Commenter Rudolph Harrier provides insightful context for Monday’s post promoting JD Cowan’s Generation Y compilation.
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.
Millennials are natural citizens of the internet. Members of Generation Y are visitors. Or rather, expats from a country that no longer exists.
Once again, slapping the same label on both cohorts will not produce a model of optimal predictive or descriptive value.
Commenter Hermetic Seal gives us a view of the micro level.
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.
And, of course, not giving money to people who hate you.
Being in the middle of Gen Y really shows how Generational Theory really is a spectrum. While growing up, it felt like those in older brother or younger brother range (those with more than a couple of years difference, of course) did have more traits in common with Gen X and Millennials respectively. There is no hard cut off for a generation, it just fades out and blurs into the next one until those characteristics die off for the next oncoming group’s identity to flower then also follow the same pattern.
1984 is a good year, because, as has been said, a Gen Y kid would be 12/13 when Cultural Ground Zero hit. They would be leaving elementary school and entering a new jail cell when they would also find a lot of what they knew and enjoyed were being changed.
1995 would be the same for Millennials, because when they turned the same age they would be coming straight into the thick of western culture’s nihilistic celebration of death and overthrowing tradition. This was peak fedora era AND when YouTube and social media took over, remember.
This would mean the Zoomer age should be 2006. They came of age right during 2018/2019, which makes them the last generation before Biden, the pandemic, the convoy, the current global conflict, and the current madness unfolding.
What that means for the future, I have no idea, but it’s definitely going to make a difference.
I got 1984 and 1995 simply by averaging Brian’s start and end cutoffs for the generations, but I do agree that they also are very nicely positioned to see the difference between the generations.
I would post additional evidence of Millennials’ netizen heritage, but no one except Bellomy would understand what he were watching.
Good analysis by Rudolph. Interestingly, even though I was still just a kid I *was* using the Internet in the late 90s, pretty much exclusively to download levels for games like Descent 2 or Freespace, and probably some game demos and mods as well. The “towns” in the Internet Wild West were forums dedicated to specific games or hobbies. So I *am* a “citizen of the Internet* but in a somewhat different sense, oddly placing me (a “Power Rangers” kid, rather than a “Transformers” kid on the older end of Gen Y) amongst older, early Internet adopters. But either way, it was just a peripheral aspect of my day to day life, not an essential component.
Back then, this was weird – I didn’t know any other kids who did this stuff. There wasn’t really a good reason for a kid to go online unless you were into gaming. But my “early adopter” experience gave me a sense of perspective to see how dramatically the internet landscape changed in the mid-late 2000s, when I was in late high school and college, with the rise of social media, and I didn’t like it one bit. Genuine Internet communities were hollowed out by the rise of Facebook and Reddit and although I’ve seen some resurgence of forums, it’s not really the same. It used to be that you joined a specific community for a specific reason. DeviantArt, for example, was sort of like social media, but you didn’t use it socially unless you were an artist wanting to interact with other artists. It wasn’t until social media that people went online just to be online or “sell themselves” via personal profiles with no specific use case.
I didn’t even get a smartphone until 2013, when I was in my *mid-20s*.
X-er here, with a few memories in support of Brian’s observations about cultural generations.
For context, I’m part of the main leading wave of Gen-X that no matter where Boomer demographers tried to fiddle with the boundaries of my generation, I’m in it. High school in the 80s, my 20s during the 90s. First cell phone and home internet in 1996. The internet was just shifting from a place of techie pioneers to one of early adopting consumers, and at that time people still thought it would be some sort of VR cyberpunk thing. Absolutely no one expected the bland yet insane world of social media, with a bunch of neurotics shrieking at each other in text.
Gen-X was openly and publicly despised by the Boomers, mostly because our existence reminded them that they were no longer the youth generation. By the mid-90s we returned the favor. The idea that Boomer-hate is some new phenomenon is a complete media fiction.
Despite the contempt, there were articles by Boomers in the early 90s pinning their hopes on us as the generation that would heroically take it on the chin and save the world at whatever cost to ourselves – basically paying the Boomer’s bar tab. Brian has accurately observed how it didn’t turn out that way.
