Same here. Born in 1981, so I answered *millennial * for he purpose of this poll, but I don’t feel like I have much in common with people born even a few years after I did. I grew up listening to hair bands and U2, most people I knew who were a few years younger than me were into boy bands and following whatever fashions the kids on Home Improvement or Fresh Prince were setting. I was driving when the average millennial was still in grade school. Culturally, I feel like a Gen X’er.
Never heard of the “Oregon Trail Generation” but I’m using that from now on.
I was born in '75 and feel pretty firmly in Generation X. My brother was born in '81 and, like Lancia above, also feels like a Gen Xer culturally. He will not identify as a Millennial, and, in my estimation, he’s definitely much more Gen X than Millennial, as well.
Gen Y was pretty much just a placeholder name for Millennials, just like Gen Z is (or will end up being) a placeholder name for whatever we decide post-Millennials are known as. A few years ago I heard them referred to as the iGeneration, which I find kind of fitting and like, but it doesn’t seem that has taken hold.
It was nice to see the reference included because definitions vary depend on who made it up and is being used as a source. There’s only one generation that is specifically tracked as a named generational cohort by the US Census Bureau, the Baby Boomers. The rest of us are just grabbing at pop culture labels that often have differing definitions.
My Boomer parent’s generation saw the end of WWII as kids, the JFK assassination, birth of civil rights, rise of the counter-culture, and other important sea changes.
I kind of feel as if there aren’t many defining historic and cultural markers for me (a Gen X). We didn’t have a TV until I was 17, so I missed a lot of shows that other Xers were into. I grew up in a small rural town without hippies, clubs or discos, so I wasn’t linked into a “scene” or gay community that was undergoing change. I worked as an IBM software tester 1985-1987, but computers were still pretty primitive – so I’m pre-digital revolution. I was 34 on 9/11 and don’t think of it as a defining generational event.
Honestly, the only thing that I regard as a generational marker for me is the advent of New Wave. It feels as if I was either too early, too late, or didn’t have cultural access to what might be special to fellow Xers.
According to the OP’s definitions, I’m a Millenial (:mad:), but I protest that I’ve seen other definitions that list me as Gen-X or at least a Xennial.
As a later Gen Xer, for me the important cultural shift–and I guess there’s a couple of them-- but to me it’s really the rise of the home computers and video games. Also, the last generation with vivid memories of the Cold War, that sort of stuff.
There’s nothing wrong with Millennials. And it’s two “ns” everyone! I’m an Xer, and I enjoy being an Xer, but I wouldn’t mind having grown up as a Millennial. The cultural backlash against them (so much as there is one) happens every fucking generation. Same shit with Xers when I was growing up: we were supposed to be a bunch of losers with no direction. Millennials at least are being bitched at about because they actually want to accomplish something. The stereotype may be that they think a little too highly of themselves and don’t want to put in their dues, but, hey, isn’t that the American way?
Back when I was in college, my older sister forwarded me an e-mail saying that we weren’t Gen X, we were something else, and which identified what we were as “millennials”. Nowadays, she’s always complaining about how those youngster millennials are ruining everything.
By the list in the OP, I would be a Gen X, but I reject that label.
We Boomers grew up in a fascinating time, for sure, but none of us saw the end of WWII. It was over before any of us was even born. A few of us might remember the Korean War, but the Vietnam War was the defining war of our generation. We do like talking about *Our Generation!, *btw. Maybe you hadn’t noticed. I mean, I can tell you lots of stories about how people tried to keep us down!
I’m surprised to see the definition of Boomer extending into the 60s, but apparently that is indeed the common definition. I thought the whole “baby boom” thing was everybody getting all excited that WW II was over and having lots of sex, which apparently produced babies for many years. But surely not for two decades after the end of the war! I mean, yeah, the war is over, that’s great, but by the mid-60s it had been over for 20 years! Didn’t those people ever sleep?
The book after which the generation was named, and which provided the template for how members of the generation were described, was published in 1991. It was about post-college age adults, so late-60s were dead in the middle of the generation at the time. The definition, which previously included the early 60s, has since shrunk a bit, but speaking for everyone I hung out with who were born in the late 60s to early 70s, we felt like the novel and the label described us to a T.
Which is ironic, because one of the defining traits of the characters in the book is that they hated to be labeled.
I’ve never identified with any generation, largely because I didn’t access the culture the way my peers did. I jumped straight from saturday morning cartoons to computer programming, and the only music I listened to was oldies (as in, oldies then). To me Generation X was always somebody else, just as the Boomers were.
I’m not sure about 1970, since you’re old enough to have the rise of video game arcades be a cultural touchstone of your youth.
However, I call the microgeneration just a couple years earlier the “punk generation” because it sounds good (its real name “generation Jones” doesn’t resonate with me.) They are too young to have lived the Woodstock lifestyle the first time around, but old enough to have experienced the first wave of punk firsthand (or, if you’d like, disco.)
I guess there might be other ways in which someone born in 1970 didn’t feel the same as someone growing up a few years later but I can’t think of one. Only the very young Gen-Xers are young enough to have a lot of exposure to the Web growing up, for instance.
The “Xennial” thing feels lame to me. Probably because I was born in 1973, soundly GenX, and all the dumb quizzes proclaim that I’m a “proud Xennial”. OMG, you played Oregon Trail in school and remember dial-up handshake noises and made mix tapes and had a Hotmail account?? One of us! One of us!
Well, no, those things just aren’t remotely unique to some sub-clique between generations.
I mean, I can tell you lots of stories about how people tried to keep us down!