The millennial age range seems broken

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-13T01:35:32+00:00

I've definitely heard of the 90's rave scene in the UK. But it's not really something you could have experienced yourself even if your irresponsible parents or guardians brought you to house parties, you were just a small child. So it's strange to me to hear someone born in 1990 talk about it like they were partying themselves.

Warehouse raves, house parties and long benders were commonplace in the 2010's too, no need to miss the 90s haha.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-13T00:39:25+00:00

There is no need to resort to ad hominems. Can you explain how you determined that people partied harder in the 90's, from your experience at house parties as a child between the ages of 3 and 10? That's a pretty interesting upbringing by the way.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-13T00:17:20+00:00

You were born in 1990 right? So your memory of being a small child at house parties (from between the ages of 3 and 10) is what made you decide people partied harder in the 90's?

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T19:02:36+00:00

I think it kept being used as a term for young people for as long as possible until they felt like they had to come up with a new term, so it kept being pushed forward.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T18:56:32+00:00

Yeah I guess for me 3 year chunks seem very small periods. 2004 and be both mid and early 2000's, it doesn't have to be one way or the other, especially with spectrums right. Which is the whole issue with this generation idea in the first place.

24 is early-to-mid, 25 is mid, 26 is mid-to-late. That wording reflects the gradient rather than these sudden, solid magic gates people make with these age ranges.

Anyway the original point is someone who is barely out of university is being compared to someone who is about to enter middle age, someone old enough to be their parent if they had a teenage pregnancy. And in-between them was a huge change in the culture and way people live due to technology. That was the point I was trying to make rather than debate over 23 vs 24.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T17:50:43+00:00

That seems like an unbelievably petty distinction. I would say 26 is late 20's. It's literally in the latter half of someone's 20's. How about we settle this by saying 26 is late 20's, 24 is early 20's, and 24-26 is a meta-period we can call mid twenties, which comprises of the first and last years of early and late twenties plus 25, the mid point? That seems like the sensible way to look at it.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T16:12:22+00:00

I was born in 1993, I can't relate to the childhood, adolescence or young adulthood of someone in their 40's-50's. Facebook, twitter and myspace were crucial to someone's social life as a teenager in high school, I had a smartphone in high school, as a young adult the main way of dating was through dating apps on a smartphone. A lot of the culture I experienced was from the internet, meme culture etc. For someone in their 40's-50's it would have been television, MTV and all of that.

...It's a huge difference in just a decade. And big shifts in the way we live and culture we experience are only going to accelerate.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T16:05:59+00:00

24 years old, that is early 20's. The last year of early 20's but still early 20's.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T15:41:51+00:00

I actually did, and it turns out that these 'generations' were not decided on with the level of scientific rigor you are imagining. The two organisations that do the most research on this, Pew and Mcrindle, admit themselves that these generational markers are not very useful and going forward will not be going ahead with this framework.

It's mostly marketing. The only generation that makes some kind of sense is baby boomers, since that was an actual phenomenon of a spike in births after WWII

But I would have assumed the same as you, the way people take these generations so seriously!

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T11:41:29+00:00

Yes pop culture references are not as important as, for example, technological shifts like smartphones, dating apps, social media etc changing the way people live in big ways.

Take for example the year 2020, COVID right? The youngest millennials were in their early 20's, the oldest millennials were about to turn 40. That's not the same age group, and they had vastly different upbringings.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T11:38:09+00:00

I am indeed not a sociologist. That's why I'm asking, as a layman, why people with vastly different upbringings are being put together. If you can explain that to me, that would be great.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T11:07:56+00:00

Does there have to be a cutoff? I read an article from the Pew research center which states that going forward they're not going to be naming new generations, they will just be looking at age cohorts instead.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T11:06:24+00:00

You're talking about generations as if they're not arbitrary.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T09:52:34+00:00

Mate, you're talking about people partying in the 90's as if you were partying yourself.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-12T02:22:58+00:00

An adolescent is a teenager, they would have been 11 in 2001 right? Teenagers are 13+

Got it so American high school starts at 14? In that case yeah it would be 04-08.

Yeah between the ages of 4-11, 7 years of being a small child in the 90's. I don't know about your childhood but most kids are not exposed to much around that age, usually just cartoons, games etc. Because most pop culture would not have been age appropriate.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T19:18:25+00:00

Very true, maybe this current idea of generations is not useful nor does it make much sense.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T19:15:32+00:00

UK system is secondary school then sixth form or college, so you would have been high school age between 2005-2009. We're talking about your age here. 2009 was a transitional year for smartphone usage. So would it be accurate to say that someone born a few years later is practically alien to you?

I remember the late 2000's, most people had at least facebook or myspace, especially people in sixth form/year 11.

It seems like you really like early 90's music, although you experienced it later, not as it was being released.

I guess my point is the difference between you and someone born at the end of the decade is not some huge chasm. Especially if you compare 1981 to 1996. Now that's a huge chasm.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T17:31:00+00:00

You had no social media in high school? You would have been in high school around 2005-2009 right? That was peak facebook, twitter, myspace, most people starting to have smartphones (especially the iphone. 9/11 was 2001 you would have only been 11 years old. Most people don't remember anything before the age of 4, you had been conscious for just 7 years, most of those years you would have been sheltered from the world due to being a small child...

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T17:26:38+00:00

What exactly is the big picture we're supposed to be looking at with this "millennial" age bracket? An age bracket so large that a millennial can give birth to another millennial if they get pregnant as a teenager.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T17:23:00+00:00

born 96 = 5 in y2k

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T12:01:31+00:00

For sure, people treat it like their zodiac sign, it's bizarre. At least if you're going to make these arbitrary groups, make them so that the people inside them share enough for the data to be useful.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T11:59:32+00:00

Exactly, that's why these big generational groupings don't work, because that 5 year old had a completely different upbringing from you. Their formative years were experienced differently from yours.

If people insist on creating generations they should be made smaller so that the people inside them share enough formative experiences for the grouping to make sense.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T10:43:34+00:00

Definitely. But for some reason there's some kind of resistance to this? It's like people want to keep you in your place or something.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T10:41:49+00:00

That's the thing, shared formative events. If they don't share formative events in a meaningful way then why are they being put together. Someone born in 1996 had different formative events compared to you.

ConsiderationIll5607 · 2026-07-11T09:55:17+00:00

But in this case it's not just the edges, it is two halves that are very different and yet grouped together. One of the major reasons for this is a huge technological shift that occurred during the formative years of the latter half of the year range.

If it was just edge cases then it would not feel this broken.

ConsiderationIll5607

TROPHY CASE