For quite a while, I was convinced they weren’t a real trend at all but some sort of hoax that the media fell for, because there simply weren’t any in any place that I’d been until about a month after I first heard about them on the radio.
To date, I’ve still only ever seen one that was actually in a person’s possession and not sitting unsold on a store shelf, so I still suspect the trend has been somewhat overstated.
I thought The Oregon Trail generation was just millennials? I’m 1986 and literally all of my friends wax nostalgic about playing Oregon Trail on our old desktop computers. That’s what we did in school when outdoor recess was cancelled due to rain.
Meagan
There’s also Xennial, the blurry area between X and Millennial
I identify with that the most, I suppose
thejeff
Oregon Trail was just a little after me. My younger friends wax nostalgic about it, but I didn’t run into it until much later. I think I heard about it starting in college. I’m significantly before ’86 though, early Gen X.
1986 is after Oregon Trail came out and generally considered well into millennial.
We had computers in high school. Played Ultima 3 on them.
But I kind of trend later, particularly since I was on the internet pretty early. Usenet through bulletin boards and then Delphi, before AOL became ubiquitous. The Internet before the Web, even. 🙂
Wait, so these “Millennials” go from 1981 to 2000? I thought it was later than that. That would make Daniel the Human a Millennial. That doesn’t sound right…
Schpoonman
Well, it’s all social construction anyway. Some people think it goes later, that’s just where I make the cut in my head.
KM
I figured the idea was one came of age at the turn of the millennium, so the early 80’s has to be is the upper bound.
Leorale
There’s some disagreement about the exact years (I’d say 1982 is the early edge of it), but the upshot is, a Millennial came of age with the Internet.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I was born in 1982 and count myself as a tail-end Gen X, rather than a millennial. I tend to have a lot more in common with the supposed personality traits of Gen Xers than millennials on the whole.
My parents are early Baby Boomers, though without the typical financial success. ;P
Clif
I just assumed that millennials were those born somewhere around the year 2000. That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention.
Shade
It has more to do about coming of age around the new millennium.
But it was born in ’88 which is unquestioned millennial territory.
Shade
*I was born
Kinoko
Yeah, ’87 for me, and I hear people in our age range call Gen Z
“Millennials” a lot, too. A lot of people like to use it as a catch-all for younger people they want to shit on, which is NOT how generations work.
Solenoid
It’s how people relate to generations, though. The Youngs gripe about The Olds being in the way. The Olds gripe about The Youngs being different and, well, existing in a way that reminds them of mortality. Sure, there are different names for roughly 18-25 year range ‘generations’, but functionally, the way people treat it is there’s only three generations: Olds, Youngs, and Peers.
WeirderThanWeird
Nope. One of the defining characteristics of being a millennial is actually being cognizant of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. I’d actually cut the birth year for millennials off sooner because of that.
Rowen Morland
I’ve read news stories that have used “born around the millennium” as their description so you are not alone in that. It also isn’t too shocking if it is an ongoing refinement on who counts. Generations are fuzzy logic until they are history.
Josie
Pew research is the closest thing to the “authority” on the matter and a couple years ago they defined it as born from 81-96. That puts the millennials 23 to 38 years old. Significantly older than most people are thinking of when they say “millennials”
Needfuldoer
Same here, I’ve always felt like a Gen X-er who missed the bus, values-wise. (Born mid-late 80s though, between Challenger and the Berlin Wall coming down.) I can relate to the current wave of 90s nostalgia, but only the tail end of the 80s wave from several years ago. I have an office job and a mortgage. I don’t put much stock in “gig economy” stuff like ride sharing, renting your home out by the night, or those electric bikes and scooters that are littering the cities. Most of the Gen Z stuff the Boomers are blaming us for is just “kids these days” to me.
I used to be “with it”, then they changed what “it” was. Now what I’m with isn’t “it”, and what is “it” is new and scary to me. This will happen to you!
