It bothers me how Generation X has been stretched out over time. It should be more people in their 60s. Coupland is 63. If you’re 55 now you were barely in high school when his book about late 20s-early 30s people came out.
Intellectually I understand why we gave up on the “Gen Y” stuff once the idea of Millenials surfaced, but I’m in that gradient where during my lifetime I went through waves of being post-Gen X, then a millenial, then all the way back to Gen X, then sorta millenial again once it became OK for millenials to have kids and jobs and be old and stuff.
Generational designators are bullshit anyway, but if you’re in that gap between X and millenials, or between millenials and Gen Z, now going through that exact process, they become annoying bullshit.
Generational demarcations are cultural, so having a hard line in between them is a bit of BS, but there were greater cultural affinity trends thanks to monoculture which has only really existed since WWII. With the way the internet is fracturing media exposure, generational cohorts may fall apart and be meaningless because there’s not one set of TV shows everyone watches together anymore, for example.
The Boomers had a ton of media from 1955-1972 to lean on for self-identification. Gen X and Millennials did the same, but Millennials and Boomers both had large-scale structural changes take place that entrenched their cohort’s cultural baseline. Gen X got screwed by the Oil Crisis, after-effects of the Boomers figuring out how to deal with Vietnam, and the economic downturn in the 70s. Boomers sucked the air out of the room and saved some of it for Millennials.
Gen X had no Moon Landing or JFK in Dallas moments that were a “where were you?” nostalgia. We didn’t get that again until 9/11, which pitches it to Millennials. Gen X had some monocultural elements, mostly phenomenal music and movies, but they weren’t as pervasive as Boomers getting TV for the first time.
I expect you might be part of the “Oregon Trail” cohort, which is the cusp between X and MIllennials - resilience of Gen X, but comfortable with dayglow colors and likely had access to an early computer in elementary school where MECC games like Oregon Trail were common. I think it’s literally people born 1979-1983. It works, though.
See, I kinda see it the other way. Generational demarcations used to be cultural and thus geographically determined back when different places had different media. Now we all have the same garbage social media, so since the 2000s it makes sense that we’re all on the same boat made of crap and hate.
For example, my parents had a moon landing, but it looked, sounded different and meant very different things. Also for example, I had no idea what Oregon Trail was or what it was about until the Internet told me it was a staple of US computer classes. If you think about it for a few seconds it may be no surprise that my equivalent was some combination of drawing dicks in LOGO, Defender of the Crown and Saboteur II.
We have local names for people born in the late 70s to mid 90s, too. After that we just use the US-designed universal names, though.
Ahhhh, OK - yes, the cultural context is also entirely country-based. All these terms are entirely US-focused. I once went to an “80’s party” that some French people put on, and it was an entirely different thing. To me, more like a late 70’s party, with the plastic and neon US cheese entirely missing.
I do agree that the washout effect is making generational cohorts obsolete in terms of media - it might just be silly trends that play into memes that have lasting power.
I was born in 96 when my mom was 19. I remember sometime in middle to early high school looking up the generation year cut offs and thinking it was wild my mom and i were considered the same generation; her being the start of the generation and me being the end.
Obviously thats no longer the case with current generation year cutoffs, but im now starting to see 96 included as the first year of gen Z which feels…wierd. I definitely dont connect with people of gen Z easily because it feels like…well…a different generation, but at the same time I feel a disconnect with other, older, millenials because they tend to remember the 90s more than myself. Im not sure about anyone else, but being born in 96 feels like being stuck between two generations that you partially relate to, but not really.
Yeah, as people insist on new names for “the youths” that they can use to write derisive articles it becomes almost impossible to match any of these arbitrary things.
By most metrics “Gen Z” is coming up on their thirties, but people still want to flag them as “the kids”, where the Gen A batch that’s still in school still aren’t the target, so you end up with this weird ongoing reclassification. It’s all kinda dumb. At the end of the day if you think about it anything since just pre-Millenials is all the same bundle of anxiety-ridden online natives that can’t afford a house. They’re all just at different stages of that process. The big cutoffs happened in the 00s with the one-two punch of the post 9/11 US imperialist nonsense and the big mortgage crisis. Everything after is just fallout.
Late Gen X / early Millennial is called a Xennial. We’re characterized as having been born in a largely analog world and coming of age as consumer technology became more prevalent. I think it informally encompasses 1977-1983.
I was born in '81 and graduated high school in '99. I grew up hearing that I was Gen X, the slacker generation, the whatever generation, the generation where trying was uncool. And that’s exactly the experience I had. I was an adult before I ever heard the term ‘millennial’ and I don’t identify with it at all, though technically I’m on the cusp. Xennial does seem to fit though.
That’s one of the places where it landed. And certainly the stupidest sounding one.
I didn’t make up “Gen Y”, it was a thing you’d hear at the time, it just didn’t stick. Iliza Shlesinger has a comedy special called Elder Millennial, which is also a thing I’ve heard elsewhere. She was born in 83.
Who is the 50-something in this situation?
