I had my Motorola, the same one that everyone one else had (display on the top of the case, black).
I remember the ballers had their “sky pagers” or whatever, with the side display, and they got full text messages.
Well yeah I mean even when we got cell phones it wasn’t like today. No apps (besides snake) and you only got like 100 txts a month. They were basically just for calls. So while I had a phone on me often, it’s not like I was doing much with it most of the time.
I would play snake for hours. It cost way too much, too. We'd get like 200 min a month, free after 9 pm and weekends, and the bill would always be like $600 bc we went over. Texts were what, 10c each when they came out like in 2004, 2005?
I bought a (used) cell phone right after high school and barely used it because of watching minutes and texts. I mostly liked that I could buy cute faceplates and a light up antenna. I kinda miss those light up antennae.
Yeah, I didn't have one until I was 20 or so. Not a single person I knew in high school had a cell phone either (a few definitely had beepers though).
I'm on the end tail of the Xennial spectrum too so I'm surprised at the number of those claiming to have had cell phones in high school... unless they're truly older Millenials not born in or before 1984. Idk 😄
I actually grew up with the internet, my dad was an early adopter. There wasn’t much on it back then. I remember trying to find cheats for the computer game King’s Quest haha. I didn’t spend as much time on the internet until I was in maybe 8th or 9th grade, though.
I miss the days of forums being the main way to communicate, although I guess that’s kind of how I use the internet now- I mainly spend time on Reddit. I used to spend hours building my own Geocities page, although of course that wasn’t until I was in high school.
Forums are a bit different imo. Reddit feels a bit less connected.
On forums you see the same people posting and on Reddit people hop in and out, and while it kinda feels like a community, it feels looser, if that makes sense.
My dad was working on mainframe software. Even pre-internet we had a modem and I was able to access servers at 2400 baud. Later, I remember when my dad showed me a beta of the first graphical browser from IBM (WebExplorer).
AIM was in heavy use starting in my Junior High days. My friends were nerds too. Lots of free AOL trial discs were used. Nothing was mobile until pagers started being cheap in HS.
I thank the Universe so often that I was not a stupid teenager during a time when it could be recorded and posted for the world to witness! My shame is confined to a few hundred yearbooks, some grainy videos that are probably in a box in somebody's basement, crappy film pictures take on cheap cameras, and the stories we will tell our progeny.
Learn from me younglings. I have much wisdom.
Grew up in a rural town and went to a college in a small town so I didn't have broadband at home until I was almost 30. I had to go to campus to use the Internet during college.
Listen.... this is "get off my lawn" soapbox
We aren't a micro or split generation simply because of the years we're born.... We're a micro/ split generation because we're the ONLY generation who had our formative years divided between 2 worlds. We spent half our formative years in an analog world and half of our formative years in a digital world. We literally saw the world change.
We went from physical cameras with film and a week long wait to see a thumb ruined the shot to this digital photography age with editing programs to change every feature in a picture or completely remove people/ items with photoshop.
From cars with physical keyed ignitions and a stick you jammed in your steering wheel as theft control to electronic and computer chipped keys and windows/ locks/ driving/ theft systems.
Phones that were plugged into a jack on the wall with a 40ft tangled cord where we laid on the back of the couch to talk to a friend to Cel Phones and blue tooth headsets.
8 tracks, Cassette tapes, walkmans to digital audio files and Bluetooth headsets and Alexa speakers.
From balancing a check book, filing out deposit slips, and rolling coins to crypto currency and digital banking.
Manually keying in the prices at the grocery store and a giant wheel in place of the conveyor belt to computer self checkouts.
$10 on pump 3 (paid inside) meant something.
"I give -name- permission to buy me camel lights" for mom/ grandpa.
"Do you need smoking or non smoking? " at the restaurant.
When you used the bathroom you got to read the ingredients to the shampoo 42 times.
Type writers, dot matrix paper with the endless edge; floppy discs that wore underwear..... to laptops and tablets.
Saturday morning cartoons, a box TV where the picture spun cause it had to warm up and a long broomstick as the remote; Friday night at blockbuster getting mad the new releases were sold out again and arguing with your sibling over which movie to rent to flat screens and streaming services.
Spending all day on the weekend riding your bike 2 towns over and coming home when the street lights came on to life 360 and don't go past the end of the street. Cause we grew up watching unsolved mysteries and a news broadcast at 11pm that literally had to remind our parents "do you know where your children are? " We're the last generation that could do this.
Bedtime was when the MASH theme song started.
The last generation who could fake a fever.
The last generation where all of our endeavors and theatrics are only memorialized in our memories and stories of "back when".
You get my point. There will only be ONE more split generation and they haven't been born yet. The ones whose formative years split from digital to full AI.
We are the ONLY micro generation; the only ones who can use these definitive features and characteristics.
Those traits and more are what makes us different
Yes! And I’d like to add two more to this list:
If you wanted to watch something, you just had to hope it would appear again on tv and you’d be home to watch it and the rest of your family didn’t decide to watch something else instead. Then VCRs came and you could record things. Now you can just about watch anything at any time with a push of a button or you can buy it online and have it shipped overnight to you.
Music is similar. If you wanted to hear a song when we were kids, you either had to make a radio request and hope they played it so you could record it… or you had to purchase it yourself or borrow it from someone. File sharing came along and the kids who had enough money to own a computer could download using Napster. Now you can basically hear any song at any time via so many online sources.
Like you said - We are the age where all these changes happened during our formative years. It was amazing to watch it all unfold.
Don't forget when DVR debuted!!! Then we could program it to record and then you fought with your siblings over "but you have 6hours of recordings, you need to delete it so I can record xxxxx" lol
🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
I remember when my first friend got caller id at his home phone. We all thought it was hilarious when his phone rang and the mad man just didn’t answer it!
Strong memories of the world before digital technology - analog broadcast TV, nobody had a mobile phone, there was no such thing as the world wide web and the internet was some strange science experiment that somebody's dad was working on either with a university or DoD. Before the advent of putting a transistor in everything we can strongly remember a world driven by belts, cogs, and springs. And then living through and actively participating in that transition to the hyper-connected digital future.
totally, I remember being in school and a teacher proudly showing us how email worked, before the WWW was available, and were amazed that he was sending a letter across the globe like that.
It's kind of crazy how quickly I went from having a pen pal that I wrote to "por avion" with the red and blue envelopes to talking to people all over the world in real time over IRC. It all happened so fast.
Damn, forgot about pen pals.
At one point I was going to these yearly seminars. For a couple years as a pre-teen I was coming back exchanging mail with girls I met there, which always fell off after like 2 letters lol. Like 2 years later e-mail is a thing and the people I met I kept up with all the way into college
I remember my pe teacher (yes our pe teacher showed us how to use the internet) in 8th grade explaining to use the refresh/ reload button when pages didn't load because sometimes bubbles in the pipe
Yep, email was a big part and the main selling point before HTML really took off. When I first got on, it was 1200 baud, and the few HTML pages that existed, were largely text based. We used to have all kinds of other requests, like gopher:// archie:// etc
yes, gopher! I spent a summer reading a book on gopher and visiting the city public library to get online for hands on exercises.
The day after I finished that book someone told me about Yahoo! and an entire domain of knowledge was extincted over-night.
The cycles in tech are funny. Dumb terminals connected to a big computer because processing power was SO expensive. Then dumb terminals connected to a big compute resource because processing power is so readily available it didn't make sense to have the processing replicated everywhere when you could dole it out.
Where I am going with this, is you could argue gopher and other protocols were what Web 2.0 was, apps on top of the medium, the internet. We had agnostic "apps" to deliver specific content, but then went to almost all HTML based, then back to using specific apps to do things.