KM
Knowing that there are still new episodes of the Simpsons for a full 2 decades since I last regularly watched it is frightening and scary. Thank goodness all Simpsons memes and quotes I ever see come from before that
Clif
The “it” in “with it” is constantly changing. As someone who recently hit the 70 mark, I’m not sure I find any of “it” scary. Some of “it” is really cool and some of “it” is dumb, but if “it” stops changing then something is wrong. And “it” would get rather boring after awhile. Rap is not and will never be my thing, but the best of it is awesome. So is Bach.
Fred
Which makes me laugh a bit. I was born in 1970 and have far more in common with the stereotypical personality traits of millennials!
I really don’t feel like a Boomer, but there you have it…
anonamousethatscurriesinthedarkness
Same here.
The boomers destroyed all the fun stuff just before I could get on board.
Free love? Nope, herpes, STDs and then aids.
Smoke po etct? Nope, war on drugs.
Easy slide into the tech industry? Nope, bubbles bursting, etc.
Buy a house? Insane interest rates and inflation bigger than pay raises if you even got one. Followed by the mortgage crises fuelled by institutionalized greed.
At least I haven’t been held for ransom by Big Pharma … yet.
eskimolos
THANK you, yes people born as long ago as mid-90s are Gen Z, I have a long drag out on FB over this with all manner of family and friends. Official guidelines put the end of millenials and beginning of gen Z anywhere between 94 and 97. I believe it’s shifts in cultural/social consciousness, millenials are the last generation to have lived before the internet became ubiquitous, on the political side of things I believe to qualify as a millenial you had to be old enough to remember 9/11, though memory of 9/11 itself is not strictly necessary as it’s still a very america-centric metric to use.
KM
Honestly though, is there anyone who would use the term millennial that wouldn’t have also been in a position to be aware of 9/11 when they were teen-agers? The attack itself and the following “global war on terror” had worldwide effects and we do get cnn…
Yeah people forget an entire 2 decades have passed since millennials were defined as a generation. mid-late 80s is DEFINITELY millennial. Some older generations just started using it as a catch-all term for anyone younger than them and forget that actual millennials are generally in our 30s (or at least late 20s) by now.
rustfire
Yeah a 20 year period for a generation doesn’t seem right. That means a Millennial could give birth to another Millennial as a legal adult
Hell even the 80-94 is pushing it cause as someone born a few days before ’94 I have way more in common with Gen Z peers and culture than I do with someone who finished high school in the late 90s(early millennial). I finished high school in the 2010’s. That’s way too much of a difference
I use those numbers too, but MSM cannot seem to make up its collective mind on when Gen X, Millennials or Gen Z started and ended.
Gen Z (2001-????)
Millennials (1980-2000)
Gen X (1965-1979)
Boomers (1946-1964) At least the MSM is consistant with this group.
Silent Generation (1928-1945) They were alive during WWII but were too young to fight in it.
G I Generation (1901-1927) They were the ones that fought in WWII.
Needfuldoer
I think we should define Gen Z as ‘too young to remember how things were before 9/11’, which would put the cutoff somewhere around 1997.
Then again I’m too young to remember the Cold War. My youth was during the relatively quiet post-Desert-Storm, pre-9/11 period, where it seemed like maybe the world could finally move on from the conflicts of the 20th century and look ahead to the future. It was going to be a whole new millennium! We had computers talking to each other! We were building a whole new space station with the Russians and the EU. The US was on track to finally balance the budget. Sure things weren’t perfect (Oklahoma City, Columbine, Princess Diana, the UK’s lease on Hong Kong expired, the dot-com insanity bubble burst, Euro Disney…) but things were finally looking up. There was no loosely defined threat looming overhead at all times, ready to be used as a convenient excuse to justify prying. There wasn’t a perpetual war against an ideology fueled by said war.
That was the future we were promised. That’s why first wave Milennials are so bitter.
Schpoonman
Damn.
