Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

cutoff btwn young/old millennials is whether or not you remember 9/11 imo

people in my peer group (born '81) and a little younger are fascinated with drawing these lines to differentiate their 80s/early 90s childhoods from the late 90s/early 00s childhoods of other people they know/observe. i'm not immune to it but it's the kind of observation about which everything that could be said got said five years ago and there don't need to be any more articles about it imho.

but the internal gen-x divides fascinate me! thinking about my own extended family, where my boomer mother's sibling cohort had kids over just a huge range of time. so my reference points for "gen xers" range from people who are now like 57 to people who are now 37, unless i count too. their childhoods were probably very similar in tons of ways (esp. the existence of the media monoculture, and a certain continuity of the general socio-technical apparatus, versus the techno-centric changes people articulate with millennial groups A B and C) but it's nonetheless a damned broad span of time!

― ✓ (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, April 26, 2017 7:32 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I do this too because I want to imbue myself with some sort of cultural significance because I was born in 79. I'm definitely not a millennial but not really a Gen Xer. Someone referred me to this article which is kinda dumb, but lays some of it out. I first started using a PC when I was 9, had a cell phone at 21 and a smart phone at like 25.

https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/oregon-trail-generation/

78, Apple IIc

81

Gameboy when it was new

i have played a star trek game, written in basic, on a trs-80

yeah I can't understand being in my cohort but not remembering 9/11/2001

I was at the beginning of my junior year of college and my sister's peers were starting their last year of high school, with a bunch of them joining the armed forces within the year. The dotcom crash had hit bottom right before then, and the economy seemed mildly bleak -- nothing compared to 2008, in retrospect

it's not as bad as being a 1964 baby boomer (!) and being born after JFK was shot

I was telling the kids Challenger jokes in the car yesterday.

i have had similar conversations like this with my students. im 31, and i teach mostly 17/18 year olds. for me the divide is "do u like spongebob memes" because i try explaining to them that show got big when i was kinda too old for it, whereas they grew up with it p much all their childhood.

that's what i tell my college students about harry potter

they howl in indignation

yeah, i was gonna mention that, too. ive since watched the films but never read the HP books.

My challop in this matter is that age of adoption of computer / internet / smartphone appears to me to have very little impact on people's basic nature and I don't buy this as a driver of temperamental/sociological differences between my cohort and the cohort 20 years younger, if indeed there even are material temperamental/sociological differences.

that's what i tell my college students about harry potter

that's what i tell people about pixar movies

arthur memes were the ones that made me realize that I am old now

for me it's when i'm playing an online game and everyone has amazing reflexes except for me, and then i realize they're all my children and i haven't been making any payments for several years now

I graduated high school before 9/11. I have never played with a Harry Potter nor have I read a Pokémon. I don't take pictures of my food, I eat it. To me a "snap chat" is something you do with your hands while talking. We didn't have "iPads" we had a saying: "hi dad(s)". Beards were for domestic terrorists and mall Santas. The way we "streamed" music was by pissing on CDs! The only "apps" we had were before dinner. The only things we "binged" were alcohol and drugs! The only "molly" we knew was ringwald, and we watched her movies on good old fashioned VHS tapes. You kids just don't know.

and senior things? well you just wouldn't understand! it was all co-ed naked volleyball and that was definitely normal

Pokemon is a dividing line for me - I don't remember it being a thing at all and still associate it with little kids but just a few years after it's a common part of their adolescence.

"XY Cusp" has always felt pretty accurate for me (81) as much as these generational things can be - my media consumption was all Gen X (grunge and My So Called Life) but there was only a short gap between Apple IIs running Oregon Trail and dialing in to Prodigy and then Geocities pages in junior high. My older brother was already out of high school by the time of Prodigy and out of the house by Geocities.

I think anime in general is big divider. Everyone younger than me seems to love it or at least more than a passing familiarity with it.

In my head I still call it Japanimation

I think I saw that scene (you know what I'm talking about) from Ninja Scroll and was like "no thanks" and never watched any anime again. I kinda hate cartoons anyway apart from the classic era of the Simpsons. Speaking of which, I'm old enough to remember when the Simpsons were super controversial and edgy!

i think not being a true digital native; remembering having to phone friends on the landline of their home, or go round to their house and knock their door to see that they're in; remembering not having the internet; remembering making plans to meet people and then either you or them not being there because there was some complication and you had no way of contacting each other; and fairly crucially not having a social media account of any type until you were in your 20s, and scant evidence of your teenage years existing online is a very significant difference.