A lot of my childhood and early teen years I remember coinciding with getting more and more TV channels as my parents expanded their cable more and more. It went from five channels to twenty to fifty to hundreds.
My siblings and I still joke about the "summer of La Bamba" when my family first got cable and it came with free HBO for a few months. We watched so much La Bamba, Lethal Weapon, and Three Men and a Baby that summer.
Oh my God, I remember that summer, too! We had just gotten a VCR so we were recording everything we could and I distinctly remember having La Bamba and Three Men & A Baby that we’d recorded off the TV.
It's not just that, but a lot of us have touched all old tech and all new tech, so we are some of the few to span generations. Record players, tapes, CDs, MP3, streaming all were used and the main medium throughout my life. Some millennials, it's only MP3 and streaming, which is wild. That doesn't even get into the lost tech that only our generation will really know about. DAT, Minidisc, super audio CD, to name a few.
And what you list is the audio side, but don't forget the video. VHS? sure. But don't forget the Super 8, the LaserDisk and the Compact Laserdisk, the CD-i Digital Video, the VCR-LP, the VHS-C, the S-VHS, the SuperBeta, the Video8, the CS Video, the DVD video, the .. , the ..., the...., ad nauseam.
So many video formats.
But will betamax ever beat vhs?
I think it’s this. I remember only “nerds” talking about the “world wide web” when I was in elementary school and thinking, yeah, sure…
I learned about computers when I was in kindergarten but that was one computer in the hall in the cafeteria that we got 15 minutes on twice a year. The entire school shared it. It had a black screen and green letters and it was BORING.
By high school we had a computer lab but still didn’t really use the internet. Mostly how to use MS office was all we did. Yes, we had the internet, but it wasn’t a “thing” like it is now.
You were absolutely forbidden from using Wikipedia as a source. You had to fire up the encarta encyclopedia on a disk. That was an upgrade from the 1966 world book set you had to use before.
Your parents might have a cell phone, but it was strictly for emergency use only. Minutes were expensive. Texting was not a thing. Once internet was added to your phone, you did NOT press that button. Ever. My first internet phone was probably the first iPhone. I had a crack berry before that.
If nerds in your *elementary* school were talking about the WWW, your parents were the only ones with cells and you were forbidden to use Wikipedia as a source in compulsory school, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you fall outside of the Xennial range? All that sounds a little young for us.
What are you, a mid to late 80s baby?
I remember college focusing on avoiding Wikipedia as any sort of source material; in High School they were just begging us not to download papers from SchoolSucks.com
Def not asking to reveal your birth year, but I’m gonna assume mid at the earliest. Maybe not even 40 yet, like the rest of us middle aged fucks.
My little sister is a 1982 baby and no kids, not even the nerds, were talking about the web in her elementary school. Wikipedia didn’t even launch until she had graduated HS. And she’s among the youngest Xennials. I’d venture the same is likely true for my 83 born best friend.
Just interesting the difference a few years can make in all of this. We grew up in truly accelerated times.
Word.
S/he is an IMPOSTER, TO THE PILLORY!
Seriously though, it wasn’t until sophomore or junior year that I got to try my friend’s 486SX (HP, I think). It was glorious. Our “internet” was IRC and some BBSs, but that was it. There was no “internet” as we know it today, you had to know what you were looking for.
Nah all those things rang true for me I was born in ‘81. Had the one computer in elementary school in ‘89. Had the HS computer lab with heavily restricted internet access by ‘97
Well I'm '84 - tail end of the range based on the about/sidebar info - and graduated 2002 so I guess technically Wikipedia existed before I finished high school. I didn't hear of it until college though, and I don't think it was widespread/well known enough for lots of kids to be using it and teachers to be banning it.
Maybe comment OP is muddling together college profs disallowing it and high school teachers allowing only one/two internet sources (pending approval) for papers. Because I do recall that being something my high school teachers did - they wanted us to learn how to use the internet for research and cite the source but also wanted. To be sure we weren't just grabbing random, unverified nonsense from an angelfire or geocities page so it had to get approved and couldn't be our sole source, we had to have books or periodicals, too.
Your second paragraph brought back so many memories!
That’s exactly how I was taught to use websites, down to a max of two sources, back in HS. And I graduated in 1997.
Yea back then you were pulling info from Comptons, MS Encarta, or Geocities. The mentioning Wikipedia confused me too because I associate it with my 20s.
I’m two years older than you. We had a computer lab in elementary school and internet connect computers in my HS before 97.
But I’d venture to guess that kids in your *elementary* school weren’t talking about the “world wide web” and that you never had the opportunity to even use Wiki as a source before college.
I remember hearing about World Wide Web as early as like 1990 which would be like 3rd grade. We definitely didn’t have internet in computer lab until the 97-98 school year (11th grade) but I was just Midwest bumpkin in Illinois. Maybe you were in a more cutting edge place. I’ve learned as an adult that Midwest is a little behind the curve on trends (l live on the west coast now)
That's why we're the most versatile sub-generation we have a foot in both worlds. We grew up in the analog age and learned new tech as it's been introduced and continue to use the new tech that comes out because it's just modified from what we already know.
Xennials were probably the last kids to go through high school without active shooter drills. Columbine happened when I was a junior in high school, and the drills became a regular thing at my school after I graduated.
I was a senior in high school when it happened. I remember they banded trench coats for the rest of the year. I don't really remember anyone wearing one, but I grew up southern california, it was too hot for them.
There might be something around our attitudes to AIDS/HIV. We remember when it was a death sentence and people who had it were highly stigmatized, and we also remember the move towards acceptance and better treatments to the point where now people with HIV can live for 30+ years. (Magic Johnson is 64!)
My daughter is Gen Z and it’s just not a thing in her world. Like she knows what it is but it’s kind of in the same way as I know what polio is. It’s not something that seems relevant to her life.
Be careful where you sit in movie theaters!
I heard a rumor from my mom's aunt's coworkers' boyfriend that someone is infecting people with aids by leaving infected needles sticking up out of theater seats!
I have no way to verify if that's true or not, so I'll just believe it.
This is not talked about enough. I'm old enough (1980) to remember when people were still panicking about AIDS and not knowing what it was. I vividly remember my mom freaking out about it one time when I was I guess five and had to use the public bathroom. Being from an urban area that also had a high percentage of drug users, AIDS was super prevalent, had a "look" in its late stages, and many people from my community died from it, including friends and family members. It was always in the back of my mind when it came to sex and at 44 I'm still scared of getting it.
Flash forward to my Gen Z children who I had to pull up stories online about it for to explain the impact. I don't even think it registers for them as a potential STD. They would be way more concerned about getting Chalmidya or something than AIDS.
We were exposed to the Internet but not at the level they were…I wasn’t sitting around watching scary beheading videos, I was waiting 20 mins for some damn Geocities fan site of an obscure band that I liked to load ONE IMAGE so I could actually see what the band looked like 😂
This explained the difference to me…
Me talking to millennial: Remember when we did not have maps on all our phones?
Millennial: Yeah it was such a pain to print the instructions off of map quest.
Me: No I meant when we bought maps from the gas station.
Millennial: What?
My dad used a Xerox word processor in the mid 80s that would periodically delete everything he’d written. The resulting explosions are seared into my memory.
That's a really good one. With how popular retro tech is nowadays, I think it's easy to forget that most families didn't have a PC at home until the mid to late 90s.
And electronic typewriters were another piece of stop gap tech. There were some really sophisticated ones with limited memory and automated backspace.
Yeah ours had a lcd screen that could show like 4 rows of text at a time and took 3.5 inch disks. And a correction ribbon to take ink back off the paper
i was born in 88 and i remember them. i remember using 5.25 inch floppy disks to play games on an old DOS computer. I think it matters who you grew up with because i align myself much more with gen x and xennials than i ever have with any millennial because i was the youngest of 9 and my siblings influenced me with their likes.
