Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

Whatever, man.

I identify pretty strongly as Gen X, but I acknowledge our politics overall are shitty. We are the Trumpiest generation: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/20/cherie-westrich-alt-rock-gen-x-maga-00033769

In retrospect, this isn’t surprising. In particular, white dudes my age were in their teens and 20s when the whole backlash against “political correctness” started, when Rush Limbaugh started, when Fox News started. It was attractive to be snarky and cynical in the Clinton era. And then a bunch of those bros got all jacked up on flag waving bullshit after 9/11.

I will always maintain that the early '60s babies are a transitional generation. After all, a a baby boom cannot last 18 years, that is absurd.

Generation Jones

I guess that's my parents - who always seemed vaguely haunted by missing the peak of the counterculture and only encountering it in its disintegrated forms (most notably for them it was west-german stalinism and radfem separatism respectively)

I think more millennials could easily have gone hard right if the financial crisis hadn't hit who it did in the way it did - and hey we still could if they want to buy us out. boomers/pundits who complained about us having been indoctrinated by radical ideology have it all backwards - all you have to do is give us houses and we'll fall in line

I'd never heard of Gen. Jones but I guess I am one (late 63). Dumb name.

people who are not within 6 years of my age in either direction are insufferable, and all their views on everything are wrong

Same, except my range is 5 minutes and shrinking.

Jones: Have never thought Flower Power hippies and the senior class of Dazed & Confused were of the same generation.

Wooderson's a Boomer tho

my gen z students think millennials are old. we're "cheugy."

ok boomer

it's true we are cheugy

they still love lana del rey though. some millennials are for all time.

millennials are old. we had our chance and we blew it on craft beer and justin timberlake. now all we have left is a future US president and I hope the zoomers are savvier with them than we were with obama.

This one always makes me laugh
https://imgur.com/ypBhMIW

Rizz named word of the year 2023 by Oxford University Press
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67602699

ugh i dont know how to do images

https://i.imgur.com/ypBhMIW.jpg

"y'all worried about the wrong houses" kills me every time

sorry to be lazy, but can someone sum up to me the view of "millennials"

roughly 1981-1996. at a spritely 40.9781 years of age, i am one of the oldest "millennials". *reporter voice* but also, what the fuck does that even mean?

spritely
a misspelling but also sometimes accurate

If you're a boomer, millennials are all 20-year olds wasting their money on frivolities like iPhones.

If you're a zoomer, millennials are boomers.

yeah, i heard archers of loaf described as "boomer dad rock" the other day and i was like damn

It's all Harry Potter. The series seemingly didn't exist at all for people my age (early millennials, Oregon Trail, whatever) but then the books were the cultural touchstone for people born just a couple of years later.

Xpost wtf? As if actual boomers would know them. If anything they're gen x dad rock and they're amazing at it.

“ghosting” seems like a millennial thing

That wouldn't hold true for me ('76) but that's not to say it might for other people.

People complain about millennials needing to "get a job" as if they aren't like 40 years old with 2 kids and a mortgage already. I know such smart and cool people ages 25, 26, 30, and up, so my recommendation is just befriend some young people.

It's possible I really don't understand my 16yo nephew but that might just be because he's a teenager.

Sorry I meant to say the Harry Potter comparison wouldn't work for me.

It does seem to feature really heavily with millennials though ime. I'm a xennial and knew a couple ppl who were into the books but it seemed like such a big cultural thing for ppl like 5 years younger than me.

Io otm though. My two closest friends at work could probablh be my kids had I popped some out really young but they're the best.

I feel millennials/gen-x differ primarily in their relationship with the internet - millennials growing up with it or seeing the transition to it as a teen or younger, not having experienced adulthood without it, and most importantly, adulthood without privacy. Gen-x had privacy in their young adult phase, from the late 70's to the 90's and watched the internet get popular once they'd already been established as young adults. Gen-z grew up with social media and smartphones being ubiquitous by the age of 10, and more recently since birth. They've seen nothing but the negative side effects as adults and have little memory of the optimism and "wild west" salad days of being online from '95-'05

I also feel the relationship to the great recession and economic status also makes a difference, with gen-x and especially boomers being able to buy houses and establish a life much easier than millennials and zoomers, and are generally much better off. This is where millennials and zoomers are aligned - boomers don't actually understand what it's like to be under 45 making contemporary salaries with the current cost of living. Theirs is already buoyed by the economic benefits they experienced compounded over decades and it's like trying to understand a foreign culture or something, there's just a giant disconnect and denial there on the economic realities and their part to play in the present day struggles.