ProfessorDetective
Amen.
rustfire
I was born at the very end of ’93 so I should be a millennial, right? According to like the Pew research center anyway
But all of my sisters I grew up with fall within Pew’s Gen Z and we’re the same literal generation, growing up in the same circumstances.
I remember being on the internet since I was a child since my parents were young and tech savvy gen X teenagers, I literally cannot remember a time when the internet wasn’t a part of my life.
I barely remember 9/11, I was like 7 and didn’t get it, but my older 30-something year old millennial friends can tell you exactly where they were when it happened, in detail cause they were in high school. The only thing I remember about pre-9/11 society is that the N64 was pretty cool
Youtube and streaming services being the main source of my entertainment since middle school, social media dominating all my communication since middle school. The internet has been central to my entire life.
My older millennial friends age 31 and 32 can’t relate to those things at all while my 19 year old Gen Z sister and I feel like we had the same experience, so I think I’m Gen Z
Murgatroyd
Interesting. I am like a year older, but I only used the internet occasionally from about 2nd grade through 8th. I wouldn’t say it was really part of my life until high school, and even then it wasn’t as pervasive as it is for the teens I currently work with because smartphones weren’t a thing, at least in my circles, till a few years later. I didn’t see a YouTube video until I was maybe 15, and again, back then I didn’t use it, say, every day. 9/11 was a huge turning point in my childhood, but I’m from NYC. I have same-age friends from elsewhere who weren’t so affected by it, so I guess geography is part of that (although my slightly younger cousins grew up in NYC too and don’t really remember the incident, so she is def a factor). Guess we’re borderline.
rustfire
How old were your parents when you were born and how old were your siblings you lived with if any? I think factors like that make a lot of difference and are part of what tilt me towards Gen Z. If I had boomer parents and older siblings instead of younger I’d def be a millennial in culture
Murgatroyd
My parents were boomers indeed. My only sibling is the same age as you.
Yeah I’m 33 (1986) and I remember floppy disks, getting dial-up internet for the first time, getting our first CD-rom, (the brief period Zip drives were gonna be a thing and then fizzled). All my friends’ first systems were Sega Genesis, SNES, the original Gameboy, or Game Gear. N64 was something we didn’t get until later.
It has always seemed weird to me how far the millennial designation spans. I do feel like people at both ends of the range really don’t feel like the same generation.
And gosh, social media, that’s a big one. Other than Myspace, forums, and Livejournal, social media wasn’t a thing for my age group until at least college. Facebook was literally created while I was in college and twitter not until after I graduated I think? You’d think that’d be a clearly defined cut-off point (growing up with social media vs. having to adapt to it in early adulthood).
thejeff
This is where I sympathize with Hank’s joke in one of the early strips “If you needed Internet while I was here, you had to leave your room, walk the hall, get an elevator, go into the lobby and invent the internet.”
I remember all the stuff from college and the end of high school. My first computer in high school had a tape drive – literally storing programs on a cassette tape. Dial up internet came after college.
rustfire
I remember switching from myspace to facebook while I was still in middle school, like around 8th grade or something. I remember my step dad still have floppy drives around the house but we never used them, I never used tapes either, I remember it being CDs until (once again) middle school when I got my first mp3 player. The iPhone also came out while I was in middle school though I didn’t get my own smart phone til a few years later. It’s honestly strange to me that people can be only a few years older than me but not have the same internet driven youth culture I had
Liquid Len
Oh, floppy drives, tape decks, it was all new stuff when I came of age in the 80s. One of the reasons I haven’t got into “Stranger Things” is because it reminds me too much of my awkward teen years
Ok I’ve decided now: the cutoff for millennials should be people who do and don’t find the snapchat UI incredibly confusing. That was the first app I’ve ever used that made me think “Wow, I’m old.” I may have even used the words “newfangled UI”
Murgatroyd
Ahh floppy disks! I remember those! Missed the original Gameboy, but I still feel like there should be only 150 Pokémon (maybe 151, or 152 because Togepi came on the scene early haha).
