This seemed mundane and pointless enough to share:
Everyone can rest easy. We finally have a label for those of us who had internet in our homes since we were a kid, but not in our pockets until well after college.
Seriously though- I now feel sufficiently special. I was born in 1981 and never really identified with either generation (I guess I’m among the oldest of the Millennials).
Hmmm. I was born in 1980, and I only score 2/21 on the quiz linked in the article.
But on a more abstract level, I do consider it a privilege to have lived through the second Gutenberg revolution while at the most formative age.
It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I was told that I was officially a millenial, even though the term was explicitly referring to younger people before that.
I don’t feel that 1984 people are any different.
I think the dividing line from us and true millenials is whether you have ever been the sender or target of a dick pic, or whether the thought seems like a gross alien concept.
Quiz seems to assume I am female and agog over things that were boring then. And also British. I didn’t see any actual score.
Born in 1983, and I get it. I’ve always felt weirdly in between generations too. I’m old enough to remember life before the internet, but young enough that it’s still pretty intuitive. I believe I got my first cell phone in college. And honestly the world was radically different in 2001, before I started college, then it was in 2007, when I graduated. It would be radical enough based on the economy alone, but 9/11 happened during the first week of school, and we were young enough, and old enough, that it changed everything.
I am female, British and born in '83, and I still didn’t identify with most of that quiz.
I was never really into popular culture as a kid (we didn’t have a television at home, for a start), and I’ve always been a late adopter of technology. I didn’t get a mobile phone until I was in my mid 20s.
Still, I have always had the sense of being not really in any of the supposed generations. Being a kid in the little grey area with some internet access, but it wasn’t everywhere, when phones were still really just a thing you had at home. Neither one thing nor t’other.
The score’s at the bottom of the second page, after it inexplicably repeats all the questions and your answers.
Further criticism…
The definition of ‘xellennial’ seems to conflate ‘baby boomer’ and ‘gen x’, as well. Given the inherent fuzziness of ‘generational’ borders, ‘xellennial’ is either the tail end of gen X, the earliest millennials, or overlapping with both.
But it is, regardless, a good decade after the latest definitions for the end of the baby boom.
(I, born in 1977, scored ‘not a xillennial’ because I didn’t know anyone with a car phone, didn’t crush on (or know anyone who crushed on) the Cories, and did know that Goonies wasn’t a scary movie in any way.)
The recent angst over who is a millennial is, to me, somewhat amusing. We hate millennials so much we don’t want to call ourselves millennials, but we are pretty obviously not Gen x.
It’s like when everyone hated hipsters and suddenly all the hipsters started complaining the loudest about how much hipsters sucked.
The first time I ever heard the phrase millennial used was in reference to my graduating high school class. We graduated in the year 2000 and had, up to that point been being called Gen Y which doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
At the time millennial was defined as “the people who graduated high school in 2000, the people born in 2000 and everyone in between”. To me this is neat and logical. Maybe you give it a little bleed on either edge but it makes sense.
Meh. I fall into this group and honestly couldn’t care less. Although it’s not surprising this is coming out a group that is right now or in the very near future turning 40.
Pretty much all the junk in the article applies to me, born in 1973, aside from some television choices. The quiz tells me that I am a true Xennial but I think it’s much more likely that “Xennial” is just an entirely unneeded category especially if we’re going to use things like “had a dial-up modem” as our metric.
Yeah, it’s dumb because you are likely definition Gen X. If you were old enough that Grunge music and Reality Bites were being made by/about contemporaries and not gown ups you are Gen X.
Grunge music was a thing when I was in high school, but Reality Bites was about grown-ups, not contemporaries. So these are actually two different ages.
What always amuses me is that, when we were in college, my sister was adamant that she (born 1974) was not a GenXer, and was the one who introduced me to the term “millennial” to describe her and me (born 1977). Nowadays, though, she’s always complaining about how those idiot millennials are ruining everything, by which she seems to means those who are now college-aged.
The writer seems to have quite a chip on her shoulder:
The idea of a “named generation” spanning about 20 years with hard cutoffs is fairly dumb, and is never going to map onto reality very well.
Someone born in the early 80s almost certainly has more in common culturally with someone born in the mid 70s than someone born in the late 90s. Because time is a continuum.
No. Grunge was not created by high school students so it was not made by contemporaries
Oh. You mean the world doesn’t revolve around high school students?
I remember getting to college and realizing it was high school kids who decide what’s popular, given all their disposable income. By and large, they have terrible taste (Those other kids. Certainly my taste when I was in high school was superior.;))
To keep things on topic and to your point, starting next year high school students aren’t going to be millennials either. Unless they got held back they should all be in college or older by then.
THANK YOU! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, here. Gen Y went the way of the Bernstein Bears.
I was born in 1977. So I guess I should feel some kinship to this group.
But I don’t. I think it’s because I had older siblings who are bonafied Gen Xers and I grew up adopting a lot of their folkways.
My wife is the same way. Born in 80 but with 3 older siblings with the oldest born in 68 and so she identifies more with Gen X.