then people who were born even later are going to learn about the decade in that limited way.
Do you mean '58? '48 would be a relatively old Boomer. I was intrigued to learn recently that the late '50s was actually the height of the baby boom in terms of births per year.
No. I think you’re mixing up the use of the term “generation” to describe familial relationships – my siblings, cousins, and I being one generation, our parents, aunts and uncles the previous one, and our grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles the generation before that – and the use of “generation” to describe social/demographic groups of people of a similar age. These groups don’t necessarily line up very well.
I have a friend “Amanda” who was born when her parents were 19, and has a younger half-sister “Bethany” born when Amanda was 19 and their shared parent was 38. My friend had her first child “Charlotte” at 24, so her daughter is only five years younger than Bethany. On their family tree Amanda and Bethany are in the same generation and Charlotte is in the next one, but Bethany and Charlotte obviously have a lot more in common with each other when it comes to whether they can remember this world event or whether they loved that cartoon.
The Strauss–Howe generational theory defines social generations as covering a birth year range of about 20 years. So it’s possible for a parent and child to fall within the same social generation, and also possible for there to be one or more social generations between a parent and child.
Even “Generation X” has a couple of names. I’ve heard 13th Gen and Baby Busters, but neither had the mainstream appeal of “Generation X.” And even within Gen X, there is sometimes further taxonomy. I’ve heard “Atari-wavers” and “Nintendo-wavers” to refer to the early and late parts of the generation. Also, the “Busters” taxonomy sometimes divides the early half in “Baby Busters” and the later half as “Post-Busters.”
“Generation Y” and “Millennials” has always been synonymous in my experience with the terms, but it’s possible there are different taxonomies. I’m not sure if there is a settled term for the newest generation, though, although the obvious one in the running is “Generation Z.”
The thing about my generation (I was born in 85) is we are the youngest people to ever turn into “get off my lawn” types. We take a weird pleasure in acting like we are so experienced and worldly just because we grew up straddling the internet age. Mostly we are just really high on ourselves
It comes down to this, we see youth culture now as so driven by technology, even though we may be only separated by a decade or so, our formative years do seem worlds apart from “kids today”. We are young enough to still be really in touch with pop culture but just old enough to be amazed at how quickly things have changed. When I was a kid we still learned to use card cataloges in the library, we were still taught to balance a checkbook, the idea of social media and smartphones would not have occurred to us. That wasn’t very long ago in years, but culturally speaking it may as well have been eons ago.
I think it has a lot to do with jealousy. Mine was the last generation that really had to struggle in high school without an outlet to connect online with throngs of people who understood us. I see kids now posting on Facebook about being picked on in school and they instantly get a dozen comments of support. I never got anything like that, so it’s easy to connect with the nostalgia of my decade as a way of saying that we had the best entertainment and the most fun and everything now is so lame.
On Facebook all the time now I see pictures of VCRs and other 90s tech saying things like “If you don’t remember this you didn’t have a childhood”, honestly it makes me want to barf.
I just checked Wikipedia and the article about the generation born starting in the early 2000s is titled Generation Z, but it notes that Strauss and Howe refer to that generation as the Homeland Generation, a reference to their being born in the years after the 9/11 attacks. Since Gen Xers were not so called until 1991*, it may be that the post-Millennials won’t have a well-established name until the older ones are already adults.
*The term “Generation X” is much older than that, but AFAIK wasn’t used to refer to the generation after the Boomers until after the publication of Douglas Copeland’s novel.
Upon reflection I think I’ve pinned down exactly why people my age tend to be such douchebags about this. We were the last group of kids who had to find fun the old fashioned way, we only had an early primitive internet that didn’t lay all that out for us. Some of us even have younger siblings who had it much better than we did in that regard, so 90’s notalgia is just a veiled sense of superiority to cover the sneaking suspicion that we should have been born a few years later.
It may depend on where you’re located, as generational names are generally tied to a specific place. In the US, I would say the term “Millennials” or “Millennial Generation” is probably more popular than “Generation Y.” If I’m using Google ngram correctly, that seems to be the case.
Xander, interesting thoughts. My wife was born in '84, and she definitely relates with what you are saying, both in terms of straddling the pre- and post-Web divide chronologically, and also with being annoyed with others her age who are all “get off my lawn”.
Pulykamell, I was not aware of the possibility of that kind of Google search. Neat!
By your calculations, I’d have to be nostalgic for the millennial decade. It would have to be my decade. But in no way do I see that as true. I grew up almost exclusively in the 90s. I may not know everything about that decade, but the things I do remember from my childhood are in that decade. There’s probably a lot about that decade that you missed because you weren’t a kid at that time. Why should you get to claim the whole decade when you only participated in part of it any more than I should for having only participated in part of it?