Murgatroyd
Dude I was born in 1992 and you just described my childhood. I legit feel like a different generation from my cousins born in the late 90s because they don’t remember 9/11 or how it changed things, life before Google and smartphones and Amazon and the dawn of social media and YouTube, or the days when eve in our native NYC it was totally normal and mainstream to be homophobic. They don’t even really remember it being a huge deal when a Black guy was nominated for president. I like to tease people a few years older than me that I was born after the fall of the Soviet Union, but really, my worldview has a lot more in common with people born in 1987, say, than in 1996.
Kinoko
Yeah, I was born ’87, and your experience sounds very similar to mine. All the stuff you mentioned (smartphones, YouTube, etc.) came into existence while I was in college, old enough to understand very well what life before those things was like.
Murgatroyd
Yeah I generally find that my coming-of-age memories are more aligned with those of folks 5ish years older than those 5ish years younger. I’m curious, as an 80s baby, do you find the same thing? Or is the difference not as big for you?
I actually like being in this generation (or generation segment or whatever) because it’s like, the internet grew up with me. By the time I had a camera phone or social media, I was old enough to be at least semi-intelligent about what I posted. And like, I watched way too much TV lol but sometimes nothing interesting was on and I would be circumstantially forced to do something more active haha. If I’d come of age in the streaming era I may never have left the couch.
Meagan
Relate. I was born in 90 and this is the thing.
Shade
Hell, MSM tends to forget Z even exists, any time Gen Z does something like that tide pod thing, they start talking about millennials.
eskimolos
Millenial became a catch all for “the delinquent youths”
Spammer123
To be fair though it feels more smoother to say millennial rather than “those damn gen-z’ers/”. Not as catchy. It’d help if there was a name for gen-z that everyone agrees with
Yeah, as a millennial I didn’t even know what tide pods WERE when all that went down and had to look them up. I had just adapted to concentrated laundry detergent, forget detergent in pod form.
Millennials were probably more worried about our babies/toddlers eating them than eating them ourselves.
Murgatroyd
Hahaha I saw an improv show in which a guy took on the persona of a YouTuber who ate Tide Pods for views and I 100% thought it was a parody until the mainstream media started covering real-life stories like a month or two later…but then, when I was a senior in college, my peers were planking for lols, so who am I to complain :p
Shade
I don’t have the money to waste eating my detergent. If I’m buying laundry detergent its going in the washing machine.
Khno
just looked upon my own country’s wp, and it seems there is a “meh generation” concept, going from 71 until today. I’d suscribe to that, but meh.
Fun fact: Baby Boomer is the only generation that officially exists, all other generations, past and future, are social constructs, and nobody can agree on when they start/end
well, I fully expect Robin to eat the fidget spinner, honestly
Schpoonman
Like a week (IRL) from now we’re gonna come back to Becky finding the one bag of frozen fruit Robin got, and is nibbling on them as they’re thawing when Robin walks in gnawing on the spinner.
220 thoughts on “Outrageous”
Ana Chronistic
well according to Boomers, they’re BOTH millennials
and so am I
and, like, anyone younger than a Boomer, even though that’s like three, maybe four generations by now
Ana Chronistic
buy one what, fidget spinner? LOLOLOLOL =B
Needfuldoer
I have no idea why those things were so popular for that couple of months. They taste like crap!
BrokenEye, the True False Prophet
For quite a while, I was convinced they weren’t a real trend at all but some sort of hoax that the media fell for, because there simply weren’t any in any place that I’d been until about a month after I first heard about them on the radio.
To date, I’ve still only ever seen one that was actually in a person’s possession and not sitting unsold on a store shelf, so I still suspect the trend has been somewhat overstated.
Schpoonman
Three, by my count. X (65-80), Millennials (81-00), and Z (01-present).
My parents are Boomers, though they suck a little less than most Boomers.
Ana Chronistic
You don’t count microgeneration “Catalano”? (or, “The Oregon Trail” generation)
autogatos
I thought The Oregon Trail generation was just millennials? I’m 1986 and literally all of my friends wax nostalgic about playing Oregon Trail on our old desktop computers. That’s what we did in school when outdoor recess was cancelled due to rain.