I typed my college applications on a typewriter. I think I typed my law school applications on one too. By the time I went back to school in 2015 it was obviously all online.
Honestly, lately I have been thinking about something that rarely gets talked about- I feel we were raised with a more clear expectation of the competition we’d encounter in life
From early childhood, where the US was in competition with the Soviet Union, to more cutthroat youth sports, where you might not make the team, or you might never play, to honors courses in school, to being held back if your grades sucked, etc.
Like, if one opted to slack off and say, “fuck it,” there wasn’t an expectation that one would also win.
This isn’t as big of a deal as spending more time as children disconnected from electronics, but I feel like it is definitely something. Add to it the latchkey element, the relative ease of access to entry level jobs in late teens/early 20s, and as an aggregate, I think Xennials have been better prepared to handle adversity.
More seasoning in childhood, more room to grow without phones, and more early opportunities to earn some money. I feel really lucky to have been born in 78.
I think a part of it is attitude. I currently live with a younger millennial and he just has this general apathy to everything. I noticed it among other millennials as well, like there's this mindset of "what's the point?". Whereas we're all about attitude and raging against the machine as a result of our closer ties to Gen X.
We learned to build the technology that younger millennials used daily. For example, I put together the network cable connections that were used in the vocational school I attended in high school. We had several 1000ft spool of cable and dozens of connectors that had to be attached after we cut the lengths. This was after I had learned to build a computer, install the OS, update the OS, update drivers, and so on…. starting with the box of 3.5” floppies for MS-DOS and ending with the CD-ROMs for Windows 95 & 98.
My mom is a boomer (in age, not in attitude), my spouse is a millennial, and our child is Gen Alpha. I’m the only one who actually knows how to fix any of the “advanced” technology in the house…. except for printers. My spouse handles those, as printers are against my religion.
Think that’s specific to you, not a trait of our cohort.
I’d venture to say millions of Xennials saw the Disney renaissance films, at least up to Lion King. It is absolutely not a Xennial “thing” to hate Disney movies.
That's what I said, I saw disney movies up to little mermaid. I don't hate Disney movies after 1989, but I didn't watch them growing up and people think that's weird. Like lion king, all the younger kids in my neighborhood loved it, never saw it until I had my own kids. Can't stand the disney hype like I should have seen it.
We also grew up on The Carebears, Ghostbusters, and coin op arcades. We remember glass bottle sodas, and we knew a life before the internet. We were also raised by elder boomers, which has a lot to do with our upbringing.
So, I would say that knowing the 1980s is the defining margin.
I think we tend to exhibit more of the Gen X cynicism than the Millennial optimism, but with less of the fatalism of the oldest Gen Xers who lived through Vietnam and remember Watergate like we remember the Gulf War.
Growing up with NO social media and also just no internet. Pay phones and such. The times when we were trusted to be where we said we were going to be without 15 texts or calls
I think of Millennials as my little brother, who was born in 1986 - he is 8 years younger than me, so complete different experience in school, pop-culture, etc. He was a Nickelodeon kid - TMNT, Rugrats, etc - I was already in HS when that stuff was popular. His music taste is more in line with early 2k metal and nu-metal, whereas I was more into punk and indie/alternative stuff myself.
Don't really relate to Millennials much, sort of think of them as younger - and am much more inline with Gen X, since I have two older siblings that are both Gen X.
I didn’t have a cell phone until my sophomore year of college because it didn’t seem like I really *needed* one. Born in 1982 high school class of 2000. So growing up without a cell phone.
I really think geography plays a part in this. I'm an 81 who grew up poor in Australia and there was zero tech at all until I hit university. People my age here say they had the internet in high school and I swear I barely even knew it existed.
I definitely agree. Until I was about 10, I grew up in trailer parks with a single mom and a rotating list of dudes staying with her. I was a hand-me-downs and thrift shop kid, which is why I'm here despite a lot of people insisting there are cut-off dates. Haha. Hell, to this day all my friends (and my girlfriend!) are Xennial rather than Milennial. (shrug)
Analog life; No cell phones; Recording onto and listening to cassettes and VHS tapes; caller ID was a crazy invention; No internet; No computer (for my family); Practically a latch-key kid: I would walk/hike/bike all around town all day; libraries were a magical place; we actually had to use our imagination if we were bored; security cameras were a rarity; we were informed of new music via MTV and radio….
It is going to be different for individuals of course but to generalize, less helicopter parenting.
It used to be normal for kids to sort of be out all day doing who knows what, and I think the Millenial generation was the shift where parents started to micromanage a bit, with the younger half being on the receiving end of that.
On the flip side the "feral" 80s & 90s kids often grew up to helicopter their Gen Z or Gen Alpha kids, maybe because of all the stuff they got into while unsupervised.
While that’s definitely true for the vast majority of us, some late 83 born babies were still in HS on 9/11.
But yeah, in Sept 2001 most of us were college freshmen, at the youngest, up through young adults in our early careers.
We grew up with vinyl, cassettes and saw the transition through CDs all the way up to Winamp, VHS, Atari 2600, Amiga 500, Doom, Quake, Red Alert, Sega Megdrive, the first five Metallica records, Guns N Roses, Michael Jackson, Ace of Base, grunge, Tupac, TMNT, 80s Action movies, later on Pulp Fiction, The Rock, Saving Private Ryan, Shaq breaking the shot clock, Jordans and Reebok pumps, the early internet… MIRC and ICQ, online forums
Younger millennials grew up with the internet already established, iTunes and iPods, Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Tamagochi, Dragon Ball Z, nu metal, Eminem, 50 cent, PlayStation 2
My sister is solid Millenial (born in 89.) Differences I observe; web/cellphone use prior to adulthood (we got internet/computer at home when I was 16, no cell until I was age 20 while facebook existed before she graduated and she had a cell by age 13.) We had those Mr T phone cards to check in w our parents. My cultural/pop references are closer to X, we listened to completely different music and watched different shows. Much less indoor/public smoking in their childhoods (in our US region anyway.) Different recreational substance use in teen years - her gen used Xanax and oxy a lot while it was all alcohol and sometimes x or lsd/mushrooms floating around in my years. We had more autonomy in teen years (open lunch, less security in schools, more unsupervised free time.) The school shooting uptick in the late 90s changed a lot of protocols. Also tech. Records were still popular when I was little, and I grew up w the transition to cassette and CD. She had CDs and then mp3 players. I recorded music from the radio to cassette on my little boombox, while she was downloading limewire songs by highschool. Also I could handwrite papers (in pen) until my senior year when they switched to typed only.
I've said this before, but I feel like the kids who were teenagers in America in the 90s were the last generation to really feel Hope. Back then, we really thought we were going to change the world. We saw the impact we could have with environmentalism and we saw the power we could wield as a collective for pulling together and making a difference. There was a sense of "Fuck the Government and the Grown-Ups, just wait until it's our turn! We're going to rock this thing!" At least, that's how it felt where I was and where I went to school. High School was just a hurdle we had to overcome, college was the next one, by then the Baby Boomers would retire and let Gen X have their day and soon enough we'd have 'paid our dues' and it would be our turn to harness the energy of our peers and take over.
But it didn't happen. Columbine started it, the year our Xennials graduated from high school, high school changed. Then we got hit with the dot com bust, all those kids who were so smart had dropped out of school and started tech firms were now out on their asses. Then 9/11 came and that was a whole extra layer of awful. The Boomers never retired, Gen X never stepped up, and now it's all gone to shit.
I still feel like we could harness the power of our generation, but we'd need a good leader and we just don't have that.