I had internet access earlier than most people my age (born in 1980), so I sorta connect more culturally with millennials than gen-x. But of course, with shit like this, ymmv. I guess I'm a xennial? New word to me... hah

I am technically a year too old to be a xennial (same year as in orbit) but I first used the internet a few months after my 18th birthday so hmm. These things probably don't map that well to the UK anyway, for a start the "baby boom" was different

early digital migrant/digital native (home PCs/computers at school but the Internet may have come later)/never knew life before the Internet/never knew life before social media/never knew life before smartphones (maybe the latter are the same micro-generation though)

Xposts - Yes that is a thing. Gen x mostly didn't get the internet until they were adults, xennials had analog childhoods but digital adulthoods, and anything younger mostly grew up online.

For example - I didn't get online until I was in college but even then all of my papers were physically handed in and we barely used email. I remember sitting down at my desk at my first real job and using Yahoo for the first time. I was amazed lol.

I had dialup as a senior in HS. It was a long distance call. Born late 79.

You're a year younger than me so that makes sense.

My brother was a solid Xer, I'm Xennial/OTG/millennial depending on who's defining it - a lot of overlapping pop cultural experiences but computers were always present in some form for me, from a Commodore 64 to eight wee Macs at my elementary school computer lab to my parents signing up for Prodigy in 1990 or 91. Zero memory of a time before home computing.

Aside from standard old/young people stuff, the biggest gap I encounter with young people is making malfunctioning technology work. They're so used to iPhones/Macbooks just working (or not working in such a way that an individual can't troubleshoot), more than I'd expect are simply not very conversant with non-touch operating systems because they don't need a Mac or Windows machine to get by, a tablet or smartphone can do what they need.

I used email at uni a bit, read Usenet alt.music.alternative, but didn't get email or internet access at work until my 3rd office job when I was 22. Was 24 when I bought my first pc and used dialup

I feel millennials/gen-x differ primarily in their relationship with the internet - millennials growing up with it or seeing the transition to it as a teen or younger, not having experienced adulthood without it, and most importantly, adulthood without privacy. Gen-x had privacy in their young adult phase, from the late 70's to the 90's and watched the internet get popular once they'd already been established as young adults.

This is definitely my experience. Born at the end of 1971, I didn't have my first email address (shared with my wife, on Yahoo) until I was in my mid-twenties, and didn't even have home internet for a couple of years after that; I literally used to check email at the library. My first major freelance writing outlet was an alt-weekly and I used to type my stories on an electric typewriter at home and fax them to the editor from the auto parts store I worked in.

Well into 1998 at my college paper (I was a grad student) I asked writers to fax their typed stories, which I retyped and edited.

I had a junior college teacher that insisted that papers be turned in on a diskette (early 90's), I was fucked... I didn't have a computer, and I didn't know how to use the ones at the library

I was lucky when between 1996 and 1998 writers would submit their stuff on floppy.

I think I started emailing corrections and accepting drafts in fall '98.

I remember a kid in one of my lit classes asking the professor if his email address was case sensitive but I thought he said k and the whole thing was v confusing.

I asked my friend what the hell he was taking about.

Not being on social media prior to adulthood is a generational gift imo. A really great young social justice person that I know got burned hard a while back because a political enemy found a teenage-era post of his that used iirc an anti-gay slur. It was many years in the past by that time but it didn't help him; he lost his job and his up-and-coming political relevancy for a while, which sucked. (Anti-gay bigotry also totally sucks obv and I think teens are on track now to do better generally, but the early 2000s were a brutal time where change was happening in different spaces at different times.)

a friend had a Magnavox Video Writer, with a printer built into the monitor! Magnavox is not a brand I normally associate with hi-tech

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/physical-object/magnavox/102646025.lg.jpg

over time I've come to the opinion that millennials were the last generation of the past not the first generation of the future

for example you can't say that someone born in 1984 really "grew up" with the Internet, certainly not in the way my daughter and her peers have in the smartphone/tablet era

a lot of millennials still grew up with newspapers, network TV shows, pre streaming service media environments

But a lot would have been online by tween/teen years right?

IO otm. I barely survived middle school as it is. I am so so glad I didn't have to deal with social media or anything online until after I was a teen.

yes, but that's a decade or more of really the most fundamental developmental years not being on it, a big distinction