Every time we pull Generation Y out of the memory hole, Gen Y deniers come out of the woodwork to parrot Madison Avenue’s gaslighting against it.
Not that it mattes. Because the establishment sources they cite just end up defining and defending Gen Y.
Frequent readers may remember the AdAge article that blew the lid off the marketing industry’s deliberate decision to bury the Gen Y category.
Here at the turn of the real millennium, trend forecasters and futurists are pondering new ways of cross-marketing to all of America’s biggest consumer groups. First there was the generation of World War II GIs–part of Mr. Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation–followed by the Silent Generation and their kids, the Baby Boomers–the group that cemented generational targeting as a discipline.
Then came Generations X and Y, and now there’s the “Millennial” generation.
There it is: proof from AD 2001 that the terms “Generation Y” and “Millennial” were in use at the same time to describe different cohorts.
But some consumers have such a raging case of Stockholm syndrome that they can’t countenance the hucksters trying to sell them their own childhoods being wrong. So some cite this Wikipedia entry (we could ignore their objection on thsoe grounds alone) as evidence that Gen Y and Millennials are one and the same:
In August 1993, an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe teenagers of the day, then aged 13–19 (born 1974–1980), who were at the time defined as different from Generation X. However, the 1974–1980 cohort was later re-identified by most media sources as the last wave of Generation X, and by 2003 Ad Age had moved their Generation Y starting year up to 1982. According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age “threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y,” and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR “the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them.”
Related: Lost Generations
While the above paragraph may seem to confirm the current trend of identifying Gen Y with the Millennials, even a cursory reading reveals some serious problems with that stance. Right out of the gate, it affirms what many Gen Y rehabilitators have pointed out, viz. that “Generation Y” was in fact the common term for the kids immediately following Generation X. It also supports the recollection that the Gen Y term held sway for about a decade until the early aughts. What’s more, even Wikipedia has to acknowledge that the decision to retire “Gen Y” was made by advertisers and the mainstream media for marketing reasons, not sound demographic modeling.
This clip from the animated sitcom Mission Hill (1999-2002) illustrates that exact scenario. See for yourself:
But there’s an even bigger hole in Wikipedia-based argument against Gen Y. And it comes from William Strauss of Strauss and Howe fame—also the co-author of Millennials Rising, who also helped coin the term “Millennial”—himself.
“Generation Y was a [popular phrase] in 1993, a term which at that point identified correctly the last third of Gen X,” Mr. Strauss said. “The notion has become familiar in popular culture and in marketing to refer to teenagers. But now Y is a little older-those marketing styles are either directed at current young twenty-somethings or they’re applying the veneer of X to a short-lived effort to reach teenagers that is not going to work over time.” Understanding the new generation as its own animal is key to reaching its members successfully, Mr. Strauss said.
Defining the Millennials as the generation born in or after 1982, Mr. Strauss calls them more numerous, more affluent, better educated and more ethnically diverse than generations past. Millennials also have been trained to be “doers” and “achievers.”
Related: Marketing Millennials
So William Strauss, a demographer quoted in a Wikipedia entry that conflates Gen Y and the Millennials, is on record asserting that they’re two separate generations.
“But Strauss also starts Millennials in 1982!” some may still argue. “Doesn’t that line up better with the current start date than 1990?”
The short answer is “It did.”
In 1987 when Stauss and Howe introduced the term, in the year 2000 when they released their book on Millennials, and even in January of 2001 when that AdAge piece was published.
But, as even critics of the Gen Y label affirm, our ability to define different generations develops with time as our demographic data set grows. After all, people’s behavior changes with time. And a couple of major events went down soon after the release of Millennials Rising and the AdAge piece that have since afforded us a clearer perspective.
Related: Gen Y and the Pre-Internet Age
The old adage that adversity reveals character remains accurate. And the major societal upheavals in the wake of 9-11 and the rise of the smartphone revealed widespread behaviors that enhanced our demographic precision. On the whole, folks born between 1979 and 1989 reacted to the paroxysms at the end of the 20th century in different ways than those born later.
Put in simpler terms, the mesure of any demographic model is its predictive value. And a model that lumps people who came of age before 9-11 in with kids who had smartphones in junior high will yield less useful behavioral predictions than one which delineates the two.
There you have it. Arguments intended to debunk Gen Y end up better defining and defending Gen Y.
Almost like it’s real or something.