Meagan
There’s also Xennial, the blurry area between X and Millennial
I identify with that the most, I suppose
thejeff
Oregon Trail was just a little after me. My younger friends wax nostalgic about it, but I didn’t run into it until much later. I think I heard about it starting in college. I’m significantly before ’86 though, early Gen X.
1986 is after Oregon Trail came out and generally considered well into millennial.
We had computers in high school. Played Ultima 3 on them.
But I kind of trend later, particularly since I was on the internet pretty early. Usenet through bulletin boards and then Delphi, before AOL became ubiquitous. The Internet before the Web, even. 🙂
Screwball
Wait, so these “Millennials” go from 1981 to 2000? I thought it was later than that. That would make Daniel the Human a Millennial. That doesn’t sound right…
Schpoonman
Well, it’s all social construction anyway. Some people think it goes later, that’s just where I make the cut in my head.
KM
I figured the idea was one came of age at the turn of the millennium, so the early 80’s has to be is the upper bound.
Leorale
There’s some disagreement about the exact years (I’d say 1982 is the early edge of it), but the upshot is, a Millennial came of age with the Internet.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I was born in 1982 and count myself as a tail-end Gen X, rather than a millennial. I tend to have a lot more in common with the supposed personality traits of Gen Xers than millennials on the whole.
My parents are early Baby Boomers, though without the typical financial success. ;P
Clif
I just assumed that millennials were those born somewhere around the year 2000. That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention.
Shade
It has more to do about coming of age around the new millennium.
But it was born in ’88 which is unquestioned millennial territory.
Shade
*I was born
Kinoko
Yeah, ’87 for me, and I hear people in our age range call Gen Z
“Millennials” a lot, too. A lot of people like to use it as a catch-all for younger people they want to shit on, which is NOT how generations work.
Solenoid
It’s how people relate to generations, though. The Youngs gripe about The Olds being in the way. The Olds gripe about The Youngs being different and, well, existing in a way that reminds them of mortality. Sure, there are different names for roughly 18-25 year range ‘generations’, but functionally, the way people treat it is there’s only three generations: Olds, Youngs, and Peers.
WeirderThanWeird
Nope. One of the defining characteristics of being a millennial is actually being cognizant of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. I’d actually cut the birth year for millennials off sooner because of that.
Rowen Morland
I’ve read news stories that have used “born around the millennium” as their description so you are not alone in that. It also isn’t too shocking if it is an ongoing refinement on who counts. Generations are fuzzy logic until they are history.
Josie
Pew research is the closest thing to the “authority” on the matter and a couple years ago they defined it as born from 81-96. That puts the millennials 23 to 38 years old. Significantly older than most people are thinking of when they say “millennials”
Needfuldoer
Same here, I’ve always felt like a Gen X-er who missed the bus, values-wise. (Born mid-late 80s though, between Challenger and the Berlin Wall coming down.) I can relate to the current wave of 90s nostalgia, but only the tail end of the 80s wave from several years ago. I have an office job and a mortgage. I don’t put much stock in “gig economy” stuff like ride sharing, renting your home out by the night, or those electric bikes and scooters that are littering the cities. Most of the Gen Z stuff the Boomers are blaming us for is just “kids these days” to me.
I used to be “with it”, then they changed what “it” was. Now what I’m with isn’t “it”, and what is “it” is new and scary to me. This will happen to you!
KM
Knowing that there are still new episodes of the Simpsons for a full 2 decades since I last regularly watched it is frightening and scary. Thank goodness all Simpsons memes and quotes I ever see come from before that
Clif
The “it” in “with it” is constantly changing. As someone who recently hit the 70 mark, I’m not sure I find any of “it” scary. Some of “it” is really cool and some of “it” is dumb, but if “it” stops changing then something is wrong. And “it” would get rather boring after awhile. Rap is not and will never be my thing, but the best of it is awesome. So is Bach.
