I’m satisfied being labeled Generation Jones. The Boomers told us “you really missed it, kid,” and Generation X asked us “what are you doing here, you old creep?”
Fair point. I should have said Coupland popularized it in its current usage. Earlier occurrences were in reference to older generations.
I’d agree. There’s a strong case for Reality Bites, but Singles wins by being first. (And Say Anything wins in the teen Gen-X category).
Here are the standard years for the usual terms for generations since 1883, according to the Wikipedia entry entitled “Generation”:
Lost Generation - 1883-1900
Greatest Generation - 1901-1927
Silent Generation - 1928-1945
Baby Boomers - 1946-1964
Generation X - 1965-1980
Millennials - 1981-1996
Generation Z - 1997-2012
Generation Alpha - 2013-present
Are these arbitrary? Of course they are arbitrary. Every division of people into groups according to the moment when they are born is arbitrary. Another common division of people is by the decade they were born. The world is constantly changing,.and the attitudes of people in the world is constantly changing. There’s no point at which people born then are different. There’s no year in which sudden changes happens. There’s no month in which sudden changes happens. Or day. Or hour. Or second. Be who you want to be and don’t worry about what group you belong to.
Born in 1970. To me, X means after the boomers and before the internet and cell phones became such a huge influence. GenXers have a level of independence and self-reliance that comes from being isolated from easy contact with anything out of immediate reach.
That would put the start of Gen X considerably earlier than commonly stated. The last year of the draft was 1972, so someone would have to have been born before 1955 to be worried about it.
1970 here. Unambiguously Gen X, by every metric.
And since the question is, “when were Gen X people born?” I was born at 8:33pm.
How about too young to have attended Woodstock? (Assuming that age is about 13.)
Reality Bites tries too hard to be “The Gen X Movie” to really be Gen X, we don’t care that much. The real Gen X movies are Clerks and Office Space. Which you most identify with depends a lot on your post high-school experiences.
I’m 1972 and my brother’s 1979, and there are definite differences between us and our upbringings.
For example, I mostly grew up outside of the moral panic about child snatchers, and had the classic free-rein that Gen-Xers typically had. My brother’s cohort was post-child snatcher panic, and he was more in a play-date era. Less so than kids today, but still much more constrained and supervised than we ever were.
In addition, the Web was invented while he was in middle school, and really blossomed while he was in high school. For me, it was during college and afterward. So he in some sense, grew up with the internet in ways that I never did. Same thing with computers- only nerds had them when I was really little and then they were somewhat common by the time I started high school, but really only became seriously popular by the time I was in college. Same with cell phones- they became a thing while he was in college, and I was several years out by that point.
So the late Gen-Xers were noticeably different than the middle and earlier ones like me. I largely grew up in a non-connected world, while my brother’s world was on the very beginning of all that stuff. I’d argue that in this case, the watershed moment to define the generations was where someone was right around 1993-1994 when the Internet sprang into popular consciousness- if you were in high school by that point, you’re still Gen-X, but if you were in middle school, I’d call you a Millennial.
As far as Millennials vs. Gen-Z is concerned, I’m not sure if 9/11 or the introduction of the smartphone is the defining moment, but one or the other has got to be it.
I do feel like 9/11 had something to do with separating Millennials from Gen-Z though.
Not sure what the next one will be though.
I thought that demographers considered Boomers to be 46-64, X-ers to be 65-80, millennials to be 81-96, then Zs, then Alphas (not sure of that transition).
I’ve seen this term used to describe people born as late as 1984, who were still playing “Oregon Trail” well into the early 90s and didn’t really experience social media in college aside from the early days of Facebook.
I’ve seen middle school students as recently as perhaps six years ago playing Oregon Trail. They installed it on their TI calculators so they’d have something to spend the time on after they finished their standardized tests.
Yes, as I said in post #23, there are standard definitions for these terms, and they are still utterly arbitrary.
Well, everything in nature is fuzzy. My rock and roller dad is more like a Gen-Xer than a boomer, even though he was born at the beginning of the baby boom. He’s better on computers than most Gen-Xers, listened to tons of 80s music (since he was playing it), etc.
The movie Slacker was the first one to come to mind for me.
Oh, I feel that. I think some of us later Gen-Xers - the children of the counterculture Boomers - were the first generation to suspect that our parents might be cooler than we were. It fed our lifelong inferiority complex.
There is no doubt that my dad is cooler than I am.
So I was 73 and my younger brother 76, and we both had the feral upbringing. I distinctly recall the child snatcher hysteria starting when I was in late elementary school. And I remember a scare through my suburban town about a guy dressed as a clown in a van. Yes, it was that stupid. And I know for a fact that Jenn ****, in my class, made that story up.
And I’d say both Clerks and Office Space resonated with me. I was in college when Clerks came out, and I wasn’t busy climbing the corporate ladder. Outside my studies (and partying), I was working at a gas station, loading trucks for Marshalls, and working the deli at Shaws. By the time Office Space came out, I was into my second office (and lab) job and that now resonated with me.
(For those who don’t know, even a job in a lab requires a lot of time on Excel, email, Word, and Power Point; and we used to have to load the plastic sheets into the printer to show our presentations on an overhead)
I was born and 1961 and always considered myself a late bloomer of a Boomer. But only because my dad served in WWII, so technically that defines a boomer for me. Still I have more in common with Gen Xers but still have a strong foothold in the Boomer shared memories.
My mom was only 14 when WWII ended and had more in common with the booby soxer era of the 50’s and she loved both Elvis and the early Beatle on the radio, which greatly influenced me. Thanks mom.
All I know is I am lumped in with the GI Joe and Transformers generation, but I was way too old for those, and have resented the implication I am into those ever since. I was a Six Million Dollar Man fan, doggone it.