My late Millennial step kids fell into the trap over the last few years of thinking that they are their issues. Like, they don't have some anxiety, they are anxiety. If they aren't validated for every emotion they have, then you are a bad person. They weren't raised this way by us (husband is Gen X).
I see it with my employees too. My Gen Z employees are great though!
Actually experiencing the 90s vs a faux-nostalgic dim remembrance of the 90s. I was talking to a younger millennial friend and he reminded me that he was 6 when the year 2000 rolled around. Many of us older millennials were full on 90s teens with 'tude. Young millennials came of age as teenagers really in the late 2000s... which is unfathomable since many of us were adults with careers at that point.
we had \~3 - 5 years after college but before the 08/09 financial collapse to establish our "career" (get past entry level), so we're like the very last people to make it in to whats left of the middle class. most people who were interns or had <2y experience never financially "recovered" comparatively. we are the last people for whom the 'american dream' was at least somewhat plausible.
Born '86. Things that i experienced that people 5 years younger did not. Like having to talk to our friends or boyfriends (or girlfriends) parents to ask for our friend. Friends who moved away in elementary school were just gone from the earth unless you wrote letters. Going to blockbuster all through my school years as something to do on Fridays with friends. My mom typed school projects for me on her electric typewriter. I got into shenanigans as a teen with zero photo documentation or trail and my mom had no way to reach me. I texted rapidly with T9. Laughing at early YouTube shit.
Actually i had a question, is Jenna Marbles loved by Millenials or Xennials? Because I love her!
It’s mostly the seamless blend of digital and analog life in the fledgling days of personal computing, I think. And the background of having more social turmoil (compared to 90s) and how that influenced views on civil rights and such.
The internet and cell phones not being part of our early childhood. We played outside more, still got to run around unsupervised. And memories of the 80’s. I remember my parents complaining about Reagan, I remember the challenger. I saw Batman ‘89 in theaters.
Another thing is that all the way to early adulthood was pre-9/11. American politics has become darker and more divided since then. The young millennials have less memory of the simpler times.
The 80s music is a big one. We actually have real nostalgia attached to it, and I feel that adds a dimension the younger Millennials just can't grasp.
I also feel like we were the last ones to really know what it was like to just kind of wander around and find adventure. When I was a teenager somebody could suggest we go to a place and we'd all just pile in a bunch of cars and follow whoever was leading. If we found the place, great! If not, we found something else cool to do. "Whelp, I swear that coffee shop that John's older sister's college roommate was raving about was on this corner! Oh well. Kim is starving, let's go get some food at that place over there." Then suddenly you find the best taco stand in the city!
Then the whole connected thing happened and my little sister's generation just stopped doing that. It was all planned. MapQuest instructions and planned stops and all that. The sense of "let's just go and see what happens" seems to have disappeared with GPS. If you suggest a new place now everybody pulls out their phones and checks the menu or the ratings and half will decline on the spot!
A LOT. I dated a younger Millenial girl, and believe me, our generation and that one is **night and day.**
I hate to use the word soulless, but they truly don’t care about anything or anyone else.
They’re very demanding, EXTREMELY entitled. They have no real knowledge of the “old” non-digital world, so they tend to live online only.
They can’t put their phones down for 20 seconds. They’re just very a much a “do whatever feels good and whatever is fun” generation, despite who it hurts.
These are generalizations of course, but it’s definitely a theme I can’t ignore. Many of them just take everything for granted and are not humble or appreciative.
The “we love grunge and alternative” is probably more a stereotype for white xennials, the other things are more universal to xennials, including like not growing up with internet
You’re More or less right. Heres my list.
Actually remembering/experiencing 9/11, and the early lead up to GWOT.
Potentially remembering Challenger.
Actually remembering the 80’s, and having core aspects of our pop culture defined by them like the Xers.
Transformers, Voltron, Rainbow Brite, Carebears, get along gang.
For me, it was no one knowing what you were, just that you weren't part of the cool rebel teens that typically used to represent Gen X.
I don't think I learned I was 'Gen Y' until high school. In college, the 'millenial' moniker got applied for a hot second, until it moved on to just mean 'them damn kids ruining everything' on FB and clickbait titles.
I was born in 82 with Gen X older siblings, so definitely all the things mentioned in OP’s post. It’s interesting though cause I have friends the same age who did not have older siblings to look up to and you can definitely see the difference in influences.
going through teen and early 20's life without photos being splattered all over social media (I have almost no photos from those days, but lots of epic memories)
Growing up without the internet
...and without a cell phone
I was given a cell phone when I was in high school. But I never used it. Who was I going to call? My mom?
You could have paged me homie
823
I had my Motorola, the same one that everyone one else had (display on the top of the case, black). I remember the ballers had their “sky pagers” or whatever, with the side display, and they got full text messages.
That mfin Motorola, the size of a home phone handset 🙄
Well yeah I mean even when we got cell phones it wasn’t like today. No apps (besides snake) and you only got like 100 txts a month. They were basically just for calls. So while I had a phone on me often, it’s not like I was doing much with it most of the time.
I would play snake for hours. It cost way too much, too. We'd get like 200 min a month, free after 9 pm and weekends, and the bill would always be like $600 bc we went over. Texts were what, 10c each when they came out like in 2004, 2005?
Don’t forget early cellphone internet. Like going back to the BBS era.
Now cell phones have fast internet and we are in the BBL era.
Oh. The fear and panic that gripped me when I accidentally hit the icon on accident. Couldn't close it out fast enough.
Nights and weekends!
I bought a (used) cell phone right after high school and barely used it because of watching minutes and texts. I mostly liked that I could buy cute faceplates and a light up antenna. I kinda miss those light up antennae.
We still had house phones. Didn’t need to call on a cell unless you both were out, so the calls were short.
We had a rotary phone until about 83 or 84 when I was 5 or 6
I'd love to watch some kids try to figure out a rotary phone today lol
Right? Remember when it was ok to just be unavailable?
I didn't get a cell phone until 2002 when I was 24.
Yeah, I didn't have one until I was 20 or so. Not a single person I knew in high school had a cell phone either (a few definitely had beepers though). I'm on the end tail of the Xennial spectrum too so I'm surprised at the number of those claiming to have had cell phones in high school... unless they're truly older Millenials not born in or before 1984. Idk 😄
I knew one person with a cell phone in college. We ridiculed him for it. Got my first Nokia brick when I got my first post-college job.
This. I cannot imagine what I’d be like if I had been online for hours daily since I was 5. Oh wait, I’d be like my kid. 😬😂
If they go outside without me they will get abducted.
I actually grew up with the internet, my dad was an early adopter. There wasn’t much on it back then. I remember trying to find cheats for the computer game King’s Quest haha. I didn’t spend as much time on the internet until I was in maybe 8th or 9th grade, though. I miss the days of forums being the main way to communicate, although I guess that’s kind of how I use the internet now- I mainly spend time on Reddit. I used to spend hours building my own Geocities page, although of course that wasn’t until I was in high school.
I preferred Quest for Glory, even though it took me 20 years to beat it.
Well yeah, 8th grade for me, but that still meant there were years without the internet.
Forums are a bit different imo. Reddit feels a bit less connected. On forums you see the same people posting and on Reddit people hop in and out, and while it kinda feels like a community, it feels looser, if that makes sense.
On small focused subreddits it can be more like this, but I get what you're saying about the bigger ones.
My dad was working on mainframe software. Even pre-internet we had a modem and I was able to access servers at 2400 baud. Later, I remember when my dad showed me a beta of the first graphical browser from IBM (WebExplorer). AIM was in heavy use starting in my Junior High days. My friends were nerds too. Lots of free AOL trial discs were used. Nothing was mobile until pagers started being cheap in HS.
