Announcing a special joint project by authors JD Cowan, David V. Stewart, and yours truly …
Generation Why?
There is an epidemic in the modern age: a crisis of meaning. Why is it the world we were promised back in the 1980s and 1990s seems so far away now? Whatever happened to those hopeful kids from back then? Whatever happened to Generation Y?
From authors Brian Niemeier (Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You), David V Stewart (The Keys to Prolific Creativity), and JD Cowan (The Pulp Mindset), comes this collection of essays about a lost generation trapped in a modernity they were never prepared for.
Read on and discover how Madison Avenue shenanigans, social instability, mindless progress, and general ineptitude, led an entire generation of people through the cracks–and how we can find them again.
Once consigned by Boomer ad men to the dustbin of history, Generation Y is reemerging as distinct demographic cohort, and people are starting to notice.
Learn more in this eye-opening collection edited by JD Cowan.
Excellent! I’ll be purchasing a hardcopy once this goes up for sale. Thanks for giving us a chance to read it before that hits.
Thank you.
It actually won’t be going up for sale for several reasons, mostly copyright issues and because we want to spread this far and wide, so it won’t have an official physical version. It’s a free work.
HOWEVER, we did include files for a paperback/hardback version that anyone can print for personal use through a service such as Lulu. I apologize if that’s a bit inconvenient, but it was the best compromise we could make.
Outstanding! Thanks for your generosity, JD, Brian, and David!
Thanks! Looks interesting. I always assumed I was solidly Gen X, but at Nov. ’67, that puts me at very late Jones, very early X. Fascinating. I need to rethink my life. 🙂
Identity politics was a mistake.
Oops. I mean future! Progress! Intersectional race theory!
My mind has been on this topic after being told once again that I am a “millennial” and then being told that I can’t understand things due to not living through certain events that I did live through (ex. saying that I had not been alive during the cold war, that I do not remember life before 9/11, that I couldn’t understand a world before cell phones and smartphones or before everyone used the internet.)
If you go to sources that try to give actual advice on how to deal with different generations (for example techniques for managing employees) they always carve out a special niche for people born roughly in the 80’s (maybe the very late seventies or very early 90’s.) But they will generally insist that these people do not constitute another generation; they are just atypical Gen X’ers or millennials.
People who tell you that are wrong. We have the receipts.
This is one of the reasons we compiled this book.
You have half the people piling Millennials in with people who lived before massive cultural changes, and the other half calling the cohort weird things like “Geriatric Millennials” or “Xennials”(?!) and other ridiculous monikers. There is a difference and it needs to be understood if we’re ever going to be able to move on from it.
“Compiled” indeed. I definitely read “The End of Nostalgia” on your actual blog, so how many other essays in this collection are recycled blog posts?
And since you can’t claim copyright, does that mean that I can pervert them with a Millennial retelling?
They’re are all compiled blog posts, edited together sometimes with other posts. This is partially why it is free. It exists to be passed around.
“Geriatric Millenials” is a particularly silly label. I’m on the leading edge of the Gen Y and am only a couple of years over the hill. While I can certainly feel my age, as compared to my twenties and thirties, I’m not old by any stretch of the imagination. Those younger than I can’t possibly be old, if I am not.
Yes, it was strange watching so many bizarre labels being brought up over the last few years to describe essentially the same thing. It is best to go with the label that was originally used, especially since it still isn’t used properly to describe anything. Millennials having two vastly different monikers would not make much sense.
I think that most of the bizarre new nomenclature comes from a combination of two factors:
1.) People recognize that there is something qualitatively different from the roughly 80’s cohort.
2.) It is “known” that “Generation Y” and “Millennial” are synonyms. Even though most people have no idea why this would be the case, they don’t want to go against approved wisdom any more than they would call Pluto a planet or call the capital of Ukraine “Kiev.”
I’ve had a lot of long discussions with friends where they agree that there are big differences between us and people ten years younger than us, but adamantly refuse to believe that we aren’t both millennials. They don’t even know who they are quoting or how the determination of the generation was made, but they will not be budged from the belief that everyone born in the 80’s and 90’s is a millennial.
So if you want to get any traction in the mainstream you are almost forced to use a new term.
Personally when I talk about it now I just go by decade. That is, I talk about people born in the 70’s vs. people born in the 80’s vs. people born in the 90’s, etc. This isn’t the best measure for all generations (and it in particular gets screwed up for the Boomers) but it’s a pretty decent proxy for Gen X, Gen Y and the millennials. And the nice thing is that by discussing it this way people don’t initially view it as a discussion of generations, so they don’t try to group different decades together.
