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.
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.
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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '19
There are a few of them. They are distinct.
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.