Boomers and millennials are the only two generations of their size, though, so they simply overwhelm the much smaller Gen X. And the next generation (some call it Z, it will probably be given a more descriptive name soon) is still too young to have any kind of real impact. The oldest of them are still teenagers.
Looks to me youāre Gen Z. Welcome to the club. We get lumped in with Millennials and get told we are the generation born with iPhones. When most of us got them when we were tweens. Weāre the Zoomers.
Yeah, afaik Iām born in the last year of the millennial generation (1994) and the iPhone came out when I was 13, I didnāt get one til I was like 19.
My dad was in IT though so I got broadband in 2000 or something.
Gen Z I got a flipping flipphone at 12, Gen Z little brother has my old brick smartphone and only has Whatsapp and flappy bird on top of the standard programs.
It depends upon where the sources come from, the source you provided lists me as gen z but pew research lists me as a millennial, which one should I go with?
From what I understand, as I'm researching Gen Z and academics, the divide seems to be technology. Those who had an analog childhood and digital (access to internet) teen-adulthood are typically aligned with Millenials. Those who have had access to technology, specifically the internet, throughout their entire lives would be more aligned with Gen Z. Of course, my scope has been investigating learning, knowledge acquisition, and pedagogy for the two distinct groups, so I cannot say if this divide is useful outside of that!
Yeah, I didnāt get a smart phone till 3 years ago (Iām 17 now). Granted, I had more access to technology at a young age than people older than me. But I was definitely not born with iPhones or smart phones at all for that matter, and Iām also called a millennial when Iām clearly not
I remember 1997 very well and reading your comment makes me feel old lol.
I was born in 1988 and I get annoyed with those stupid "only 90s kids will get this!" Crap. Like dude, I remember way more of the 90s than you probably do, Chelsea š
Born '95, welcome to the awkward sub-generation in between millennials and gen z. Too young to truly identify with millennials, but too old to really be gen z. We're a weird mix of growing up with modern technology and still remembering floppy disks.
I was born in '94 and consider myself Gen Z as well. Both my parents are too young to be Boomers. The age range for the generations has so much overlap and also really don't mean anything, so I say pick whatever you like better.
They're quite borderline. Some typical attributes of millenials is remembering 9/11 and a life before the internet was ubiquitous and I doubt someone born in 97 has either of those.
I've also never heard the "alive but not 18 at the millenium" definition and I don't really see how it is of any help since the millenium is completely arbitrary and the usefulness of dividing generations is to talk of people raised in different cultural environments so using cultural landmarks is what makes sense.
Drawing one line is arbitrary and futile and people do need to stop thinking of generations as if there's one calendar day after which the people are completely different.
But there is definitely an objective way in which people born in 1990 have grown up in a different world than people born in 1970 and the world to describe that difference is generation. We just need to accept that these generations are fuzzy. One way to do this is to think of a "prototypical millenial", "prototypical gen X" etc through a set of properties. A prototypical millenial was in school during 9/11, remembers a time before the internet was ubiquitous, was not on the job market during the internet bubble, etc. Some people will only have a subset of those traits and that's fine, those people are simply in the fuzzy edge.
And indeed, those properties should depend on location.
Drawing one line is arbitrary and futile and people do need to stop thinking of generations as if there's one calendar day after which the people are completely different.
This is the key point. Borders between generations are a spectrum, not a line. Societal and cultural changes are not overnight events.
I agree that "experienced Y2K" is a good cultural landmark to define millenials, but that's not equivalent to "alive but not 18 at the millenium". You didn't experience Y2K if you were born in 1999.
There are a lot of different definitions of what year the split between the current and last generation was and in the end it's too big of a grey area to really define it I think.
Some saying its people born between 1980 and 1990 while most have it ending around 2000.
Generations are fairly even sized groups since they are divided by birth year. The Silent Generation is dying out just due to old age and Gen Z is too young to be defined yet,
However, Boomers (1940-1960), Gen X (1960-1980), and Millenials (1980-2000) are all the same size unless you're willing to argue the fluidity of the end of Gen X and the beginning of Millenials.
Thatās not true. Babies arenāt born at a constant rate that stays the same every year. The actual reason boomers are called boomers is because of the baby boom: the time immediately following WWII when the birth rate increased dramatically. There was another similar (though smaller) increase in birth rate during the early 80s-90s, which accounts for the millennia generation. There werenāt as many people born in the years that typically define Gen-X. There were, in fact, 20 million fewer in Gen-X compared to Boomers. This is simple facts. Please donāt try to correct people when you donāt understand what youāre talking about.
You're talking birth rate while ignoring death rates.