@Rudolph Harrier: You might have something, there. Fighting the established order head-on is the best way to lose. If you want to supplant it, make something new.
I really appreciate all the writing you guys have done on this subject. I was born in ’88, the oldest of three boys, but one of the youngest in my class at school, with many of my best friends having older siblings. This placed me deep in the culture of Gen Y, and I felt a divide long before I came across your commentary on it. The biggest generational separator to me is that Gen Y had a childhood, in part or whole, before the widespread proliferation of computers around 1995 or so, and especially before the rise of the Internet and cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s. Millennials have been “connected” all of their conscious lives. It is impossible that this wouldn’t lead to a deep feeling of separation between generations separated by just a few years.
After returning from a stint in Japan about eight years ago, I started going to an evangelical nondenominational church, some years before becoming Orthodox. Most of my friends there were about five years or more younger than myself, and I often found myself baffled by their tastes. These guys would sit around playing the N64 Smash Bros all day and talk about how great Ocarina of Time was, but I remembered that whole console generation as being pretty clunky and preferred the Super Nintendo, to give one example. This experience made me feel rather isolated and unable to relate to my “peers.” For this reason, I’ve long preferred the company of guys a few years older than myself, and most internet “content creators” I enjoy fall into this age range as well.
Much of what you write about the spiritual destitution of much of Gen Y is epitomized by the sad plight of Noah Antwiler/The Spoony One. A popular media reviewer in the late 2000s of 80s and 90s media, Spoony plunged into a downward spiral of despair largely due to the factors you’ve mentioned: a lack of spiritual foundation leading to futile attempts to plug a God-shaped hole in the heart with nostalgia and consumerism.
Nostalgic entertainment can be fun in safe doses, but there is a temptation, especially strong in Gen Y, to make it the fulcrum of one’s existence, and it is this impulse which gave rise to the Consoomer phenomenon and nostalgia strip-mining scams like Disney Star Wars. The antidote to this, of course, is a proper spiritual foundation and making the pursuit of God our foundation, as we were thus designed.
We can take an average member of Gen Y as being born in 1984 and an average millennial as being born in 1995.
Let’s look at some key trends and consider the relevant ages:
Cell Phone – The first phone really used for commercial usage (Motorola StarTAC) came out in 1996, and we don’t start seeing sales in the hundreds of millions until the end of 1999. So before 1996 cell phones were basically nonexistent, and they were not common before 2000. Our average Gen Y member would have been 12 when he first started seeing cellphones and 16 when they become ubiquitous. Very good chance that he could have graduated high school without using a cell phone. The millennial would have been 1 when cell phones started showing up and 5 when they became common. He would only have vague memories of a time before cell phones.
Smart Phones – Smart phones became common in about 2007, same as the rise of sites like facebook and twitter. Our Gen Y representative would have been 23, meaning that he was probably in the workforce even if he want to college. Zero impact on his childhood. Our millennial would have been 12, meaning that his high school and college years would have been full of people posting crap on social media via their cell phones.
Internet – The US crossed the 50% internet usage barrier in 2001, and the 75% barrier in 2010. I can’t find stats from before 2000, but the world internet population in 1995 was only about 3% of what it was in 2001, so maybe 1 or 2% of the US was online then. There is a big jump in internet access in 1998, though at that time there was still probably less than 10% of the US online. So we can put it at 1995 – only fanatics online. 1998 – The more tech oriented are online, but it’s still pretty strange. 2001 – Average people are now getting online. 2010 – Pretty much everyone is online, or at least knows someone online.
Gen Y representative would have been 11, 14, 17 and 26 at those times. He very well may not have used the internet outside of school until after college, and if he was online he would not have viewed at as a normal activity that everyone does.
Millennial would have been 0, 3, 6 and 15 at those times. He would have at least known people who were online in his very early childhood, and by the time he graduated high school he would have been online regularly without thinking that it was anything strange to do.
This is too good not to feature as a post.
Thanks for the book! I enjoyed the intro. I liked, “you are not im-
mune to propaganda. Reaction is still influence.” because it reminded me that lately I have been thanking God for my enemies. I was a pop-cult junkie and ignored the entertainment industry giving me the middle finger behind my back. Then the usual suspects started giving me the finger to my face and daring me not to consoom their product. I can’t not react, but I can choose my reaction and lately that choice is to seriously weigh what I spend my time and money on and avoid stuff peddled by people who hate my guts.
Glad you enjoyed the book. Good job reclaiming your dignity, and thank God, indeed.