By about the mid 90s Gen-Y was widely recognized as a new cultural generation, with a birth cutoff between the two at roughly 1980. The oldest Ys had some of the archetypical Gen-X attitude and culture, but it was clear that something was changing. By the end of the millennium some were calling Ys the new Silent Generation or even Organization Men because of their milder, more tractable attitude. Based on this, the earlier Boomer vision for Gen-X reemerged for Gen-Y, again hoping they’d pay the bill so Boomers wouldn’t have to. That is failing too, though for different reasons.
Gen-Z was originally the hypothetical next generation either being born in the 90s or that would be born around the turn of the millennium. The term was used somewhat interchangeably with Millennial, which of course eventually won out.
At the time, tacking the terms Y and Z onto X seemed like a bit of a cheap placeholder from the Boomers, but the generational divisions those labels represented were true enough.
As mentioned, by the end of the 90s and on into the early 00s, Gen-Y was manifesting what seemed to be a peculiar passivity and lack of ambition or direction. On the other hand, they were noticeably nicer than recent generations of youth had been. In particular, Gen-Y men were less prone to fights and self-destructive excess than my generation or Gen Jones had been at the same age, but they were also less masculine in general. They were also nothing like what the Millennials later proved to be.
Then in the 2000s the media machine memory-holed Gen-Y and folded them into the Millennial label, as if someone born in the early 80s was a peer with a then-newborn baby. Some of us noticed at the time and wondered what was going on, but nothing came of it for years as Boomers latched onto ‘Millennial’ as their new all-purpose term of abuse for the young.
Brian is doing yeoman’s work in resurrecting the term and truth of Gen-Y.
Most oof quote from the compilation so far:
Sincere condolences, Gen X. You were supposed to be the heroes we
needed. But like hack authors who purposefully subvert the hero of
prophecy in their postmodern Tolkien ripoff novel, the Boomers’ neglect
and abuse killed your optimism and patriotism. Along with half of you.
A couple of years ago, I remember someone doing an analysis of Arthurian myth and arguing that the slaughter of the May babies was the fundamental crime that led to the downfall of Camelot.
I was struck by the parallels to our own situation, from the Boomer’s myth-appropriation* of Camelot for their ‘Golden Age’ to our 50 years of slaughter and creating our own Mordreds …
*I regret nothing.
Yep.
Well, this is interesting. As I’ve said before, Ireland isn’t the same as the US, but we went through something similar, just on a faster, more accelerated timescale. When my mother was born in the late 50s, my country was on the level of a Third World country, or scarcely above it. The majority of rural households didn’t even have ELECTRICITY. My mother remembers a time, in her childhood, when flushing toilets and televisions were new inventions. Then in the 70s we had an enormous boom and rapidly became a “modern” industrial society. Effectively, we got the entire Industrial Revolution in about two decades. This meant that we got a kind of “delayed effect” where whatever happened to America showed up here after a few years’ delay. This is why I, though being born in 1993, didn’t use a computer outside of school until my mid teens, and didn’t have a smartphone until the mid 2010s.
You know. What you just described sounds almost exactly like what was the Philippine experience. I was born in 1991 and only was a consistent internet user around 2006/2006
Good milestones.
In addition to the technology there is also the principles that operated in those eras. I would say that during the 2000’s era (roughly 1998 – 2008) it was the same people but with new technology. They thought in a similar way. After 2008 people’s thinking started changing but the effects were gradual, not immediate. 2013 is when I first noticed that smartphone usage had become cultlike. It was no longer viewed just a more sophisticated cellphone, but as a lifeline. And that’s also when same sex marriage was legalized in the US.
Mentally, a lot of people are still in the early 2000’s because that’s the last time when the principles that people said were operating still were operating, at least to some extent (though maybe not in the most radical parts of the world). Jobs were still about skills, entertainment was still about entertainment, education was still about education.
We still haven’t come to terms with the 2008 – 2019 era. That’s when things started operating according to weird principles and when the stated reasons for things are seen to be false or at least missing so much of the puzzle as to be unhelpful.
But even then, the events of the past two years have shown that the conspiracy theorists of the 1990s were more or less right. Not necessarily in the specifics, but in the idea that in addition to the supposed principles that were at work in the world, there were other things underlying them.
“Expats of a country that no longer exists is a good way to put it.” In addition to the value of remembering a time before the Internet, Gen Y (and older (pre-1995) Millenials) also remember the last time that things operated according to normal human principles.