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There were points growing up where people up to the mid-80s were even called Gen X because the Gen Y line was so hard to define. Even in the early 00s there were weird assertions like saying Gen X ended in 1984 and Millennials start with 1986. It felt a lot like throwing things at the wall and hoping they stick.
But the better case is that the last generation that grew up analog is not the same as the first that grew up digital. Gen X kids had more in common with their Boomer parents’ childhood than Gen Y kids had with their Millennial younger brothers. Columbine, 9/11, the War on Terror, social media, smart phones, and the internet, were inarguable game-changers, and shifted the entire way children grew up and were formed.
I don’t understand why this is fought against so hard. It’s clear as day to anyone who actually thinks about it.
For some reason, most people want generations defined numerically – either in birth trends, or in some cases by decades, like Steve Sailer’s idea of dividing generations by decade – instead of cultural.
There’s also the desire for clean, binary cutoff dates instead of a spectrum, as Brian has noted before.
“weird assertions like saying Gen X ended in 1984 and Millennials start with 1986”
That sounds like someone trying to recognize the blurring at the edges in a spectrum but not quite managing to get the idea. That said, there could be some “dead zones” between generations, kind of how like the 1989-1992 Bush years were post-80s, but there was still 80s inertia, and there were some proto-90s elements but the decade hadn’t really kicked off yet.
I don’t know if this helps at all, and I’m sure someone could make a snazzier graphic, but this might help some of these people understand the gradations between generations. If not, feel free to ignore it.
https://nightskyradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/generations-graph-1.png
For whatever trivial detail it’s worth, the colors were chosen deliberately. Green for the gaia-loving money worshipping boomers, black for Gen X (really, what else could it be?), yellow for cautious and confused Gen Y and warning of approaching danger, and blue for ultra-liberal blue state millennials. Any better suggestions welcomed.
The petty quibbling over the Gen Y label is why I’m leaning more and more toward the “Nintendo Generation” descriptor. It’s vivid, doesn’t overstate itself, and leaves no room for confusion.
That explains so much. I’ve never been able to figure out where the dividing line is between X, Y, millenial, whatever, and never really identified with any of them.
I am, of course, a 1980 kid.
It’s strange to see people get really upset about the idea that Gen Y and Millennial’s aren’t the same thing.
Contradicting what the TV told X-ers and YouTube told Millennials produces massive CogDis in both groups.
And then they go on to make stupid names like “Xillennial” or “Geriatric Millennial” to split hairs. They don’t do this with any other group, either, but that fact never seems to click.
At this point I’m just sticking with Y because it gets that emotional response, which means it is effective.
The trouble with convincing people of the difference is that most people are not actually interested in having useful generation categories. Instead, they are looking for what the answer “you are supposed to say” is.
It’s like asking “is Pluto a planet?” You can get into discussions about what a useful definition of “planet” is, or you can point out the ridiculously gamed way that the vote to declare it “not a planet” got through (short version: they lost several times, waited until most people but their allies had left the conference to push through a successful vote, and immediately did a press junket that made it inconvenient to change the definition again.) But the truth is it doesn’t matter. Most people don’t care at all about whether Pluto is a planet but they DO care that they are saying something that has been approved by society, so that’s the end of it.
Same thing with definitions. For most people it just comes down to whatever years Pew Research says, since those are the ones on Wikipedia. You can point how absurd this is (even noting that they didn’t settle on the end of the Millennial generation until 2019) but it doesn’t matter; they just want to make sure that they are in accordance with the “official” source.
In general when discussing this sort of thing it’s always went one of two ways: the first where there is some initial resistance but then after thinking it through an agreement that having Generation Y and Millennials as distinct makes sense (or an agreement that Millennials need to be broken up into “younger and elder millennials”, which really is doing the same thing.) The second is endless repetitions of “but the years are…” regardless of what argument is made.
Pedantry gets a bad rap. But the cynical manager class and their academic midwit coat holders programmed the NPCs to feel that using language with precision and accuracy is mean. That’s how we got insulting word golems like “themself,” no way to express the literal sense of “literally,” and “gender” used as a synonym for “sex.”
To fix these ills, we need more pedants, not fewer. Empowered to levy fines and horse-whippings, if necessary.
I distinctly recall hearing “gender” used a euphemism for “sex” in the 90s, but at the time it had nothing to do with gender theory or the Political Correctness of the era. Rather, it was due to bourgeois discomfort around uttering the word “sex,” especially in front of children. This habit inadvertently cleared the ground in a lot of people’s minds for the abuses you reference.