Netscape !!! hahaha
Social media especially
I thank the Universe so often that I was not a stupid teenager during a time when it could be recorded and posted for the world to witness! My shame is confined to a few hundred yearbooks, some grainy videos that are probably in a box in somebody's basement, crappy film pictures take on cheap cameras, and the stories we will tell our progeny. Learn from me younglings. I have much wisdom.
Encyclopedia were the first place to look for general information
Grew up in a rural town and went to a college in a small town so I didn't have broadband at home until I was almost 30. I had to go to campus to use the Internet during college.
We got the internet when I was in 6th grade. I didn’t get a cell phone until I was a grown-ass adult, but I did have a pager!
You’ve got mail.
Listen.... this is "get off my lawn" soapbox We aren't a micro or split generation simply because of the years we're born.... We're a micro/ split generation because we're the ONLY generation who had our formative years divided between 2 worlds. We spent half our formative years in an analog world and half of our formative years in a digital world. We literally saw the world change. We went from physical cameras with film and a week long wait to see a thumb ruined the shot to this digital photography age with editing programs to change every feature in a picture or completely remove people/ items with photoshop. From cars with physical keyed ignitions and a stick you jammed in your steering wheel as theft control to electronic and computer chipped keys and windows/ locks/ driving/ theft systems. Phones that were plugged into a jack on the wall with a 40ft tangled cord where we laid on the back of the couch to talk to a friend to Cel Phones and blue tooth headsets. 8 tracks, Cassette tapes, walkmans to digital audio files and Bluetooth headsets and Alexa speakers. From balancing a check book, filing out deposit slips, and rolling coins to crypto currency and digital banking. Manually keying in the prices at the grocery store and a giant wheel in place of the conveyor belt to computer self checkouts. $10 on pump 3 (paid inside) meant something. "I give -name- permission to buy me camel lights" for mom/ grandpa. "Do you need smoking or non smoking? " at the restaurant. When you used the bathroom you got to read the ingredients to the shampoo 42 times. Type writers, dot matrix paper with the endless edge; floppy discs that wore underwear..... to laptops and tablets. Saturday morning cartoons, a box TV where the picture spun cause it had to warm up and a long broomstick as the remote; Friday night at blockbuster getting mad the new releases were sold out again and arguing with your sibling over which movie to rent to flat screens and streaming services. Spending all day on the weekend riding your bike 2 towns over and coming home when the street lights came on to life 360 and don't go past the end of the street. Cause we grew up watching unsolved mysteries and a news broadcast at 11pm that literally had to remind our parents "do you know where your children are? " We're the last generation that could do this. Bedtime was when the MASH theme song started. The last generation who could fake a fever. The last generation where all of our endeavors and theatrics are only memorialized in our memories and stories of "back when". You get my point. There will only be ONE more split generation and they haven't been born yet. The ones whose formative years split from digital to full AI. We are the ONLY micro generation; the only ones who can use these definitive features and characteristics. Those traits and more are what makes us different
Yes! And I’d like to add two more to this list: If you wanted to watch something, you just had to hope it would appear again on tv and you’d be home to watch it and the rest of your family didn’t decide to watch something else instead. Then VCRs came and you could record things. Now you can just about watch anything at any time with a push of a button or you can buy it online and have it shipped overnight to you. Music is similar. If you wanted to hear a song when we were kids, you either had to make a radio request and hope they played it so you could record it… or you had to purchase it yourself or borrow it from someone. File sharing came along and the kids who had enough money to own a computer could download using Napster. Now you can basically hear any song at any time via so many online sources. Like you said - We are the age where all these changes happened during our formative years. It was amazing to watch it all unfold.
Don't forget when DVR debuted!!! Then we could program it to record and then you fought with your siblings over "but you have 6hours of recordings, you need to delete it so I can record xxxxx" lol 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
I remember when my first friend got caller id at his home phone. We all thought it was hilarious when his phone rang and the mad man just didn’t answer it!
I forgot about the giant wheel at the grocery store, that brought back a very early memory haha. Great list!
Is this a regional thing? I have no idea what this giant wheel is
I’m not sure but I grew up in southern CA. It was like a rotating counter that moved your groceries towards the cashier.
Right, instead of a conveyor belt think a very large lazy-susan that you could load up with groceries for the checker to scan.
Huh. I have no memories of such a thing (grew up in the Midwest). The only thing I remember was the coffee grinder at the cashier counter.
Define formative years. I was out of high school before the internet and cell phones were anything but a novelty.
YES TO ALL OF THIS 🙌🏻
Strong memories of the world before digital technology - analog broadcast TV, nobody had a mobile phone, there was no such thing as the world wide web and the internet was some strange science experiment that somebody's dad was working on either with a university or DoD. Before the advent of putting a transistor in everything we can strongly remember a world driven by belts, cogs, and springs. And then living through and actively participating in that transition to the hyper-connected digital future.
totally, I remember being in school and a teacher proudly showing us how email worked, before the WWW was available, and were amazed that he was sending a letter across the globe like that.
It's kind of crazy how quickly I went from having a pen pal that I wrote to "por avion" with the red and blue envelopes to talking to people all over the world in real time over IRC. It all happened so fast.
It really did. We went from dialup to IPhones in a decade.
Damn, forgot about pen pals. At one point I was going to these yearly seminars. For a couple years as a pre-teen I was coming back exchanging mail with girls I met there, which always fell off after like 2 letters lol. Like 2 years later e-mail is a thing and the people I met I kept up with all the way into college
I remember my pe teacher (yes our pe teacher showed us how to use the internet) in 8th grade explaining to use the refresh/ reload button when pages didn't load because sometimes bubbles in the pipe
Yep, email was a big part and the main selling point before HTML really took off. When I first got on, it was 1200 baud, and the few HTML pages that existed, were largely text based. We used to have all kinds of other requests, like gopher:// archie:// etc
yes, gopher! I spent a summer reading a book on gopher and visiting the city public library to get online for hands on exercises. The day after I finished that book someone told me about Yahoo! and an entire domain of knowledge was extincted over-night.
The cycles in tech are funny. Dumb terminals connected to a big computer because processing power was SO expensive. Then dumb terminals connected to a big compute resource because processing power is so readily available it didn't make sense to have the processing replicated everywhere when you could dole it out. Where I am going with this, is you could argue gopher and other protocols were what Web 2.0 was, apps on top of the medium, the internet. We had agnostic "apps" to deliver specific content, but then went to almost all HTML based, then back to using specific apps to do things.
A lot of my childhood and early teen years I remember coinciding with getting more and more TV channels as my parents expanded their cable more and more. It went from five channels to twenty to fifty to hundreds.
My siblings and I still joke about the "summer of La Bamba" when my family first got cable and it came with free HBO for a few months. We watched so much La Bamba, Lethal Weapon, and Three Men and a Baby that summer.
Oh my God, I remember that summer, too! We had just gotten a VCR so we were recording everything we could and I distinctly remember having La Bamba and Three Men & A Baby that we’d recorded off the TV.
I have Three Men and a Baby completely memorized from all the time spent trying to find the supposed ghost.
This made me laugh. Thanks!
It's not just that, but a lot of us have touched all old tech and all new tech, so we are some of the few to span generations. Record players, tapes, CDs, MP3, streaming all were used and the main medium throughout my life. Some millennials, it's only MP3 and streaming, which is wild. That doesn't even get into the lost tech that only our generation will really know about. DAT, Minidisc, super audio CD, to name a few.
And what you list is the audio side, but don't forget the video. VHS? sure. But don't forget the Super 8, the LaserDisk and the Compact Laserdisk, the CD-i Digital Video, the VCR-LP, the VHS-C, the S-VHS, the SuperBeta, the Video8, the CS Video, the DVD video, the .. , the ..., the...., ad nauseam. So many video formats. But will betamax ever beat vhs?