It bothers me how Generation X has been stretched out over time. It should be more people in their 60s. Coupland is 63. If you’re 55 now you were barely in high school when his book about late 20s-early 30s people came out.
Intellectually I understand why we gave up on the “Gen Y” stuff once the idea of Millenials surfaced, but I’m in that gradient where during my lifetime I went through waves of being post-Gen X, then a millenial, then all the way back to Gen X, then sorta millenial again once it became OK for millenials to have kids and jobs and be old and stuff.
Generational designators are bullshit anyway, but if you’re in that gap between X and millenials, or between millenials and Gen Z, now going through that exact process, they become annoying bullshit.
Generational demarcations are cultural, so having a hard line in between them is a bit of BS, but there were greater cultural affinity trends thanks to monoculture which has only really existed since WWII. With the way the internet is fracturing media exposure, generational cohorts may fall apart and be meaningless because there’s not one set of TV shows everyone watches together anymore, for example.
The Boomers had a ton of media from 1955-1972 to lean on for self-identification. Gen X and Millennials did the same, but Millennials and Boomers both had large-scale structural changes take place that entrenched their cohort’s cultural baseline. Gen X got screwed by the Oil Crisis, after-effects of the Boomers figuring out how to deal with Vietnam, and the economic downturn in the 70s. Boomers sucked the air out of the room and saved some of it for Millennials.
Gen X had no Moon Landing or JFK in Dallas moments that were a “where were you?” nostalgia. We didn’t get that again until 9/11, which pitches it to Millennials. Gen X had some monocultural elements, mostly phenomenal music and movies, but they weren’t as pervasive as Boomers getting TV for the first time.
I expect you might be part of the “Oregon Trail” cohort, which is the cusp between X and MIllennials - resilience of Gen X, but comfortable with dayglow colors and likely had access to an early computer in elementary school where MECC games like Oregon Trail were common. I think it’s literally people born 1979-1983. It works, though.
See, I kinda see it the other way. Generational demarcations used to be cultural and thus geographically determined back when different places had different media. Now we all have the same garbage social media, so since the 2000s it makes sense that we’re all on the same boat made of crap and hate.
For example, my parents had a moon landing, but it looked, sounded different and meant very different things. Also for example, I had no idea what Oregon Trail was or what it was about until the Internet told me it was a staple of US computer classes. If you think about it for a few seconds it may be no surprise that my equivalent was some combination of drawing dicks in LOGO, Defender of the Crown and Saboteur II.
We have local names for people born in the late 70s to mid 90s, too. After that we just use the US-designed universal names, though.
Ahhhh, OK - yes, the cultural context is also entirely country-based. All these terms are entirely US-focused. I once went to an “80’s party” that some French people put on, and it was an entirely different thing. To me, more like a late 70’s party, with the plastic and neon US cheese entirely missing.
I do agree that the washout effect is making generational cohorts obsolete in terms of media - it might just be silly trends that play into memes that have lasting power.
I was born in 96 when my mom was 19. I remember sometime in middle to early high school looking up the generation year cut offs and thinking it was wild my mom and i were considered the same generation; her being the start of the generation and me being the end.
Obviously thats no longer the case with current generation year cutoffs, but im now starting to see 96 included as the first year of gen Z which feels…wierd. I definitely dont connect with people of gen Z easily because it feels like…well…a different generation, but at the same time I feel a disconnect with other, older, millenials because they tend to remember the 90s more than myself. Im not sure about anyone else, but being born in 96 feels like being stuck between two generations that you partially relate to, but not really.
Yeah, as people insist on new names for “the youths” that they can use to write derisive articles it becomes almost impossible to match any of these arbitrary things.
By most metrics “Gen Z” is coming up on their thirties, but people still want to flag them as “the kids”, where the Gen A batch that’s still in school still aren’t the target, so you end up with this weird ongoing reclassification. It’s all kinda dumb. At the end of the day if you think about it anything since just pre-Millenials is all the same bundle of anxiety-ridden online natives that can’t afford a house. They’re all just at different stages of that process. The big cutoffs happened in the 00s with the one-two punch of the post 9/11 US imperialist nonsense and the big mortgage crisis. Everything after is just fallout.
Late Gen X / early Millennial is called a Xennial. We’re characterized as having been born in a largely analog world and coming of age as consumer technology became more prevalent. I think it informally encompasses 1977-1983.
I was born in '81 and graduated high school in '99. I grew up hearing that I was Gen X, the slacker generation, the whatever generation, the generation where trying was uncool. And that’s exactly the experience I had. I was an adult before I ever heard the term ‘millennial’ and I don’t identify with it at all, though technically I’m on the cusp. Xennial does seem to fit though.
That’s one of the places where it landed. And certainly the stupidest sounding one.
I didn’t make up “Gen Y”, it was a thing you’d hear at the time, it just didn’t stick. Iliza Shlesinger has a comedy special called Elder Millennial, which is also a thing I’ve heard elsewhere. She was born in 83.
It’s all a dumb mess, I guess is my point.
The children