Stop Blaming it on Millennials
It's basically impossible not to hear about what hipster Millennials or ironic Zoomers are doing. Even though I believe that the popularization of generation names is almost purely for marketing (primarily trying to drive hate-clicks or shock you into reading what New Industry Millennials are Killing Now and Why That's Bad). What if I told you that we've completely skipped a generation?
The Millennial/Zoomer Dilemma
I don't know when it started, but all of a sudden I started hearing people breathlessly proclaim online that "Millennials are in their 40's now, stop accusing them of doing the stupid things, it's the Zoomers who are young and stupid now!"
I was born in 1999, right at the turn of the new millennium. When I was a young kid and a teenager, I was derided by grown adults as being a stupid Millennial, and was lumped in with young adults a bit older than me and kids a bit younger than me. Something strange happened to me in college, around the time I was 20. I suddenly started getting derided by grown adults as a stupid Zoomer, Zillennial, Gen Z, etc. What gives? Am I a stupid Millennial deserving of derision, or am I a stupid Zoomer deserving of derision? (There is no escaping the derision from older generations, anyone younger than them is always wrong and the cause of all the problems in the world, real or imagined.)
Are Millennials 40 or 20 years old today? Are Zoomers in middle management or still in high school? I say that we've just completely skipped a whole generation that would fix this problem. There is absolutely no reason that someone who was born in the 1980's should be called a "Millennial" as if their birth had anything to do with the turn of the new millennium. The Millennial group was named because they were born at the turn of the millennium. 1999 seems like a good candidate year to be a Millennial to me. What we are missing is the preceding generation.
A Solution
Baby Boom, X, [Missing], Millennial, Z.
This is my proposal. No one would say a 40-year-old is in Gen X, he is definitely younger than people born in the 1960's and 70's. I find it similarly inappropriate to lump the 40-year-old in a group with the 20 year old. I have heard it said that I am not a "true" Millennial because I don't remember 9/11, being only two years old at the time. This is a ridiculous argument, never before have we demarcated generations by what each individual remembers. This would be like saying "Oh you aren't a REAL Silent unless you were personally affected by the Dust Bowl!" or "You aren't a REAL founding American unless you personally shouted 'The British are coming!”
Generations are decided by your date of birth, any other measure is too subjective and flimsy. One reason that I believe may have contributed to the mass confusion of who is and isn't a Millennial is that our generations are getting longer. Typically, a generation is roughly 20 years. I would argue that as the country has fewer kids in total and the age of having your first child increases, this is going to stretch out the length of a generation, meaning we will eventually have to adjust how we define the length of a generation.
A Modest Proposal
For the most part, generations are retroactively given a name based on something significant about their date of birth. (Sorry X’ers, you get the short end of this stick. The name has stuck, not much hope in changing it now. If we all work fast enough, then we will one day rename Gen Z so they get something cooler.)
I posit that we name this missing generation between X and Millennial the Bicentennial Generation on account of their being born around the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of the United States. This generation would include everyone born in the 1980’s, a great time for American patriotism to boot.
Let's use this as a rough guideline:
Baby Boomer: 1944-1960
X: 1961-1975
Bicentennial: 1976-1991
Millennial: 1992-2007
Z: 2008-2023
I don't have much in common yet with someone born in 2007, who would only be 16 right now, but that's a perennial truth. The young will always feel like a "different" generation just because they haven't done anything yet and teenagers do weird things. The same was true with the Boomers born in 1960, adults born in the 40's would not have felt related to those youngin's at the time because the age gap was actually meaningful. Their age differences are the exact same as it always was but now the relative significance of that age difference is less meaningful, so it's easier for us to group them together. The same will be true when kids born in the early 2000's reach their maturity. In 2050 I will be 51 and the youngest of my generation will be 43. That is an insignificant age gap, we are surely of the same generation.
So stop calling me Gen Z, I am a Millennial. Stop calling 40 year old's Millennials, they belong to the missing generation that I have just named the Bicentennials. Everyone younger than you isn't a Zoomer. Everyone older than you isn’t a Boomer.