Fred
Which makes me laugh a bit. I was born in 1970 and have far more in common with the stereotypical personality traits of millennials!
Ntrovert60
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/ft_19-01-17_generations_2019/
I really don’t feel like a Boomer, but there you have it…
anonamousethatscurriesinthedarkness
Same here.
The boomers destroyed all the fun stuff just before I could get on board.
Free love? Nope, herpes, STDs and then aids.
Smoke po etct? Nope, war on drugs.
Easy slide into the tech industry? Nope, bubbles bursting, etc.
Buy a house? Insane interest rates and inflation bigger than pay raises if you even got one. Followed by the mortgage crises fuelled by institutionalized greed.
At least I haven’t been held for ransom by Big Pharma … yet.
eskimolos
THANK you, yes people born as long ago as mid-90s are Gen Z, I have a long drag out on FB over this with all manner of family and friends. Official guidelines put the end of millenials and beginning of gen Z anywhere between 94 and 97. I believe it’s shifts in cultural/social consciousness, millenials are the last generation to have lived before the internet became ubiquitous, on the political side of things I believe to qualify as a millenial you had to be old enough to remember 9/11, though memory of 9/11 itself is not strictly necessary as it’s still a very america-centric metric to use.
KM
Honestly though, is there anyone who would use the term millennial that wouldn’t have also been in a position to be aware of 9/11 when they were teen-agers? The attack itself and the following “global war on terror” had worldwide effects and we do get cnn…
autogatos
Yeah people forget an entire 2 decades have passed since millennials were defined as a generation. mid-late 80s is DEFINITELY millennial. Some older generations just started using it as a catch-all term for anyone younger than them and forget that actual millennials are generally in our 30s (or at least late 20s) by now.
rustfire
Yeah a 20 year period for a generation doesn’t seem right. That means a Millennial could give birth to another Millennial as a legal adult
Hell even the 80-94 is pushing it cause as someone born a few days before ’94 I have way more in common with Gen Z peers and culture than I do with someone who finished high school in the late 90s(early millennial). I finished high school in the 2010’s. That’s way too much of a difference
Plasma Mongoose
I use those numbers too, but MSM cannot seem to make up its collective mind on when Gen X, Millennials or Gen Z started and ended.
Gen Z (2001-????)
Millennials (1980-2000)
Gen X (1965-1979)
Boomers (1946-1964) At least the MSM is consistant with this group.
Silent Generation (1928-1945) They were alive during WWII but were too young to fight in it.
G I Generation (1901-1927) They were the ones that fought in WWII.
Needfuldoer
I think we should define Gen Z as ‘too young to remember how things were before 9/11’, which would put the cutoff somewhere around 1997.
Then again I’m too young to remember the Cold War. My youth was during the relatively quiet post-Desert-Storm, pre-9/11 period, where it seemed like maybe the world could finally move on from the conflicts of the 20th century and look ahead to the future. It was going to be a whole new millennium! We had computers talking to each other! We were building a whole new space station with the Russians and the EU. The US was on track to finally balance the budget. Sure things weren’t perfect (Oklahoma City, Columbine, Princess Diana, the UK’s lease on Hong Kong expired, the dot-com insanity bubble burst, Euro Disney…) but things were finally looking up. There was no loosely defined threat looming overhead at all times, ready to be used as a convenient excuse to justify prying. There wasn’t a perpetual war against an ideology fueled by said war.
That was the future we were promised. That’s why first wave Milennials are so bitter.
Schpoonman
Damn.
ProfessorDetective
Amen.
rustfire
I was born at the very end of ’93 so I should be a millennial, right? According to like the Pew research center anyway
But all of my sisters I grew up with fall within Pew’s Gen Z and we’re the same literal generation, growing up in the same circumstances.
I remember being on the internet since I was a child since my parents were young and tech savvy gen X teenagers, I literally cannot remember a time when the internet wasn’t a part of my life.