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, April 26, 2017 6:55 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

- and it never did us any harm... Share If You Agree!!! ;)

my little brother wasn't alive in the 20th century & I don't think there's any significant difference between him and me & my other brother (mid-old millennials). something v desperate about ppl trying to think in these terms

My youngest brother and his cru are market different than the other three of us tbh, lol death of catholic Ireland in 1990

Markedly

the big difference in his peers at this age seems to be the lack of distinct tribes i.e. no moshers/goths/emo sorts per se, everything's more mixed & normcore as hell

From what I can tell it's kids with swords versus kids with nunchucks.

used to be jocks vs nerds, now it's all nerds

You know how they've got those apartments for people with Alzheimer's, where all the appliances are from the 60s, the phone is black and sits corded to the wall, the TV is a giant cathode console with a button to push to make the screen go back to b/w?

I just wonder if in my apartment, I'll have a PS2 or will they go all the way back to a Sega Genesis?

We're going to get VR goggles and rooms that smell like mousepads

I remember when that's what you called those horrible sticky traps you put by the door.

I'm oct '80 so bang on the cusp of Gens X and Y, and I always felt like I noticed a difference in attitude, even among people just a little older or younger than me. I remember my older friends, when I was growing up, wearing their deadbeat badges with honour. Many of them were happy to live on the dole or to squat or were generally uninterested in careerism through a good chunk of their 20s. Getting a job was 'conforming', 'selling out'. There was a lot of concern about 'selling out' among these peeps, and in a way they've stuck to these values (despite finally getting jobs). Among people younger than me, I don't think this would have even been entertained. There were fewer development grants for artists etc, so any bohemian dreams of living off your creativity were quashed unless you could afford to go and work at a start-up in London. Careerism wasn't just an option, it was essential. The idea of signing-on wasn't a mark of cool, it was a mark of being a drain on state resources... This is obviously just applicable to a couple of narrow groups of people in commuter-belt UK, but still it's something I noticed quite strongly.

Incidentally, my own litmus test for UK Gen X / Millennials is the image that springs to mind if you hear the word 'terrorist'. Even today I still think of an Irish guy in a balaclava, so I guess I must be more Gen X than Millennial.

I'm old enough to remember when the Simpsons were super controversial and edgy!

― Fiddle Catstro (latebloomer), Thursday, April 27, 2017 2:12 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol I was talking about pop culture stuff with my mom and she said, "When you were a kid we didn't let you watch South Park"! and I was like uh, mom, South Park came out when I was in high school and we didn't have cable. You're thinking of The Simpsons, which was never really that edgy, and I watched all the time a few years after it was deemed "edgy"

this was of course after I saw Book of Mormon with her and I realized I'm still not into musicals and definitely not ones that are 90% material recycled from South Park

Incidentally, my own litmus test for UK Gen X / Millennials is the image that springs to mind if you hear the word 'terrorist'. Even today I still think of an Irish guy in a balaclava, so I guess I must be more Gen X than Millennial.

<extremely psychoanalysis voice> I think of my mother, masturbating.

this song is amazing... like, it's even more Algiers than Algiers. The Northern Soul thing is amplified but it threatens to be drowned under layers and layers of harsh noise. I fricking love it and it's easily better than anything off the first album (which is saying something)

oops. wrong thread

I think of my mother, masturbating.

wait who's jerkin' it in this scenario, you or yr mother

asking for a friend

When deep psychoanalysis voice is present, everyone masturbates.

It's like musical chairs, but with enough chairs for everyone

'describe in single words only the good things that come to your mind about your mother, masturbating'

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Umc9ezAyJv0/maxresdefault.jpg

:'-D

millenials love their oxycontin

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/05/daily-chart-21

See, back in my day, we didn't have these cameraphones with a ruler app downloaded on it see...

http://i.imgur.com/GtWCpqE.jpg

this meme is real

Incidentally, my own litmus test for UK Gen X / Millennials is the image that springs to mind if you hear the word 'terrorist'. Even today I still think of an Irish guy in a balaclava, so I guess I must be more Gen X than Millennial.

dude with an uzi

I have a boss that's right at the end of the baby boomers, awesome guy. Baby boomers are fine, but the older they are the worse they are and this guy is at the far part of the right end. I'm at the beginning of the millennials. I think a large part of the reason we work well together is that we neatly cut out the most garbage generation that's ever been: gen x.

whatever

What did gen x do that was so bad?

dressed cool, slacked

sold out, man