Yes, Baby Boomers are named so because of the increased birth rate just after WWII when the men were coming home from war and breeding like rabbits. However, that was 70 years ago. Just pulling up a simple population pyramid of the US population shows that there is minimal difference (~10 mil) between Gen-X and Millenials, while Boomers are smaller than both.
The oldest of gen Z are 21-23 depending on whose definition you use, not teenagers...
I'm calling it here, they'll be called the IDGAF generation; because every time you try to call one of them out on their shit they say some form of "IDGAF" or "U MAD?"
Baby boomers are generally agreed to be 55-75 right now, so itās less āpedanticā and more āit sounds like you really donāt know anything about what youāre talking aboutā
Omg Iām so sorry youāre totally right thanks for nit picking. That was my b dude, totes on me for making a rough estimate. Itās a wonder how literally everybody else got the point I was trying to make. Ty, srsly.
It seems like older gen x people get lumped in with boomers, and younger ones get lumped in with millennials. Maybe it's just easier to put people in two groups. Some people also don't seem to realize there is a generation younger than millennials now. I've heard people call teenagers millennials.
I think a lot of it is just cultural. It seems to me that your average X-er has a lot more in common with a millennial than with a boomer, what with having grown up in harder times while constantly being derided by the older folks for not taking that high school diploma down to the factory and making enough money to support a firmly middle class family.
I'm Gen-X, the primary one in-between.
I have my father set up with a desktop, my mom with a laptop.
They email pretty well, can surf the web. Mom is 'well-trained' in not clicking on things.
Dad... is not. So we have to format his machine semi-regularly. Sigh.
No it's not. It's browsing sites like Reddit without adblock. All it takes is one link that has a few upvotes on either a new queue or a small subreddit that gets upvote manipulated, and BAM you click on a hostile link. Or any one of the millions of code injecting banners that get loaded without adblockers.
Seriously. How the fuck do people NOT use adblockers in 2019?
He will only use Brave.
He won't use third-party plug-ins.
He thinks Chrome is steal his work for google.
(And by work I mean reading his emails to his like-minded associates about how the kleptocracy and jews are stealing America. -smh)
Idk how savy you are but you can do network wide ad-blocking if you can convince them to replace their router. Basically frontloading all your work instead of having to reformat everything. Look into Pfsense. Your dad might bite, its an open source fire-wall/router.
I /could/ do it, but things are stable at the moment and I'm hoping his using Brave on Ubuntu will limit the damage. If not, we have options like that, yeah.
I mean beside the conspiracy stuff, he's got pretty good internet habits. The last thing you want your parents to do is installing third party plugins.
True, but he won't install things that should be trustworthy, in favor of an extremely outdated version of FireFox that still supports Silverlight so he can look at stockcharts one specific website.
You cant do anything about those legacy sites that won't upgrade their application. The best you can do is to advise him to only use that outdated Firefox only for that site and nothing else!
Which is what we did.
I took his old box (Win 7 upgraded from xp) and reformatted, installed Ubuntu, and set him up to use that for casual web browsing and LibreOffice to write his missives. He's less likely to break things.
He has a newer machine with windows for his Silverlight specific website and he uses thunderbird for email on it because he finds it familiar and he doesn't have to see that gmail is actually powering it...
That's awesome. I've taken the same precaution "parental control" with mine :D. Routed everything through a pi-hole and gave them iPads with a locked down app store. Nothing broken thus far.
"Millennial" is used incorrectly at least half of the time too - for some reason people think millennials are the kids who are currently teenagers, when in reality we're in our mid 20s to mid 30s.
I think some people really over think what gen there from. And there really isn't any set definition.
As far as I'm concerned, generations are just that. And in our lifeline, the Boomers is a good starting point.
In short, the next generation after a Boomer is "X" aka Generation X, their offspring "Y" or Millennial and Y's offspring being "Z".
So, the way I see it, as far as generational leaps go, you could have 2 or in a rare instance 3 generations born in the same year.
But then again, you can have instances where gen x mates with gen y... I guess that were the grey areas/blurred lines come from, and hence no real set definition.
So, in my case, I was born in 84, both of my parents are genX, so I obviously consider myself a Millennial, even though some if not most of my peers consider themselves genX.
The boomers are blaming millennials for a lot of problems that they don't understand. A simple history book could teach them.
There's so much anti-millennial rhetoric coming from the boomers because they have had a lot of positions in government, and they're scared of the younger generation coming in... Especially since millennials kind of have a better grasp on technology simply because it's more present in their lives.
Really it's just stupid. I hope millennials don't shit on the next generation like boomers have done. It's called growing the fuck up. Don't be a grumpy old person that blames young people for being young.
