this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Eh. Generations are defined by a lot more than what clothes someone wore or what TV shows were being broadcast. Those things move quickly. Generations are usually marked by larger cultural touchstones.
There are quite a few ways to try and slice the Millennial/Gen Z divide, for instance. An easy-on-paper ones are things like what generation your parents belonged to (Boomers/Gen X, respectively), for instance, though that just kind of pushes the issue back to a different generational divide. Or there's the "do you remember the world before 9/11 happened?" metric. These point to differences in parenting, or differences in the larger socio-political culture within which one had their formative years, and they're far, far wider reaching than fast fashion.
Millennials are a strange generation because I feel like elder millennials and younger millennials are kind of divided by whether they remember a time before the Internet went mainstream or not.
To your point, another dividing line for Millennials and Gen Z is that Gen Z kids' first phone was probably a smart phone and they probably got theirs a couple years younger on average than millennials.
The Oregon Trail Generation is just its own thing.
I agree, and I think categorizing generations is always going to be messy. But I think the Oregon Trail Generation/Xennials just seems to be more distinct than most other micro generations. I'm pretty much in the middle of the commonly accepted millennial age bracket and would still consider myself more of a Xennial based off the broad characteristics that have been described, despite falling outside that rough '86 cutoff by a couple years. I know part of it is probably due to how much Millennials get shat on, but it feels like the "Millennial Generation" is an especially weird generation where half the people that are supposedly in it don't feel like they belong with the other half and many resent the label. To me, the Millennials born after '90 seem quite distinct from those born before '87 and I feel like I'm in the middle and identify more with the Xennials. I'm no sociologist, though, this is just my limited subjective experience.
Can't really go off parents' generation. Some people have kids at 16 and some at 45. I'm millennial with Gen X parents because they had me when they were young. I have a sister 15 years younger than me, who is Gen Z. We had very different experiences growing up, but share a parent.
No generational rule is hard and fast. They're all broad stroke generalities.
You can't even go based on year, because sociologists disagree on which years to use.