I still have arguments with the same people over the same topics and it does get annoying, but I keep it up anyway. I’m willing to argue with people who have points to make, not those who rehash half-formed thoughts they don’t have any investment in beyond faux-edgy contrarianism or NPC talking points.
Sometimes they give in and try to have a real conversation. It’s worth it for when that happens.
My wife and I (b. 1985) have brothers 2 and 4 years younger than us. We’ve often remarked that they belong to a different generation. Facebook in college had very different implications than MySpace in middle/high school.
Another important point. The accelerating rate of technological advancement makes 20-year generations almost useless for behavioral modeling purposes.
Why did they name the 70s Gen X, 80s Gen Y, and 00s Gen Z anyway? Because they intended Gen Z to be the last White generation. They intended the genocide to be complete. Otherwise, when you start labelling genwrations by letters, you’d obviously start with A.
Gen-Xer here. I first recall seeing the Gen-Y label somewhere in the early-mid 90s, sometimes alternately called ‘Generation Next’. It meant the younger half of what would have been Gen-X under traditional 20-year generations – roughly, people born in the 80s.
Somewhere shortly after that, ‘Gen-Z’ appeared in reference to those born in the 90s. Around the same time, ‘Millennial’ initially referred to the then-future generation to be born around the turn of the millennium. Hence the name.
Note that the sequence of X, Y, Z thus actually made sense at the time. Meanwhile, Millennial would have begun some new series of names, rather than being interpolated between Y and Z as later happened.
By the late 90s the Gen-Y label was in common use, and the oldest Gen-Ys were entering the workforce. People at the time noticed and discussed the differences in work and interpersonal style between Xs and Ys, especially the more docile go-along-get-along attitude of the Ys.
Among the people who noticed and discussed Gen-Y’s traits were some of the same boomers who now label everyone born from 1980 to the present as “millennials”.
None of the above was controversial or secret at the time. It was widespread enough to be common knowledge, which makes it notable that when the corpocracy quietly memory-holed it somewhere in the 00s, so few noticed, and that there could be such determined, emotionally-invested hostility toward reclaiming the Gen-Y name today.
As a late-stage Gen Y, it seems almost self-evident to me that there’s a vast cultural gulf between Y and Millennials. My childhood up through second grade or so was analog. After that, digital. Computers “broke” into the mainstream in 1995, when we got ours, and *everything* changed after that. I was part of the very last cohort to remember a world without computers everywhere for at least part of my childhood.
If you were born in the early-late 90s, you did not live in the pre-Personal Computing world, or you were a toddler. Computers, Internet, cell phones, have always just been there. It’s just crazy to me that this is even remotely controversial.
I wonder if part of it is that some objecting, young Ys come from families that were early adopters and had more technology earlier on, so even though they were born in the mid-late 80s they actually didn’t really have a life without it. And some – particularly from poorer families and circumstances, I suppose – were later to get a PC, internet, and so on. But that doesn’t refute the general trend, in middle-class America, at least.
I think I mentioned this before but a decade ago I was part of a “house church” group where almost everybody else was about five years younger than me. This was long before I thought about things like generational dividing lines, but it was often jarring to me just how different these slightly-young-than-me people were. The guys were always sitting around playing the original Smash Bros on N64, a game neither I nor my friends ever played when we were kids. Their nostalgia struck me as bizarre. They had very different behavioral patterns, to the extent that I often felt like I was the adult in a room full of kids. But really, it was just the Gen Y – Millennial gap in action.
“I wonder if part of it is that some objecting, young Ys come from families that were early adopters and had more technology earlier on, so even though they were born in the mid-late 80s they actually didn’t really have a life without it.”
My father worked in the tech industry and we were allowed to play PC games as soon as we knew the commands to run them in MS-DOS. We also had a small library of BASIC programming books. That kind of early adoption had little implication for the rest of daily life. We still learned to use the card catalog at the library, while “Computer Lab” at school was mostly typing and basic spreadsheets.
One of the ways that I’ve repeatedly heard Millennials described is “the generation that never knew what it was like to live without cell phones.” Whenever I hear this from someone I’m talking to I pounce on it, since I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 20, and while I was a late adopter I didn’t know anyone with a cell phone until I was about 14. My childhood was all about landlines.
Unfortunately this often does not change any minds because the “official” years are just that accepted.