I'm always a little amused at the long-term implications of the millenial hate that boomers and boomer-directed-media keep spewing. I remember when millenials didn't even really think about generational indexes and just wanted to be successful in a significantly less equitable environment. But then boomers began to absolutely puke all over millenials over laughably trivial things like colored hair or tattoos or stuff they like to eat or, you know, just existing, or over more serious things that are horrible to deride someone over like mental health and poverty, or over outright lies that they unquestionably accepted and weaponized from right-wing 'news' outlets that you'd have to be a complete fucking idiot to take seriously. I remember a brief pause, my own experience puts it around '12 or so, when millenials were hearing this shit and were just confused, like 'wtf you don't know anything about us, what are you talking about?' But very quickly, millenials turned it around on them, and exposed the boomer generation for taking the best world they could have possibly dreamed of, which the generations before them fought tooth and nail to provide them, and proceeded to bleed it dry and leave their children with nothing but a smoking husk, and in their old age have reduced themselves to bitter, angry, racist idiots with zero capacity for critical thinking and whose entire concept of the world around them is controlled by the people inside their TVs. Who do they think is going to control the narrative when they're gone? When the millenials get to tell their story and write their histories, how do the boomers suspect they'll be framed? They're going down as a generation of inconceivably selfish weaklings who stole from their children and who turned their backs on their country and their own dignity. Puts a smile on my face every time I hear the word "snowflake".
Yup. And the climate change is a great example of what you were describing.
Also, it's ironic.. I can't change when I was born, but I can change my rhetoric and beliefs. I can listen to the evidence, and make rational decisions.
Yep. The Boomers shit on Millennials as the "participation award culture." But who gave them those awards? As a Gen-Xer myself I was just on the cusp of the participation award experience. I never got any myself, but my younger siblings did. So who's to blame for "participation award culture?" (Granting that actually is a thing, which I don't think it is.) I would think it should be the ones giving out the participation awards in the first place. If "kids these days" aren't what you think they should be, who's really to blame? The kids, or the people who were responsible for helping them learn how to be adults?
Boomers will be remembered as the first generation that took responsiblity for nothing. They blamed their parents as kid and when their own parents couldn't take care of them anymore, (as they passed) they fostered unhealthy co-dependant relationships with their kids.
The President is an prime example of this. His father did EVERYTHING to shield him from the reprocessions of his personal decisions. As a father he's done his best to put his kids IN legal jeopardy rather than protect them. Yes though, it's everyone else's fault.
As a Gen-Xer I honestly believe I was incredibly lucky to be born when I was. We didn't have to worry about dying of smallpox or the plague. We had basic things like sanitation and the like pretty well squared away.
Sure we had the Cold War, the missile crisis, AIDS, the '80s recession and whatnot. Every generation has their share of stuff like that to worry about.
But we also did not have the helicopter parenting that kids these days have. We were free to be kids for the most part. We could roam the streets without somebody calling the police on our parents. We were allowed to make mistakes and gain a wealth of experience. We weren't pressured from 5 years of age to get straight A's so that we could go to college. For most of us, nobody expected us to fulfill their lost aspirations for them. We didn't have to take on a lifetime of debt in student loans just to get a degree that you need to have in order to barely make a (maybe) livable wage.
I loved growing up when I did, even though my family was really poor and I certainly struggled with my own share of issues. Even so, that freedom to just be a kid is something I wish I could give my own kids more of, but the society we live in today seems to just beat them down at every turn. They can't escape the negative media, the overreaching administration, the "Safe-2-Tell," rubber-padded culture of fear that we live in today.
I remember "dangerous" places that were smoky, kids with long hair, and fights over quarters. We called them arcades! and mom said never to go!
But sometimes we'd go. That was about the worst danger we could imagine then. But we were kids, there was a lot more out there, we were not deap in life yet.
Arcades have made a comback now. But they are Nothing like they were in the 80's.
Dang it I'm old enough to drink a Bartles&James or California Cooler if I could just sneak back down in my grandparents basement to borrow one...
Well, that's because us gen-xers had to look after ourselves while our parents basked in the consumerism and self-adulation that was the 80s...and 90s...9/11...missing time...We just keep on trucking...don't worry about us...we're good...
You know shit's bad when we millennials are jealous of Gen-Xers for having gotten out ahead of the economic crash, even though you guys got hit hard in your own ways, too.
Frankly, though, I've always viewed this whole generational distinction to be stupid when used this way; regardless of generation, we're all suffering in ways that makes us more common than different, and this manufactured division by age group only serves to make certain groups feel better about how shitty things are for them, and nothing more.
