You see them everywhere, the articles about millennials. As a culture we’re obsessed about what they wear, what technology they use, what careers they pursue. I’m no exception. No matter how vapid the article, I devour the click bait like a hungry shark. But my interest is beyond what millennials believe about parental leave or Hillary Clinton. I have a far stronger motivation: I desperately want to know whether I’m one of them.
Experts who study generations and the reporters who talk to them don’t quite know how to handle those of us born in the early 80s, “cuspers” wedged between millennials and Generation X. Depending on whom you ask, the generation started in 1980, ’81 or ’82 and ends somewhere in the late 1990s.
“Generational boundaries are fuzzy, arbitrary and culture-driven,” writes Paul Taylor, author of “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown.” They are contrivances, he says, but useful contrivances in that they help us organize our world.
Society at large may not lose sleep over such squishy definitions. But for me and my fellow border babies, a lot is riding on this issue. Mainly, we need to know whether we can continue to safely judge the millennials — or whether, as official members of their ranks — we need to switch gears and start coming to their defense.
My suspicion is that many of us would like to continue judging. For my 30-something friends, talking about our 20-something peers is a favorite pastime: These 2013 grads already want our jobs! Doesn’t talking to your parents ONCE a day suffice? Were they seriously Snapchatting during that meeting?!
[READ: The Best Countries for Dating, according to millennials.]
Less than half of all millennials identify with their generation, according to the Pew Research Center, and among older millennials, about 33 percent actually identify more with Gen X. Though if we’re honest with ourselves, many of us probably couldn’t define Gen X if our lives depended on it. The generation is “‘America’s neglected middle child,” says Taylor, formerly with Pew. It’s smaller in population size — 66 million people compared to 75.4 million millennials and 74.9 million baby boomers. Marketers — and the media — didn’t describe them to death.
Gen Xers are often thought of as latchkey kids, many of whom experienced divorce. Taylor calls them “savvy, skeptical and self-reliant.” Those adjectives make this 1980 baby want to be in the Gen X camp. But when I hear about the parameters used to define millennials, it hits home. Suddenly, I wonder if I’m just as “special” and “entitled” as my 24-year-old coworker on Tinder.
Neil Howe, who coined the term “millennial” in his 1991 book, “Generations,” chose 1982 as the start of the millennials because the children born that year were the first to come of age, or turn 18, in the new millennium. He also believes the early 80s marked a new generation because at the time, “there was a sharp change in how kids were treated.”
[WATCH: Neil Howe discusses how he defined millennials.]
In the 70s it was a dark time to be a child, Howe says. Parenting was more hands off, and societal institutions to protect children no longer seemed to work. Then, the in the 80s, parents became increasingly concerned about child abuse and child safety. Baby on Board stickers were born, as was a whole new era of parental protection and less risk taking. Fast forward 10 or 15 years, and we have the emergence of participation trophies and helicopter parents discussing their child’s grades with college professors.
Aside from the 1982 cutoff, which seems too arbitrary, this explanation for the start of the millennials makes sense to me. I want to believe I earned those purple sixth-place ribbons in middle school track, but I’m pretty sure I was jogging — not running — that 800 meters.
Another reason to tie the birth of the millennial generation to the early 1980s relates to technology, says Tammy Erickson, adjunct professor at the London Business School and author of “What’s Next, Gen X?”
“In general, people born in 1980 and after don’t remember when they started using a computer,” she says. “That’s one of the characteristics of a millennial: they are unconsciously conscious users of computers. More or less, when you get older than that, people tend to be able to remember the first time they logged on.”
When it comes to technology, many of us cuspers feel a bit more millennial — like the less tech-needy version of digital natives. I don’t remember the first time I logged onto a computer. But I remember using boxy Macintoshes in classes throughout my elementary school years, during which time I was inadvertently responsible for killing hundreds of pioneers on the Oregon Trail. We may have had to suffer through dial-up internet, but the online world was very much a part of my adolescence. Why actually date a sixth-grader when you could have online talks with a “Frenchman” named “Pierre” who you met in an AOL chat room?
That said, our experience with technology in our formative years differed significantly from people just a few years behind us. Without cell phones, we had to face the terror of calling our boyfriends and girlfriends on an actual land line and having a parent, or worse — a cooler, older sibling — say hello. But we were spared the horror of having our college and high school exploits chronicled on Instagram or Facebook, which would have been particularly tragic in an era with too few hair straighteners and too many overalls and No Fear shirts.
[READ: These 10 global millennial leaders are making waves.]
It’s not just technology that makes us relate to millennials. Although we hate to admit it, there’s a lot that we admire in them and see in ourselves — like their social progressiveness, their desire to find meaning in what they do and their yearning to make the world a better place.
Howe, who named millennials, says that often people don’t identify with their generations until later in life, when a few years of an age difference matter less. Maybe that will happen one day, and I’ll find myself feeling very millennial or very Gen X. As for now, I’m forced to embrace the ambiguity.
“Anyone who is born around the cutoff years can absorb characteristics of the generation that came before or the one that came after,” says Ann A. Fishman, author of “Marketing to the Millennial Woman.” “It’s like a train coming to a stop. It doesn’t happen all at once.”
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Caught Between Gen X and the Millennials originally appeared on usnews.com
