this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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AFAICT Gen X should really just be split into Boomers and early millennials.
I'm a late gen X (1978) and do not associate with boomers at all.
We're basically millennials before the internet.
That is what I think about when thinking about Gen X. I have clear examples because I'm myself in the millennial range, my (much) older brother is Gen X and my parents are boomers. I'd never lump my bro with the boomers and I consider gen X as a whole pretty chill. They're all the bands I grew up listening to and carried the bulk of what made the 90s great. Boomers have fine individuals but as a whole they're nasty.
I’m also a late Gen X. Please, please, PLEASE don’t group us with Boomers. We’re nothing like them and proud of it.
Also GenX. Fuck everyone that isn't my generation or I don't know personally.
Gen X reporting.
Meh.
I'm from 1980, so technically Gen X, but I've always associated more with millennials. My first phone (after I moved out of my parents' house where we had landline) was a Nokia 3210 and I got my first email account in 1996.
You, my 1980 cousin, are Xennial! We have an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials?wprov=sfla1
Also a 1980 baby, but because of my dad's work, we had the internet, such as it was, in late 86/ early 87, and I literally had a computer available to me since birth. Some of us got started on the digital part early.
I am 86 baby and you are one of the only very few people born in 80s or earlier that had really early adoption to computers in addition to me. I could use MS-DOS before I could write anything else as I also had had computer available since pretty much birth also because of my dads job.
I had computers from a young age.
ASM coding on a Microbee running CP/M OS was where I started somewhere around 1986.
But I grew up as they did and have a deep understanding of how they work.
I'm a Senior SysAdmin/Systems Architect these days.
I still have a @hotmail.com email address that is just my name. No numbers or anything.
See you in the third act :)
It makes much more sense when a generation boundary is marked by some sort of significant societal shift. Like Boomers are people born after WWII ended. I guess Gen X kinda makes sense being defined as a generation that grew up after the civil rights act and the establishment of rock & roll. But it seems like there should also be something between that and the internet, because as you say there’s a difference in late Gen X. Maybe the advent of video games should be a cutoff. Someone who grew up with video games and VCRs in the 80s has a pretty different experience from someone who grew up in the 70s.
I've always been told the defining turn from boomers to Gen X was the end of the boom. Readily available birth control for men and women made family planning the norm. Gen X just doesn't get a fancy name because they never got there "define with this" phenomena
That makes sense as a reason too. I think the 60s saw an undeniable cultural shift. The 80s is harder to pinpoint and yet I don’t know anyone born in the last years of the 70s that is comfortable with being grouped with Gen X without caveats.
i'm late gen x (78), that's more comfortable to me than being lumped with millennials. (the caveat being, i suppose, that we're dissimilar in some respects from early gen x.)
internet was not widely available until about the time i started college, and gen x media defined popular culture at that time. i also relate to the notion of being the child of two working parents - the first generation of latchkey kids.
i tend to see millennials as people who were kids when i was in school - and they grew up with the internet.
Worth noting that Douglas Copeland who wrote the book Generation X that gives the generation it's name cut it off in 1974 if I recall correctly.
I was born in 77. I am the Star Wars generation.
'78
Space Invaders
https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/generations-age/
Pew and a bunch of other think tanks are moving past generational studies as it seems that you are correct that you have more in common with people within 5 years of your age than people in your "generation".
They needed think tanks to figure that one out?
You need studies to demonstrate these effects in a scientific manner so yes/no as it could be done by a scholastic institution if it wasn't done by think tanks.
Hello fellow Xennial!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials?wprov=sfla1
As a person born nearly a decade after you, I pride my generation (Gen Y/millennial) as also experiencing life before computers and the internet in your home, but still developing (sort of naturally) with all that (but still remembering what it felt like to be really and truly bored). Gen Zers born after a similar gap as between me and those born later, don't remember life before the internet or 9/11.