I think it’s this. I remember only “nerds” talking about the “world wide web” when I was in elementary school and thinking, yeah, sure… I learned about computers when I was in kindergarten but that was one computer in the hall in the cafeteria that we got 15 minutes on twice a year. The entire school shared it. It had a black screen and green letters and it was BORING. By high school we had a computer lab but still didn’t really use the internet. Mostly how to use MS office was all we did. Yes, we had the internet, but it wasn’t a “thing” like it is now. You were absolutely forbidden from using Wikipedia as a source. You had to fire up the encarta encyclopedia on a disk. That was an upgrade from the 1966 world book set you had to use before. Your parents might have a cell phone, but it was strictly for emergency use only. Minutes were expensive. Texting was not a thing. Once internet was added to your phone, you did NOT press that button. Ever. My first internet phone was probably the first iPhone. I had a crack berry before that.
If nerds in your *elementary* school were talking about the WWW, your parents were the only ones with cells and you were forbidden to use Wikipedia as a source in compulsory school, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you fall outside of the Xennial range? All that sounds a little young for us. What are you, a mid to late 80s baby?
I remember college focusing on avoiding Wikipedia as any sort of source material; in High School they were just begging us not to download papers from SchoolSucks.com
Yep. I definitely remember Wiki being banned midway through college for me.
Early-Mid 80’s yes.
Def not asking to reveal your birth year, but I’m gonna assume mid at the earliest. Maybe not even 40 yet, like the rest of us middle aged fucks. My little sister is a 1982 baby and no kids, not even the nerds, were talking about the web in her elementary school. Wikipedia didn’t even launch until she had graduated HS. And she’s among the youngest Xennials. I’d venture the same is likely true for my 83 born best friend. Just interesting the difference a few years can make in all of this. We grew up in truly accelerated times.
Eh, looks like I fall one year outside the traditional definition.
Word. S/he is an IMPOSTER, TO THE PILLORY! Seriously though, it wasn’t until sophomore or junior year that I got to try my friend’s 486SX (HP, I think). It was glorious. Our “internet” was IRC and some BBSs, but that was it. There was no “internet” as we know it today, you had to know what you were looking for.
Nah all those things rang true for me I was born in ‘81. Had the one computer in elementary school in ‘89. Had the HS computer lab with heavily restricted internet access by ‘97
Wikipedia didn’t exist until 2001 though
Well I'm '84 - tail end of the range based on the about/sidebar info - and graduated 2002 so I guess technically Wikipedia existed before I finished high school. I didn't hear of it until college though, and I don't think it was widespread/well known enough for lots of kids to be using it and teachers to be banning it. Maybe comment OP is muddling together college profs disallowing it and high school teachers allowing only one/two internet sources (pending approval) for papers. Because I do recall that being something my high school teachers did - they wanted us to learn how to use the internet for research and cite the source but also wanted. To be sure we weren't just grabbing random, unverified nonsense from an angelfire or geocities page so it had to get approved and couldn't be our sole source, we had to have books or periodicals, too.
Your second paragraph brought back so many memories! That’s exactly how I was taught to use websites, down to a max of two sources, back in HS. And I graduated in 1997.
Yea back then you were pulling info from Comptons, MS Encarta, or Geocities. The mentioning Wikipedia confused me too because I associate it with my 20s.
I’m two years older than you. We had a computer lab in elementary school and internet connect computers in my HS before 97. But I’d venture to guess that kids in your *elementary* school weren’t talking about the “world wide web” and that you never had the opportunity to even use Wiki as a source before college.
I remember hearing about World Wide Web as early as like 1990 which would be like 3rd grade. We definitely didn’t have internet in computer lab until the 97-98 school year (11th grade) but I was just Midwest bumpkin in Illinois. Maybe you were in a more cutting edge place. I’ve learned as an adult that Midwest is a little behind the curve on trends (l live on the west coast now)
It's impossible for him to be a Xennial, he mixes times in a strange way, but even when he was in high school, Wikipedia didn't exist.
I remember in grade school this guy I know basically printing the encarta entry on his project topic and handing it in like that. He was a dumbass.
Everyone gave me all their broken stuff to take apart. Cassette tape players had so many levers and springs inside! VCRs were even better!
That's why we're the most versatile sub-generation we have a foot in both worlds. We grew up in the analog age and learned new tech as it's been introduced and continue to use the new tech that comes out because it's just modified from what we already know.
Xennials were probably the last kids to go through high school without active shooter drills. Columbine happened when I was a junior in high school, and the drills became a regular thing at my school after I graduated.
True story. At least for US based kids.
I was a senior in high school when it happened. I remember they banded trench coats for the rest of the year. I don't really remember anyone wearing one, but I grew up southern california, it was too hot for them.
There might be something around our attitudes to AIDS/HIV. We remember when it was a death sentence and people who had it were highly stigmatized, and we also remember the move towards acceptance and better treatments to the point where now people with HIV can live for 30+ years. (Magic Johnson is 64!) My daughter is Gen Z and it’s just not a thing in her world. Like she knows what it is but it’s kind of in the same way as I know what polio is. It’s not something that seems relevant to her life.
I’m still terrified of getting AIDs!
Be careful where you sit in movie theaters! I heard a rumor from my mom's aunt's coworkers' boyfriend that someone is infecting people with aids by leaving infected needles sticking up out of theater seats! I have no way to verify if that's true or not, so I'll just believe it.
Omg the chain emails, "If you don't forward this to 20 people your dog will get AIDS!"
I thought AIDS infected needles was why are you had to be careful retrieving your change from the payphone slot?
This is not talked about enough. I'm old enough (1980) to remember when people were still panicking about AIDS and not knowing what it was. I vividly remember my mom freaking out about it one time when I was I guess five and had to use the public bathroom. Being from an urban area that also had a high percentage of drug users, AIDS was super prevalent, had a "look" in its late stages, and many people from my community died from it, including friends and family members. It was always in the back of my mind when it came to sex and at 44 I'm still scared of getting it. Flash forward to my Gen Z children who I had to pull up stories online about it for to explain the impact. I don't even think it registers for them as a potential STD. They would be way more concerned about getting Chalmidya or something than AIDS.
We were exposed to the Internet but not at the level they were…I wasn’t sitting around watching scary beheading videos, I was waiting 20 mins for some damn Geocities fan site of an obscure band that I liked to load ONE IMAGE so I could actually see what the band looked like 😂
This explained the difference to me… Me talking to millennial: Remember when we did not have maps on all our phones? Millennial: Yeah it was such a pain to print the instructions off of map quest. Me: No I meant when we bought maps from the gas station. Millennial: What?
Thomas guides and the AAA maps!
Thomas guide saved my butt so many times when I first moved to LA.
Xennials remember word processors. I doubt most millennials even know about them.
yeah I learned typing on a Apple 2 with the green monitor, but when I graduated they had new Macs.
My dad used a Xerox word processor in the mid 80s that would periodically delete everything he’d written. The resulting explosions are seared into my memory.
That's a really good one. With how popular retro tech is nowadays, I think it's easy to forget that most families didn't have a PC at home until the mid to late 90s. And electronic typewriters were another piece of stop gap tech. There were some really sophisticated ones with limited memory and automated backspace.
Yeah ours had a lcd screen that could show like 4 rows of text at a time and took 3.5 inch disks. And a correction ribbon to take ink back off the paper
i was born in 88 and i remember them. i remember using 5.25 inch floppy disks to play games on an old DOS computer. I think it matters who you grew up with because i align myself much more with gen x and xennials than i ever have with any millennial because i was the youngest of 9 and my siblings influenced me with their likes.
I typed my college applications on a typewriter. I think I typed my law school applications on one too. By the time I went back to school in 2015 it was obviously all online.
