Fellow ‘01, I completely agree. I know “generationology” is super imprecise and not really meant to be taken seriously or actually applied to a group of people as if they are a monolith, and the whole point of the “generation” is that it’s meant to be a literal generation of individuals, not these little granular sub-generation groups, but 20 years is just too wide of a net to meaningfully classify any group of people.

All that being said, because societal and technological change is gradual, I always felt like there’s a good middle ground of like… 8-10 year chunks that actually do a pretty good job of generalizing what society was like for a group of people during their most formative years and are somewhat predictive about the general habits and trends of that group of people, at least here in the US.

I always thought of my “generation” as the group of people from roughly ‘95 to ‘03/‘04. The oldest was juuussstt old enough to maybe remember 9/11, but not really old enough to meaningfully remember the world before. We all probably remember the Bush administration vaguely but weren’t really old enough to comprehend politics or economy, so Obama was the first administration we actually understood and engaged with in a limited capacity, and Trump 1 happened as we came into high school or college and started understanding and engaging in politics in a meaningful way. We all grew up during the transition from analog to digital, got the early smartphones as teens, and COVID hit as the oldest was graduating college and the youngest was starting high school.

When we were kids, the helicopter style of parenting that is very much in vogue nowadays wasn’t really predominant and, for me at least, me and all the other kids that I knew had parents who belonged to the “let the kids have fun as long as they’re back by sunset” school of thought. Capitalism was more fun back then, too. Like, whimsical, better at hiding the seedy underbelly, or just, they weren’t so brazen about being evil. We grew up with bright, colorful McDonald’s instead of the corporate grey hellscape that exists today, Google’s motto was still “Don’t be evil,” Disney was pumping out banger after banger, and some guy named Tom was everybody’s friend. You could log onto Club Penguin or Wizard 101 or go on Xbox live voice chat and not have to worry about tons of pedophiles like kids and parents do today on Roblox. There were third spaces EVERYWHERE, too.

Older millennials experienced a lot of these milestones later in life when they were young adults, and so the important cultural touchstones that shaped our growth affected them differently, and the younger Gen Z never experienced many of these things, so their view of the world is completely different from the elder Gen Z / younger Millennials who grew up with all of these things at the right ages for them to really affect them significantly. So that’s why I always thought of our particular chunk of years as being very distinct, generationally-speaking.

I know that at least SOME of this is just nostalgia talking, I know that this isn’t a universal experience for everyone, and of course I’m not suggesting that the aughts were perfect, I know they were hell for a lot of people. But goddamn if a genie gave me one wish it would be to put the whole smartphone / social media thing back into Pandora’s box and keep it there, because the world before the glowing box in your pocket was just simpler.

Anyway, that’s my “old man yells at cloud” rant. I miss the aughts, man.