I barely remember 9/11, I was like 7 and didn’t get it, but my older 30-something year old millennial friends can tell you exactly where they were when it happened, in detail cause they were in high school. The only thing I remember about pre-9/11 society is that the N64 was pretty cool
Youtube and streaming services being the main source of my entertainment since middle school, social media dominating all my communication since middle school. The internet has been central to my entire life.
My older millennial friends age 31 and 32 can’t relate to those things at all while my 19 year old Gen Z sister and I feel like we had the same experience, so I think I’m Gen Z
Murgatroyd
Interesting. I am like a year older, but I only used the internet occasionally from about 2nd grade through 8th. I wouldn’t say it was really part of my life until high school, and even then it wasn’t as pervasive as it is for the teens I currently work with because smartphones weren’t a thing, at least in my circles, till a few years later. I didn’t see a YouTube video until I was maybe 15, and again, back then I didn’t use it, say, every day. 9/11 was a huge turning point in my childhood, but I’m from NYC. I have same-age friends from elsewhere who weren’t so affected by it, so I guess geography is part of that (although my slightly younger cousins grew up in NYC too and don’t really remember the incident, so she is def a factor). Guess we’re borderline.
rustfire
How old were your parents when you were born and how old were your siblings you lived with if any? I think factors like that make a lot of difference and are part of what tilt me towards Gen Z. If I had boomer parents and older siblings instead of younger I’d def be a millennial in culture
Murgatroyd
My parents were boomers indeed. My only sibling is the same age as you.
autogatos
Yeah I’m 33 (1986) and I remember floppy disks, getting dial-up internet for the first time, getting our first CD-rom, (the brief period Zip drives were gonna be a thing and then fizzled). All my friends’ first systems were Sega Genesis, SNES, the original Gameboy, or Game Gear. N64 was something we didn’t get until later.
It has always seemed weird to me how far the millennial designation spans. I do feel like people at both ends of the range really don’t feel like the same generation.
autogatos
And gosh, social media, that’s a big one. Other than Myspace, forums, and Livejournal, social media wasn’t a thing for my age group until at least college. Facebook was literally created while I was in college and twitter not until after I graduated I think? You’d think that’d be a clearly defined cut-off point (growing up with social media vs. having to adapt to it in early adulthood).
thejeff
This is where I sympathize with Hank’s joke in one of the early strips “If you needed Internet while I was here, you had to leave your room, walk the hall, get an elevator, go into the lobby and invent the internet.”
I remember all the stuff from college and the end of high school. My first computer in high school had a tape drive – literally storing programs on a cassette tape. Dial up internet came after college.
rustfire
I remember switching from myspace to facebook while I was still in middle school, like around 8th grade or something. I remember my step dad still have floppy drives around the house but we never used them, I never used tapes either, I remember it being CDs until (once again) middle school when I got my first mp3 player. The iPhone also came out while I was in middle school though I didn’t get my own smart phone til a few years later. It’s honestly strange to me that people can be only a few years older than me but not have the same internet driven youth culture I had
Liquid Len
Oh, floppy drives, tape decks, it was all new stuff when I came of age in the 80s. One of the reasons I haven’t got into “Stranger Things” is because it reminds me too much of my awkward teen years
autogatos
Ok I’ve decided now: the cutoff for millennials should be people who do and don’t find the snapchat UI incredibly confusing. That was the first app I’ve ever used that made me think “Wow, I’m old.” I may have even used the words “newfangled UI”
Murgatroyd
Ahh floppy disks! I remember those! Missed the original Gameboy, but I still feel like there should be only 150 Pokémon (maybe 151, or 152 because Togepi came on the scene early haha).
Murgatroyd
Dude I was born in 1992 and you just described my childhood. I legit feel like a different generation from my cousins born in the late 90s because they don’t remember 9/11 or how it changed things, life before Google and smartphones and Amazon and the dawn of social media and YouTube, or the days when eve in our native NYC it was totally normal and mainstream to be homophobic. They don’t even really remember it being a huge deal when a Black guy was nominated for president. I like to tease people a few years older than me that I was born after the fall of the Soviet Union, but really, my worldview has a lot more in common with people born in 1987, say, than in 1996.