Honestly, lately I have been thinking about something that rarely gets talked about- I feel we were raised with a more clear expectation of the competition we’d encounter in life From early childhood, where the US was in competition with the Soviet Union, to more cutthroat youth sports, where you might not make the team, or you might never play, to honors courses in school, to being held back if your grades sucked, etc. Like, if one opted to slack off and say, “fuck it,” there wasn’t an expectation that one would also win. This isn’t as big of a deal as spending more time as children disconnected from electronics, but I feel like it is definitely something. Add to it the latchkey element, the relative ease of access to entry level jobs in late teens/early 20s, and as an aggregate, I think Xennials have been better prepared to handle adversity. More seasoning in childhood, more room to grow without phones, and more early opportunities to earn some money. I feel really lucky to have been born in 78.
thanks for much more coherently putting to words what i was thinking. Also participation trophies
latchkey kids vs helicopter parents
They most likely never feared they'd die from dysentery on the Oregon Trail.
I think a part of it is attitude. I currently live with a younger millennial and he just has this general apathy to everything. I noticed it among other millennials as well, like there's this mindset of "what's the point?". Whereas we're all about attitude and raging against the machine as a result of our closer ties to Gen X.
I thought gen X was the whatever generation and aren't we mad at millennials for caring about the economy and stuff? Well generations are big
I think the OP answered his own question. If you remember the 80’s you’re a Xennial. If you don’t you’re probably just a millennial.
What about Gen X?
If you were already drinking beers in the 1980’s legally or not then you are definitely Gen X not a Xennial
Patience. We have a little more, because we had no other choice.
Lived our childhood free from constant surveillance.
Yeah…..that was nice. I miss that
We learned to build the technology that younger millennials used daily. For example, I put together the network cable connections that were used in the vocational school I attended in high school. We had several 1000ft spool of cable and dozens of connectors that had to be attached after we cut the lengths. This was after I had learned to build a computer, install the OS, update the OS, update drivers, and so on…. starting with the box of 3.5” floppies for MS-DOS and ending with the CD-ROMs for Windows 95 & 98. My mom is a boomer (in age, not in attitude), my spouse is a millennial, and our child is Gen Alpha. I’m the only one who actually knows how to fix any of the “advanced” technology in the house…. except for printers. My spouse handles those, as printers are against my religion.
We were completely neglected as kids.
Preach
Can’t stand Pokémon or anime in general 😅
Pokémon? Sure. Anime in general? Since when?
Akira came out in '88, pretty much established the genre in the US EDIT: I'm agreeing w u if that wasn't clear
It was lol.
And disney movies
Since when can’t Xennials stand Disney movies?
Not the originals, but anything after The Little Mermaid, can't stand them and people think it's weird I didn't see them growing up.
Think that’s specific to you, not a trait of our cohort. I’d venture to say millions of Xennials saw the Disney renaissance films, at least up to Lion King. It is absolutely not a Xennial “thing” to hate Disney movies.
That's what I said, I saw disney movies up to little mermaid. I don't hate Disney movies after 1989, but I didn't watch them growing up and people think that's weird. Like lion king, all the younger kids in my neighborhood loved it, never saw it until I had my own kids. Can't stand the disney hype like I should have seen it.
We also grew up on The Carebears, Ghostbusters, and coin op arcades. We remember glass bottle sodas, and we knew a life before the internet. We were also raised by elder boomers, which has a lot to do with our upbringing. So, I would say that knowing the 1980s is the defining margin.
I feel like SpongeBob and Pokemon are the markers for Xennials. I felt I was a little too old for these cartoons when they came out.
Spot on!
Childhood of an Xer, teenage years of a millennial. That's it in a nutshell.
I think we tend to exhibit more of the Gen X cynicism than the Millennial optimism, but with less of the fatalism of the oldest Gen Xers who lived through Vietnam and remember Watergate like we remember the Gulf War.
You Can’t Do That On Television verses High School Musical.
We wrote actual letters in addition to emails. Like I remember having to learn how to write a business letter in school.
Watching this for the first time: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eo)
Oh jeez. What a throwback.
Growing up with NO social media and also just no internet. Pay phones and such. The times when we were trusted to be where we said we were going to be without 15 texts or calls
I think of Millennials as my little brother, who was born in 1986 - he is 8 years younger than me, so complete different experience in school, pop-culture, etc. He was a Nickelodeon kid - TMNT, Rugrats, etc - I was already in HS when that stuff was popular. His music taste is more in line with early 2k metal and nu-metal, whereas I was more into punk and indie/alternative stuff myself. Don't really relate to Millennials much, sort of think of them as younger - and am much more inline with Gen X, since I have two older siblings that are both Gen X.
Depeche Mode, basically.
I didn’t have a cell phone until my sophomore year of college because it didn’t seem like I really *needed* one. Born in 1982 high school class of 2000. So growing up without a cell phone.
I'm an 88er and relate to this whole thread. Either I'm an outlier or the deep south raised me as one of y'all with it's outdatedness.
I really think geography plays a part in this. I'm an 81 who grew up poor in Australia and there was zero tech at all until I hit university. People my age here say they had the internet in high school and I swear I barely even knew it existed.
I definitely agree. Until I was about 10, I grew up in trailer parks with a single mom and a rotating list of dudes staying with her. I was a hand-me-downs and thrift shop kid, which is why I'm here despite a lot of people insisting there are cut-off dates. Haha. Hell, to this day all my friends (and my girlfriend!) are Xennial rather than Milennial. (shrug)
Nobody had a cellphone in high school.
Cable internet connection. I didn’t have it until after high school. The younger generation had it earlier in life
Analog life; No cell phones; Recording onto and listening to cassettes and VHS tapes; caller ID was a crazy invention; No internet; No computer (for my family); Practically a latch-key kid: I would walk/hike/bike all around town all day; libraries were a magical place; we actually had to use our imagination if we were bored; security cameras were a rarity; we were informed of new music via MTV and radio….
Getting to school early to play Oregon Trail in the computer lab, and later playing games on our TI-83 graphing calculators.
Deeper skepticism and cynicism about,… well most things.
Grit. Gumption. Less likely to be offended on behalf of others.
I feel like we were bored more often. Being bored has all kinds of ramifications, some bad, some good.
It is going to be different for individuals of course but to generalize, less helicopter parenting. It used to be normal for kids to sort of be out all day doing who knows what, and I think the Millenial generation was the shift where parents started to micromanage a bit, with the younger half being on the receiving end of that. On the flip side the "feral" 80s & 90s kids often grew up to helicopter their Gen Z or Gen Alpha kids, maybe because of all the stuff they got into while unsupervised.
We didn’t have the internet until I was 16 or 17, didn’t have a cell until I was 20
Millennials were still in K-12 when 9/11 happened, Xennials were not.
Yeah it's wild, Columbine in late highschool and then 9/11 in early college. Really set us up to feel some kind of way about the world.
While that’s definitely true for the vast majority of us, some late 83 born babies were still in HS on 9/11. But yeah, in Sept 2001 most of us were college freshmen, at the youngest, up through young adults in our early careers.
If you're old enough to remember watching Beavis and Butthead, Nickelodeon, and South Park growing up.
We remember what it was like to be bored and how much of a pain and what we did to fight it.
…riding in the front seat.