And who in the world gets nostalgic for news stories? And if you don’t get nostalgic for them, why are they at all relevant?
Just barely. Most of the college students that I interact with were born in the '90s, so a lot more of the folks born in the '90s are older than you think.
I was born in 1983 and have Gen X siblings. By having that connection and also older parents (born during WWII rather than post-war), I tend to straddle that divide but lean toward the younger Gen X attitudes.
My husband’s sister and I are six months apart in age, but we relate to very different things generationally. Some of it is due to me having some influence of significantly older siblings and parents who are significantly older than hers. There’s probably also some heavier emphasis on regional differences; even though she spent a significant portion of her life in the same state, a large portion of her adolescence happened in the Orlando area, and I grew up entirely in South Florida, but we also attached ourselves to different parts of pop culture from our formative years. I have a nostalgia for things in the 1980s, even though I was still an elementary school student when they ended, but I also have a significant nostalgia for the early 1990s; both decades were pretty gory down here, as the nightly news would frequently have some sort of local murder as their leading story.
BigT, without checking I am going to guess you don’t post in the Elections board. How could any political person who was a young voter in the early '90s not get nostalgic any time they hear “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”? Or for your age group, “Yes We Can”?
I was born in 1981 and as a teenager, I felt somewhat left out like I was the end of something. Didn’t know what it was, but now that there have been all of these generational articles the past few years, I can at least put a name to it, and call it being on a generational boundary. I remember the last half of the 80s but wish I experienced more, I got to go out to the megaclubs in NYC but many were past the heyday and closed when I was 22 or 23. I just about made it out of my parents house at 18 and am probably the youngest person to do so before it just got too darn expensive. I just felt I was a year or two late for the party, so setting the boundary around my birth year seems to make sense.
But as far as this person’s question, the 90s is very millennial, especially if you set the boundary of generations at early 80s. Heck, and this is sort of a not a typical millennial thing, but as I moved out at 18, I lived 5 months on my own in the 90s:-). As a millennial. So to wonder why I’d be nostalgic for that is dumb. My earliest pop culture memories include shows like Facts of Life, Small Wonder, Mr. Belvedere, Rags to riches, Alf, music from Madonna Like a Virgin, Huey Lewis and the News, Pat Benatar Love is a Battlefield, Pointer Sisters Jump, Expose/Freestyle stuff - forward (from NY so lots of dance music here then, different than rest of country in ways)…so if you take that into consideration, it shouldn’t be a surprise at all that millenials are claiming things 5-10 years later than these items.
I don’t think it’s just because not enough time has passed, I think it’s because things just haven’t changed that much. I think the difference from 80s - 2000s was MUCH bigger than 90s - 2010s. Many examples I can give, but to name a few - if I look back at pictures from the 80s, all of my teachers/older women are in dresses with those fluffy tie “librarian” shirts; or pants suits in bright colors; pictures from mid-90s forward look pretty much like today. 80s had a lot of thin people, I remember the obesity epidemic starting in the early 90s and it hasn’t given up since then. 90s started the more permissive attitude, not only about liberal ideals, but in how we dressed to go out, spoke to eachother, etc. Much of the behavior I see today (wearing sweat pants out to dinner, cursing a lot, talking about certain topics such as sex or joking about party parts) would have been considered complete white trash back in the day but isn’t as shocking anymore.
I think the work world changed a lot, but millenials were too young to be working office jobs in the 90s to know it.
I think TV changed a lot though, which is something easy for people to make nostalgia over. Gone are TV families and sitcoms, or shows with slower moving but more realistic plots. Everything is 10 second long shots, lots of depressing characters, unrealistic plots, too many special effects…people are longing for hilarious but non-PC humor that shows like Married with Children or even the Golden Girls or the Nannie provided; or they want good sketch comedy like Kids in the Hall, or to watch a good, wholesome family like on Boy Meets World. Family shows aren’t cool anymore, nor is anything that is going to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. TV how is about shock value or gore or crime, so it’s no shock that millenials are nostalgic from their childhood TV shows.
I often think about the shows from my childhood and wonder how kids now grow up without them. I remember the “one to grow on” during Saturday morning cartoons and many episodes of Growing Pains and Facts of Life that were straight up teaching you how to live. Now there aren’t shows like that, there must be a void in what kids are learning…so I’m sure there is also nostalgia for these types of shows as well…as cheesy and transparent as the themes look as an adult, there is a certain comfort in watch tv shows like that.
Well a two and a half year old thread is not exactly a zombie, but I always went by the decade that you went to highschool. So I may have been a pre-teen in the seventies, but went to high school in the eighties with the attendant movie’s, music, and clothing.
