No, We Are Not All Millennials

The Emergence of Micro-Generations as Primary Cultural Cohorts

We’ve all seen the stories: Millennials are spoiled and entitled, selfish and lazy, more concerned with how many likes their Facebook status got than finding their own apartment…

Millennials are the punching bag of countless columns, articles, and opeds, all decrying the state of America’s future.

The main problem here, and the source of most complaints, is in the conflation of natural twentysomething behavior with a generational identity. (“It’s not narcissistic to have a diary, but if you publish your diary online all of a sudden you’re self-obsessed.”)

What facilitates this conflation, however, is a general misunderstanding about how the nation thinks about this generation. Simply put, the post-Gen X generation is not one unified cohort, but two (or more) micro-generations artificially divided by both the Great Recession and the rapid increase in technological innovation and normalization.

A common refrain I hear in my research is that those born in the late 1970s and early 1980s strenuously object to being associated with “Millennials.” And given the media’s portrayals, it’s with good reason. Many of these folks even try to claim to be Generation X, despite holding almost no shared values or experiences. (“I was born in 1984, but I’m not a Millennial, that’s for sure.”)

This generational estrangement is the by-product of the economic and technological divide. Micro-generations are rooted in a specific cultural timeframe, through the historical gravity of short-lived phenomenon. It is not that micro-generations don’t mature with society (e.g., a Gen X individual using a iPad isn’t abnormal), it is that a micro-generation doesn’t have any connection to a time before that specific cultural point. The speed of change is the primary factor here. Where two children born in 1950 and 1960, respectively, certainly remember different specific events, they remember and experienced largely the same technological and economic conditions. Children born in the early 1980s and the early 1990s simply don’t remember and haven’t experienced the same conditions.

If you were born in the early 1980s you remember the first dot-com bubble, but weren’t old enough to be scared off by it like Generation X. You grew up alongside the digital world, maturing at roughly the same pace. You remember the jump to 64-bit gaming and the circulation of jokes and chain letters on AIM long before they were dubbed “memes.” You were in high school or college on 9/11 and graduated before the economy fell apart in the late 2000s. (For clarity, I refer to this cohort as Generation Y.)

Much of the criticism of “Millennials” is directed at those born later, say the late-1980s through the 1990s. If you were born in the early 1990s, you don’t remember the dot-com bubble, you matured with the internet already largely established, and you have no real memories of the nation not at war. More importantly, you were in college or high school when the economy collapsed. The worldview of this second group was necessarily shaped by the new reality: almost certain immediate unemployment. The fact that these “Millennials” are slow to buy houses and new cars and more likely to live at home isn’t a reflection of a unique prescribed generational bias, it’s a response by a micro-generation to an economic reality.

In fact, many of the criticisms of Millennials themselves date the critic more than the subject. Millennials don’t use the internet nearly at the same rates or in the same ways as those in Gen Y and older. Snapchat and Twitter and products I’m sure I don’t even know about are the go-to social media for Millennials; Facebook and email are for communicating with parents and grandparents. One of the more surreal professional moments for me is when I teach about Napster as an historical event. It often takes a few attempts to adequately explain how big and important and ground-breaking Napster was to an audience that has always had iTunes and streaming radio (Spotify, Pandora, etc.).

However, these structural issues have also created one of the generation’s largest strengths: entrepreneurship. And it makes sense: a generation wholly comfortable with the internet — never having to face the wild west of geocities and dial-up modems, but instead capable of accessing endless apps through nearly universal wi-fi — yet facing slim traditional employment avenues will of course use the internet to make money.

This also ties into why Millennials are often cited as very optimistic about the future. The rate of technological advancement has shifted power structures in society and in many respects (beyond simple demographic math) has put Millennials in the cultural driver’s seat.

So next time you read about those entitled, lazy Millennials, don’t take offense and instead recognize that it’s just envy by the older generations recognizing their power is largely gone because the culture they grew into and mastered is largely gone. Now if only we could do something about their institutional power…

Reference Note: the commonly accepted generational divisions are: Baby Boomers 1945–1965, Generation X 1965–1980, Generation Y/”Millennials”1980–2000, Generation Z/”Post-Millennials” 2000-present.

This brief entry is part of a larger project on the cultural divisions caused by the Digital Age. On the concept of micro-generations and the split between Gen Y and Millennials, I am indebted to Adam Famiglietti. On the Gen X cultural experience, Michael Mercurio has been a reliable and informative sounding board. Many thanks to Matt Hayman and Jordan Scott for their notes and suggestions on how to make this discussion clear and coherent to a non-academic audience.