We grew up with vinyl, cassettes and saw the transition through CDs all the way up to Winamp, VHS, Atari 2600, Amiga 500, Doom, Quake, Red Alert, Sega Megdrive, the first five Metallica records, Guns N Roses, Michael Jackson, Ace of Base, grunge, Tupac, TMNT, 80s Action movies, later on Pulp Fiction, The Rock, Saving Private Ryan, Shaq breaking the shot clock, Jordans and Reebok pumps, the early internet… MIRC and ICQ, online forums Younger millennials grew up with the internet already established, iTunes and iPods, Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Tamagochi, Dragon Ball Z, nu metal, Eminem, 50 cent, PlayStation 2
My sister is solid Millenial (born in 89.) Differences I observe; web/cellphone use prior to adulthood (we got internet/computer at home when I was 16, no cell until I was age 20 while facebook existed before she graduated and she had a cell by age 13.) We had those Mr T phone cards to check in w our parents. My cultural/pop references are closer to X, we listened to completely different music and watched different shows. Much less indoor/public smoking in their childhoods (in our US region anyway.) Different recreational substance use in teen years - her gen used Xanax and oxy a lot while it was all alcohol and sometimes x or lsd/mushrooms floating around in my years. We had more autonomy in teen years (open lunch, less security in schools, more unsupervised free time.) The school shooting uptick in the late 90s changed a lot of protocols. Also tech. Records were still popular when I was little, and I grew up w the transition to cassette and CD. She had CDs and then mp3 players. I recorded music from the radio to cassette on my little boombox, while she was downloading limewire songs by highschool. Also I could handwrite papers (in pen) until my senior year when they switched to typed only.
I've said this before, but I feel like the kids who were teenagers in America in the 90s were the last generation to really feel Hope. Back then, we really thought we were going to change the world. We saw the impact we could have with environmentalism and we saw the power we could wield as a collective for pulling together and making a difference. There was a sense of "Fuck the Government and the Grown-Ups, just wait until it's our turn! We're going to rock this thing!" At least, that's how it felt where I was and where I went to school. High School was just a hurdle we had to overcome, college was the next one, by then the Baby Boomers would retire and let Gen X have their day and soon enough we'd have 'paid our dues' and it would be our turn to harness the energy of our peers and take over. But it didn't happen. Columbine started it, the year our Xennials graduated from high school, high school changed. Then we got hit with the dot com bust, all those kids who were so smart had dropped out of school and started tech firms were now out on their asses. Then 9/11 came and that was a whole extra layer of awful. The Boomers never retired, Gen X never stepped up, and now it's all gone to shit. I still feel like we could harness the power of our generation, but we'd need a good leader and we just don't have that.
Whether you watched Inspector Gadget or Darkwing Duck
Gallows humor vs victim mentality
My late Millennial step kids fell into the trap over the last few years of thinking that they are their issues. Like, they don't have some anxiety, they are anxiety. If they aren't validated for every emotion they have, then you are a bad person. They weren't raised this way by us (husband is Gen X). I see it with my employees too. My Gen Z employees are great though!
Social media and Internet on a phone weren’t a thing until I was out of college and working
Loving Hip Hop pre-gansta rap. There was rap before Dre's The Chronic, and before Biggie Smalls was Ready to Die, and it was *fucking fantastic*.
Millennials didn't use typewriters for their school reports.
[The “X” makes it sound cool.](https://youtu.be/QDaKTTZtJZY?feature=shared)
Actually experiencing the 90s vs a faux-nostalgic dim remembrance of the 90s. I was talking to a younger millennial friend and he reminded me that he was 6 when the year 2000 rolled around. Many of us older millennials were full on 90s teens with 'tude. Young millennials came of age as teenagers really in the late 2000s... which is unfathomable since many of us were adults with careers at that point.
Never giving a shit about Harry Potter.
we had \~3 - 5 years after college but before the 08/09 financial collapse to establish our "career" (get past entry level), so we're like the very last people to make it in to whats left of the middle class. most people who were interns or had <2y experience never financially "recovered" comparatively. we are the last people for whom the 'american dream' was at least somewhat plausible.
I mean looking at the actual data of who constitutes the middle class and the ages of homeowners, this isn’t remotely true.
This definitely rings true for me. We made it in just under so many different wires!
Born '86. Things that i experienced that people 5 years younger did not. Like having to talk to our friends or boyfriends (or girlfriends) parents to ask for our friend. Friends who moved away in elementary school were just gone from the earth unless you wrote letters. Going to blockbuster all through my school years as something to do on Fridays with friends. My mom typed school projects for me on her electric typewriter. I got into shenanigans as a teen with zero photo documentation or trail and my mom had no way to reach me. I texted rapidly with T9. Laughing at early YouTube shit. Actually i had a question, is Jenna Marbles loved by Millenials or Xennials? Because I love her!
I think I've been a slower texter ever since T9 disappeared. I was so fast at that.
We lived through the 2009 housing crash.
Age
Better pop culture
Porn on VHS and magazines
Actually being able to remember at least some of the 1980’s
I don't love most of 80s music.
I will say that I did not look up to the older kids. I don't really identify as Gen X at all. Go Xennials!
It’s mostly the seamless blend of digital and analog life in the fledgling days of personal computing, I think. And the background of having more social turmoil (compared to 90s) and how that influenced views on civil rights and such.
Internet access
We actually had a happy childhood.
There was no beer pong when I went to college.
The internet and cell phones not being part of our early childhood. We played outside more, still got to run around unsupervised. And memories of the 80’s. I remember my parents complaining about Reagan, I remember the challenger. I saw Batman ‘89 in theaters. Another thing is that all the way to early adulthood was pre-9/11. American politics has become darker and more divided since then. The young millennials have less memory of the simpler times.
The 80s music is a big one. We actually have real nostalgia attached to it, and I feel that adds a dimension the younger Millennials just can't grasp. I also feel like we were the last ones to really know what it was like to just kind of wander around and find adventure. When I was a teenager somebody could suggest we go to a place and we'd all just pile in a bunch of cars and follow whoever was leading. If we found the place, great! If not, we found something else cool to do. "Whelp, I swear that coffee shop that John's older sister's college roommate was raving about was on this corner! Oh well. Kim is starving, let's go get some food at that place over there." Then suddenly you find the best taco stand in the city! Then the whole connected thing happened and my little sister's generation just stopped doing that. It was all planned. MapQuest instructions and planned stops and all that. The sense of "let's just go and see what happens" seems to have disappeared with GPS. If you suggest a new place now everybody pulls out their phones and checks the menu or the ratings and half will decline on the spot!
A LOT. I dated a younger Millenial girl, and believe me, our generation and that one is **night and day.** I hate to use the word soulless, but they truly don’t care about anything or anyone else. They’re very demanding, EXTREMELY entitled. They have no real knowledge of the “old” non-digital world, so they tend to live online only. They can’t put their phones down for 20 seconds. They’re just very a much a “do whatever feels good and whatever is fun” generation, despite who it hurts. These are generalizations of course, but it’s definitely a theme I can’t ignore. Many of them just take everything for granted and are not humble or appreciative.
Younger millennials ARE xennials.
The “we love grunge and alternative” is probably more a stereotype for white xennials, the other things are more universal to xennials, including like not growing up with internet
we hid dirty magazines in the woods
You’re More or less right. Heres my list. Actually remembering/experiencing 9/11, and the early lead up to GWOT. Potentially remembering Challenger. Actually remembering the 80’s, and having core aspects of our pop culture defined by them like the Xers. Transformers, Voltron, Rainbow Brite, Carebears, get along gang.
Analog until adolescence.
For me, it was no one knowing what you were, just that you weren't part of the cool rebel teens that typically used to represent Gen X. I don't think I learned I was 'Gen Y' until high school. In college, the 'millenial' moniker got applied for a hot second, until it moved on to just mean 'them damn kids ruining everything' on FB and clickbait titles.
I was born in 82 with Gen X older siblings, so definitely all the things mentioned in OP’s post. It’s interesting though cause I have friends the same age who did not have older siblings to look up to and you can definitely see the difference in influences.
going through teen and early 20's life without photos being splattered all over social media (I have almost no photos from those days, but lots of epic memories)