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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I don't even know what the fuck generation I am, when I was a kid they called me Gen X but then I got retconned to Gen Y and now who knows. When I started highschool mobile phones and the internet weren't a thing and when I started university they were ubiquitous, that should date me closely enough.

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You're a Xennial, just like me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

They should just move the Gen X - Millennial cutoff back from 1980 to 1975 or so. Gen X is already so small, it won't matter if we make it a bit smaller still. Meanwhile, coining your own special term to feel extra special about yourselves is the most Millennial thing I can imagine!

X/Y "Cusper" (I think most cut that off at '82?), or just an early or "elder" Millennial if you're slightly past that. Some like to add an "Oregon Trail generation" that covers the tail end of X and the beginning of Y, basically for the kids whose first computers (their own, a relative's, at school, whatever) were not connected to the Internet. I think that cut-off's around '85 or '86, usually.

[EDIT] I think there's a tendency to have a bunch of names for that set specifically because the latter ~half of Millennials had a very different experience than the early ~half—the early half did have a childhood more similar to Gen X, and they grew up immersed in Gen X media on top of it—so lumping them together doesn't seem right to a lot of people.

> "Oregon Trail generation"

I like that. My gaming started with Repton, Qwak, Vertigo and Elite on a BBC Micro but I spent a lot of time playing Dig Dug and Rick Dangerous on green screens. I graduated highschool just as we got dialup and started realising that combined 2D/3D graphics cards might actually be alright after all. (We got one from a little company called nVidia, you probably haven't heard of them though. :P )

If you learned to ride a bike with a helmet on, you are Gen Y. If you learned helmet free, you're Gen X.

I feel like this is super regional but they brought in helmet laws where I live when I was like 10.

I'm GenX (b. early 70's), my parents were/are Boomers (b. 1949/50), but somehow Millennials' parents are Boomers too. Families changing caused a lot of this- my parents stayed married, had kids early, Mom stayed home, parents paid for undergrad, retired early but simply. The Millennial upbringing seems to be kids late, Mom worked, kids left with student loans while parents have second homes and travel and new partners. I suppose if my parents had been less focused on family and participated in the party/disco side of the 70's, I'd have been a millennial too.

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