That sounds pretty Gen-X to me.
I love that your retort to “you’re entitled” is “I am not! I’m entitled to these things!”
If you think that’s bad, consider the fact that all Millennials are old enough to have graduated college. Not some of them…all of them.
I was the opposite, also technically a Boomer (born in 1962), I remember Woodstock as a kid, the Vietnam War was real and I still read books about it, I saw my first Grateful Dead show when I was 14, I saw a whole bunch after that, I didn’t get Gen-X, but I was still too young IMHO to be a true Boomer…
Silent guy; born 1940.
By the technical definition, a Boomer, but I’d like to register a complaint.
“Summer of Love”? What “Summer of Love”? I, for one, feel ripped off. I wasn’t old enough for any such thing, so how can I be said to be part of any such age group? Kennedy was assassinated when I was in First Grade, so I only barely remember that.
I technically had to register for the draft, so I did, but they weren’t drawing numbers any more, so I only had to worry about Vietnam as a theoretical sort of thing.
Yes, these age groupings have always seemed too pat for me.
Drove one of these* in high school. Wore bell bottoms and tie died shirts and wanted to teach the world to sing (in perfect harmony). Learned to dance to Brandy (by the Looking Glass), had lots of Bread and Carpenters albums, and later did the “Bump” to Donna Summer in college.
Solid Baby Boomer here (dead center of the year range).
Humorous anecdote involving the above car: When my son was about to turn 16, he was paging thru an old photo album and saw that picture. He looked up and said: “Please, please tell me this is waiting in a storage building somewhere, and you are planning to surprise me on my 16th birthday.”
*Google pic of exact model. I don’t have a good digitized one of mine.
Born 1954, so smack in the middle of the Baby Boomer generation.
One thing to remember about the Baby Boom was that it was/is a demographic bulge (which is why it goes all the way to 1964), rather than a grouping defined by cultural markers.
My wife was born in late 1964, so she counts as a Boomer too. But she was 3 when MLK and RFK got killed, 8 when the Vietnam War ended, and 9 when Nixon resigned. She is not a child of the Sixties in any meaningful way. We grew up in very different eras, even though we’re both Boomers. And I expect someone born in 1946 could say the same about me.
No chance. There’s just not enough of us (I fit the label pretty well) to be a defining cultural group that gets pandered to. We’ll have our part, sure, but except for a brief period in the 90s the marketing boys seem to have headed for the next generation.
Right, this is me. I’m NES old, but not Atari 2600 old. I remember Ren & Stimpy but not He-Man, and I never wore a mullet or a denim jacket.
It’s funny: I remember when Xers basically owned the Web in terms of dictating fashion and what they assumed everyone would be nostalgic for, and it was consistently about ten years too old for me. They were in their twenties in the 1990s, so they were born in the 1970s and they imprinted strongly on 1980s pop culture like Mr. T and high-period pre-ironic slasher movies, stuff that was either gone entirely or on its way out by the time I was conscious and working a TV remote. And guess what: They were ironic, sarcastic smart-asses with no respect for Proper Authority or Established Norms or, like, working at the same company for forty years. They sure as Hell weren’t going to get no gold watch or pension, they saw what Gordon Gekko did to all that…
And now they’re getting all high and mighty about Millennials not becoming careerists.
The definition of Baby Boomer is based on the entire cohort starting with the first baby. So, basically the Baby Boomer generation is made up of kids born after WW II where the first child was born relatively soon after the war-certainly by 1955. But those parents kept at it and produced kids for the normal 15-20 years. Personally, a child born after 1961 only formally qualifies as a boomer. She is too young to remember the 60’s which is pretty much a requirement to be a boomer (and yes I know, if you can remember the 60s you didn’t participate-wrong. While drugs were common, they weren’t the issue that drove most young people. Vietnam, race relations, the space race, the cold war-if you are a boomer, you remember those things personally and have stories to tell.)
I’m not sure I agree with that. From the toy aisle of the department store to the current movies/TV series, I think Gen X is very heavily marketed to. I mean, we’re the ones with money now, so of course they’re going to cater to us. I just feel like 80s nostalgia is everywhere.
Someone born in 1946 was a teenager in the late '50s/early '60s, and someone born in 1954 was a teenager in the late '60s/ early '70s. Very different eras indeed. Like the difference between a duck tail and bomber jacket, and shoulder-length hair and tie-dye.
This whole thread indicates why I’m very skeptical about the whole idea of named generations. Born in 1962, I have much more in common with a Gen X born in 1965 than with a fellow Baby Boomer born in 1950.
Joneser here. I agree that there’s a huge divide in the early and late Baby Boomer experience.
'86 millenial checking in.
I just made boomers, I was born December of ‘64.
I belong to the blank generation.
I’m a very old Millennial. I didn’t get a cell phone until well after high school. I didn’t grow up being able to just google something to get an answer. And so on.
Yet, I entered the job market at the beginning of the recession. I grew up being told that a college degree was all you needed for a good job, then I tried to get said good job. I ended up going back to school to get a degree in a more employable field. So I’m 34 and I just started a career-type job in January. I had about a decade of underemployment. So I’ve encountered the recession in a way that is very similar to the younger millennials. We’re waiting for the boomers to retire so we can start moving up in the world, and the boomers are working longer since their investments were hit so hard by the recession.
Born into X (1967) but I never really seemed to fit in with it. So…pretty solid X I guess.
Jophiel,
I think you miss the point of the nick-name. I learned to type in school on a computer in kindergarten and 1st grade. (On Ataris and Commodores) By the time we got to 5th-8th grade, computers were commonplace enough that we weren’t scared of them, we were already using them as toys. The fact that Mr. Poopypants died of dysentery is a universal joke among us as our age group was no longer stuck to the games of Pong and Adventure and Pacman. Our games allowed us to choose our own adventures and if they didn’t we tried to make them.
We were among the first with TI-81s and 85s and I can tell you how much porn was drawn on them through their rudimentary programming. We had Prodigy in our house in 6th grade. And internet into a couple of terminals in middle school. We all were on Facebook first because we had .edu addresses. The fact that you blow off the Oregon Trail game demonstrates: #1. my generation is far more computer and social media literate than you #2. we are the first wides-spread gaming generation #3. you aren’t in our “club”.