Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

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

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?

― z_tbd

speaking as someone who was assigned gen x at age 18 or something, "millenial" to means that you're clinically depressed, you love spongebob, and you hate capitalism

that last bit might not be true, everybody i know hates capitalism

i don't think "gen x" actually exists. it's the most transphobic generation (well consider the crap we were fed growing up). it's boomers without the good bits. it's people whose affected apathy and nihilism turned out to be as much of a pose as the boomers' affected idealism.

i don't think x-aged people here represent gen x, any more than i think, like, kurt cobain represented gen x. we're all outliers. anomalies.

i managed to get a stable marriage and a career and a house, and if i'd been cisgender, maybe even if i could've kept pretending to myself i was cisgender, maybe i could've kept it, maybe i could've been like some of the people i knew, slowly getting more isolated and alienated from everyone and everything around me, my nameless fears hardening into paranoia, my struggle to tolerate the intolerable crushing me more and more with each passing year. maybe i shouldn't judge the people i knew - not people here, to be clear - who did that.

i don't think millennials have the same "opportunity" that people in gen x did. i think we slid in under the wire. whatever comes next, y'all might see some of it. i can't even imagine what might come next, myself.

Oh god I just remembered friendster and how crazy it felt at the time to find people from childhood etc.

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.)

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

i used to be really afraid of someone digging up my old edgelord usenet shitposts where i said awful things

i needn't have worried; i was never in a position where anyone was going to bother with that shit

i guess someone could try it now. it wouldn't be hard to find lots of awful things i've said. hell, i still say awful things sometimes. i don't mean to.

the main way i feel like i as a gen-x person differ from millennials is my tendency to shake my fist at the cloud

i am a paranoid digital packrat. i save _everything_. i'm trying to figure out actually how to back up my personal stuff to the cloud so i don't lose decades of shitposts in a catastrophic drive crash, but i've reached the age where technology confuses me and/or i'm too entitled to actually figure out how it works anymore

bring back dos 5.0, i knew how to use dos 5.0

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.

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.

I do wonder if it would've been worth the extra bullying I would almost certainly have got via social media if it existed to be able to meet more like-minded people outside of school, my teens were a pretty lonely time. maybe not

Recently I am realizing that a bunch of current software that seemed daunting at first is at root (not in re directories) software I used in the 90s… I actually feel like all those years learning Filemaker pro are relevant lol

"Every girl in NYC but me was dating Moby and hanging out at Teany, his vegan tea parlor on Rivington Street."

https://annekadet.substack.com/p/friendster#%C2%A7whatever-happened-to-friendster

Wait wtf lol - In 1999 I bartended with the woman he dated and opened Teany with. She went to NYC one weekend and came back gushing about this DJ she had met but never mentioned who it really was. She quit not long thereafter and moved to NY. Found out he was the DJ in question when I read a profile of the shop online a couple years later.

I completely forgot about that whole thing until your post.

i forget how i digitized the cartoons tbh

Industrial-sized scanner? I worked in a CC RTVB lab in the mid-'00s and we still had one of those tanks.

I do wonder if it would've been worth the extra bullying I would almost certainly have got via social media if it existed to be able to meet more like-minded people outside of school, my teens were a pretty lonely time. maybe not

― Colonel Poo

it's weird because when i first got on the internet in september '93, it just seemed completely revolutionary. i was a weird autistic kid, i didn't have a lot in common with the other people in my suburban town... i did the BBS scene, but it was all kids in my class who were into pirating games my computer was too slow to play... the internet opened up a world for me of people who were weird in kind of the same ways i was weird. and some of that was good, and some of that was bad, and i didn't, you know, really differentiate. on top of that i was always a lot better at communicating in words than i was talking face to face. i honestly thought the internet was like the best thing ever to happen.

and now it's easy to look back and see all the ways it was terrible, all the ways in which i got it wrong, in which most people got it wrong. bullying, yeah, i was a huge fucking bully online. cycle of abuse and all. i thought it was a good thing, the way i was behaving, because people were WRONG on the INTERNET. like a lot of them were just complete assholes. doesn't justify what i did, but they were.

it's just that it only went so far. is what i regret about it. there wasn't anything i could find when it came to the trans stuff. it was there, but it was buried deep to where i was never able to find it. i don't know if it would've done me any good to know, back then, when nobody would've accepted me. i know people who knew, and they had a terrible time of it. it just seems like a betrayal of the promise of the internet... you could be anyone you want on the internet, you could be a _dog_ on the internet, but if i was a girl...

i don't blame generation x or anyone there. there were a couple of people who knew, you had people like mary ann horton, but just structurally... that knowledge didn't get out there, when i was young. i know some of these people know and they're, like, to me they're really young, and they're saying "is 30 too old to transition" and i smile and laugh and it's good, but like. 43 fucking years. it was fucked up. the generation, the times i grew up in were really fucked up, in ways i didn't understand.

XP... when it finally died, my boss went over to Fry's Electronics and spent maybe $150 of his own money for a more practical plug'n'go replacement which served for years afterwards.

xxxp Weirdly, Friendster carried on in the Philippines long after the rest of the world had decamped to MySpace

I and all of my 4 siblings are boomers. My oldest sister and brother were born in 1946 and 1947, my middle sister in 1951, and I and my younger sister in 1955 and 1956.

Out of the 5 children, 3 are living in the real world, including my oldest and middle sisters and I. My older brother is in Trump land in a golf paradise in NC, and my younger sister is in some conflicted world in between.

My niece and her fiancee, millennials who are in the tech industry, live 8 blocks from me in SF and are aligned with my views, are getting married in August, and the family is getting together. It will be interesting to see all of the interactions

We are mostly conflict-avoidant as a family though, I think because my siblings and I all lived together as children in a very small house

This is kind of a truth bomb. Millennials and Boomers are pretty much the same.

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.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, May 9, 2024 1:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Man, they're really coming for Gen X on TikTok these days. I guess the Boomers got too old? I love that there is barely any retaliation though. Stitches I've seen have mostly been along the line of 'Okay. Whatever'

I did get a good laugh at that comedian who spent part of her set begging for Gen Z to join Millennials against Gen X. Lol good luck, lady.

I suspect there will be a fracturing within millennials when some more of them start inheriting property but as of now I support an anti-gen x coalition if you're so rad why don't you give us your houses

I don’t have a house!

lol most of us dont have houses. So weird how millenials think economic downturn happened to them first.

We had lower expectations

My nephew, who is Very Online (wherever the kids are online these days, I think Discord + idk), still asked to be hospitalized last year for depression/self-harm impulses partly informed by isolation and loneliness, so while I have fantasies of how much better my life would have been with the internet ages 12-20, I wouldn't say it's perfectly protective.

i watch all of these. i can't help myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l457OuUXn24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkGPIhxdfXc

lol at anybody getting a house, all our folks are gonna be transferring their wealth to their end of life care unless they're the lucky ones who go in their sleep or on the back 9.