Is Gen X the Greatest Generation?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's like when somebody talks about 'west coasters' or 'blondes' or even the 'mom test'.
I think it's the right move.
That being said, I don't view it in a negative light at all. Whatsoever. I don't feel that the adults let us down. I don't consider myself a trauma victim. And I never felt alone. I, too, walked myself home from school and found my own snacks. And then I took off again. On my bike or on foot. I met up with friends or cousins and we lived a life I could only dream about now. We built forts, played in the mud, shot our bee bee guns. Rode bikes, used tools, fixed things. We crashed, we got hurt, we solved our own problems. We lived, we learned, we built confidence, capability, and self sufficiency. We had a freedom that makes me want to weep yearning for it now.
Our parents, mine at least, didn't neglect me. They trusted me. And they didn't trust me not to fuck up. They knew I'd do that. They trusted me to learn from it.
Millennial wasn't a generation. It referred to those who were set to graduate from high school in the year 2000. Generation Y was the name of the generation that followed Generation X.
This is why there is debate between 1981 and 1982. It is dependent on how one's school system was setup. In my jurisdiction, the 1981 cohort is who graduated from high school in 2000. In other jurisdictions, it was those born in 1982.
So, never fear, those who are afraid of being labelled millennials. The window is much smaller than the article lets on.
It's as much of a generation as people broadly accept it to be, and I'd think a majority of people who bother to have an opinion don't attribute the delineating factor to the specific criteria of graduating during that exact year. Ironically, my sense of Gen Xers is that they're entirely defined by closely associating with their high school culture and not being boomers, who incidentally created a majority of Gen X culture.
Boomers are the selfish entitled "me" generation who had it the easiest economically, hold all the wealth now, and have killed the economy, Gen Xers are the latchkey kids who we forgot about and yet created the biggest tech companies we all rely on (carrying in the boomers footsteps), Millenials are the snowflakes who grew up on the cusp of the burgeoning internet, were given trophies for losing and yet are more competent and educated than anyone before, and will be responsible for paying for the boomers as they die through taxes and sacrifices (aka "The we're fucked, but like actually" generation), and then there's the rest who carry some of the same millenial issues (because damn those boomers, and the "don't call us boomers" generation are still out ruining everything) but were born late enough that they don't remember 911 or the millennium and have never known a life without the internet or something
It has become a generation, but it wasn't. For those who are pedantically concerned with not being a millennial, they can take solace in knowing that they'd only be a millennial if they, as a student, were set to graduate in 2000.