Kinoko
Yeah, I was born ’87, and your experience sounds very similar to mine. All the stuff you mentioned (smartphones, YouTube, etc.) came into existence while I was in college, old enough to understand very well what life before those things was like.
Murgatroyd
Yeah I generally find that my coming-of-age memories are more aligned with those of folks 5ish years older than those 5ish years younger. I’m curious, as an 80s baby, do you find the same thing? Or is the difference not as big for you?
I actually like being in this generation (or generation segment or whatever) because it’s like, the internet grew up with me. By the time I had a camera phone or social media, I was old enough to be at least semi-intelligent about what I posted. And like, I watched way too much TV lol but sometimes nothing interesting was on and I would be circumstantially forced to do something more active haha. If I’d come of age in the streaming era I may never have left the couch.
Meagan
Relate. I was born in 90 and this is the thing.
Shade
Hell, MSM tends to forget Z even exists, any time Gen Z does something like that tide pod thing, they start talking about millennials.
eskimolos
Millenial became a catch all for “the delinquent youths”
Spammer123
To be fair though it feels more smoother to say millennial rather than “those damn gen-z’ers/”. Not as catchy. It’d help if there was a name for gen-z that everyone agrees with
autogatos
Yeah, as a millennial I didn’t even know what tide pods WERE when all that went down and had to look them up. I had just adapted to concentrated laundry detergent, forget detergent in pod form.
Millennials were probably more worried about our babies/toddlers eating them than eating them ourselves.
Murgatroyd
Hahaha I saw an improv show in which a guy took on the persona of a YouTuber who ate Tide Pods for views and I 100% thought it was a parody until the mainstream media started covering real-life stories like a month or two later…but then, when I was a senior in college, my peers were planking for lols, so who am I to complain :p
Shade
I don’t have the money to waste eating my detergent. If I’m buying laundry detergent its going in the washing machine.
Khno
just looked upon my own country’s wp, and it seems there is a “meh generation” concept, going from 71 until today. I’d suscribe to that, but meh.
Paradox
Fun fact: Baby Boomer is the only generation that officially exists, all other generations, past and future, are social constructs, and nobody can agree on when they start/end
Doctor_Who
According to Boomers an XBox is a Nintendo.
pdp15
Some of us are still trying to figure out Pong.
Mr. Random
The stick moves and the ball goes ‘tok’.
anonamousethatscurriesinthedarkness
Stick? Sheer extravagance.
We had rheostats … er … dials for each players controller.
BarerMender
This boomer doesn’t know an XBox OR a Nintendo from a hole in the ground.
anonamousethatscurriesinthedarkness
A hole in the ground is what you get when the controller battery dies on your RC plane.
Ryek Hvek
You are all tiny tots too insignificant to differentiate, and both the ruination and future hope of the nation, depending on whether and how you vote.
So there. And get off my lawn.
DSL
Forever amused by people’s needs to attach labels to themselves, while simulataneously insisting on their individuality.
Schpoonman
Someone get Robin a dietitian. Please.
AeromechanicalAce
Why? Seriously, A Robin in a diabetic Coma is a Robin NOT enacting Toxic policy.
Ana Chronistic
well, I fully expect Robin to eat the fidget spinner, honestly
Schpoonman
Like a week (IRL) from now we’re gonna come back to Becky finding the one bag of frozen fruit Robin got, and is nibbling on them as they’re thawing when Robin walks in gnawing on the spinner.
ValdVin
I fully expect Robin to burn out the bearings on the fidget spinner.
JetstreamGW
But this is the source of her power.
Reltzik
Are you implying that it’s not healthy to eat fidget spinners?
David
You are confusing them with midget spinets. Wait, let me check my notes…
Cattleprod