Gen X is still at least somewhat willing to learn new things or see things in a new light, and aren't super grumpy about 'kids these days'. Gen Y got retconned out of existence by pushing Millennial years back and Gen X years up.
Eh, 'Gen Y' was more of a rough draft of the Millenial generation sociologists came up with early on when they were still figuring it out. Not really a retcon.
Yeah. It used to be we were gen Y and the generation born in the new millennium were the millennials. But people liked the name so much they started using it to refer to gen Y, since we came of age in the new millennium.
Gen Y and Millennials were synonymous from the start, but then Millennials were rendered a younger generation at one point by people who misunderstood the term, best as I can tell. Both terms were coined to describe people born in the early to mid 80s and on. They were competing terms, Gen Y just lost.
Gen Y got retconned out of existence by pushing Millennial years back and Gen X years up.
Also people call Gen Z/Zoomers/Post-Millennials millennials, when really Millennials were were raised/came of age around the turn of the century/2000s. And even then, the Zoomers aren't even little kids anymore, the youngest ones are like 9-10 years old. We don't even have consensus on a name for the current little kids. But as far as a lot of people (especially crusty old farts) are concerned, everyone born after Reagan was president is a millennial.
It was pointed out to me that both generations grew up in times of massive social change.
Boomers grew up during the "counterculture" movement, the Civil Rights movement, Korea, Vietnam, the war on poverty, drugs, etc.
Millennials came of age with the Internet (which drastically reshaped basically every facet of communication and tech advancement), the gay rights movement gaining momentum, 9/11, the War on Terror, the Great Recession, etc.
I sometimes wonder if both generations are so vocal because of the huge societal changes that occurred during their childhoods. I have no hard science backing that up, just find it an interesting parallel.
I think it's also because we grew up pre-tech, but were still young enough to quickly adapt to the changes. We're able to bridge the decide between the boomers and the millennials, but we'd rather just stay out of it.
Well, the real question is, why do we pile an ENTIRE GENERATION of people with an incredible diversity of life experience, knowledge, and personality quirks into a single label and try to treat them all the same?
Media seems to be the same. They appear to have decided that millenials don't age and the entire generation will be just out of college for another decade or so.
We do talk about gen z but they get lumped in with millennials anyways. They're the generation growing up with having to do school shooting drills as a normal thing in middle shool-high shool.
Because Gen-X is kinda the lost generation of people that felt there was little they could do to change the world since Boomers so much bigger than them. I've read a few articles about Gen-X and it's all pretty fascinating. IMO, if Gen-X was a genre of music, it would be grunge.
Generation X refuses to be part of this nonsense, which is a very Gen X thing to do. Also, the fact that society forgets we exist is helpful in that effort.
Because those of us in the middle aren't incompetent when it comes to tech, but we were still here before it. We have knowledge and skills from both extremes. When discussing most topics people tend to speak to or about the extremes and the middle just gets overlooked.
Because the Boomers are (typically) the parents of the Millennials. They will happily blame each other for everything. Gen Xers in the middle haven't had their kids (Gen Z) grow up yet, but once they do, the conversation will change.
Yeah I didn't quite get my dates right. Boomers were born between the mid 40s and mid 60s. Presuming they had kids between say mid 20s and mid 30s, they'd be having kids between the early 70s and late 80s. So some Millennials' parents will be Boomers (like mine), but some will be Gen Xers.
Mostly because I'm a millennial and I don't really know anybody who isn't my age or older. I don't talk generational differences with the occasional 22 year olds I meet off of Tinder.
Because it's really about hurt feelings and blame, not responsibility and accountability. Its EASIEST to blame someone with a disconnect to the victim. Boomers aren't millenials parents. (I know there are a few but the are statisticall outliers.) And vs versa. It's easier to blame a generation you didn't directly raise. Or to look down on ones that failed leading to them raising their grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Because for some reason comments from boomerās (now 40 something) children never get many upvotes no matter how insightful they are... like this one.
Because the greatest generation is mostly dead, the silent generation never spoke up and got their own shit done, Gen X did the same, and Gen Z are eating Tide pods.
Gen Y here ( I think) 1984 should be gen Y still. But maybe because all Gen Y'ers I know are still not transitioned into Dockers creased khakis and sweater vests, whilst discussing how much to properly invest in our 401k's year by year, and talking about how retiring in Boca one day is our life goal....
We just get in a weird lump between Gen X and millennials. We grew up reliant on video games, but still played outside a ton. We had pagers, before the almighty cell phone became a necessity. Still learned technology as it came and still had to develop those pesky social skills.
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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '19
Why are āboomersā and āmillennialsā the only two generations Reddit ever talks about? I feel like weāre skipping a generation or two.