Hacker News Reader

Comment by theseanz | Hacker News Reader

Hey! As a 46 year old I am offended by this - I am definitely not Gen X. We’re a weird X/Millenial hybrid I’ve seen referred to as Xennials.

Also F ZScaler - we use this officially sanctioned MTM attack at work and all it does is make my job harder.

View on HN

Impressive how many people posting here love the gen [XYZ] categories and feel offended when they are not put in the correctly labeled drawer. ...Shouldn't we move on from this and obsess about something more fun?

The label unless you grew up in the Anglo sphere is also especially meaningless, yet certain people insist in labelling the rest of us :) I got to enjoy Phreaking well into the era most others already had ADSL…

you were born in 1980 you are gen x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X by definition.

But also:

> Xennials, also called Xillenials, are a social cohort encompassing people born on the cusp of or during the later years of Generation X and the early years of the Millennials generation.

> Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983, though some extend this further in either direction. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

Depends a lot on your background. I was online in 1994 as a kid, but my peers weren’t until nearer 1999. Same age. We all got mobile phones when we went to university in sep 2000

Yeah, I grew up in N. GA in a rural area and my family still had a rotary until the mid or late 90s. lol. No internet either

> Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

Pretty bang on description actually. As a 46 yo, sometimes I can't believe I have actual memories of using a rotary phone, or when my family first got a microwave or even VHS recorder. Yet I do. Feels like eons ago.

I’m quite a bit younger and have the same experience.

I feel blessed for this actually. It’s like I lived 3 generations at once.

Can't be really strict with the dates, the generation thing is cultural and depends on the time and environment of your socialisation.

ngl as a 45 y.o. Gen Y i was not so surprised to read what stupid things 46 y.o. Gen X do

I believe the term is xennial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

Rare and intersectionally have an unfair advantage.

I am definitely more triggered by the mention of ZScaler than the Gen X scope creep

Yeah, by most definitions at least 50% of “40-somethings” are solidly millennial.

People on the borderlines often are overlooked. I'm an old GenX, a few years too young to be a Boomer, and even the younger Boomers grew up with a quite different experience than the mainline Boomer generation. And I was already an adult and married by the main part of the GenX era.

Dividing generations across decades might work for marketing to them in general, but it's otherwise about as useful as horoscopes and the BMI scale.

Duodecades are superior to decades, and we can take overlapping pairs of duodecades as "generations" to solve the dividing line problem.

Duodecades:

  * 1968-1980
  * 1980-1992
  * 1992-2004
  * 2004-2016
  * 2016-2028

Overlapping generations:

  * GenX: 1968-1992
  * Millennial: 1980-2004
  * GenZ: 1992-2016

Precise boundaries are clearly problematic but you can’t claim that someone born in the late 60s had the same type of global view that someone born in the late 80s did.

The BMI scale is useful. Yes, athletes and bodybuilders it may not be accurate for, but being on HN I think you are neither :)

Currently, I am at 20 BMI, for reference.

I feel like looking at a photo to judge how fat they are is probably equally effective tbh. It is a rule of thumb at best.

You might be Generation Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones

I'm slightly younger than that, but certainly shared parts of their experiences. Closer to Jones than Boomer for sure. And my father was too young for WWII and too old for Vietnam so I have no direct ties to either of those experiences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com