Road tripping with an early millennial

Are you from Gen X, or are you a Millennial? Or are you kind of in the middle?

I find generational theory both fascinating and frustrating. It’s fascinating because there are definitely aspects of being born at a particular time that predispose one to certain social trends or influences. It’s undoubtable that someone born post-1985 would have been influenced by the rise of the internet in a way that someone from the Baby Boomer generation would never have been.

Back in Sydney where I grew up, a city where I’ll never be able to afford to buy a home!

I also find it really interesting, as someone who is interested in sociology, how certain generational traits manifest themselves in art, culture, politics and society. Australia’s insane property prices and weirdly regressive politics? Definitely a product of the Baby Boomers’ obsession with mortgages, investment, stability, and their vast numbers currently in their 60s. Nirvana (the band) and the movie Reality Bites couldn’t really have been produced (or marketed to such success) by another generation than X. The smartphone and social media is arguably as much a product of the Millennials’ alleged narcissism as their narcissism is a profit of the rise of the smartphone and social media.

However I also find a lot of this very problematic, not least of all because it paints people in very broad strokes when we know that people are inherently individual, unique and varied (although perhaps that’s my Millennial snowflake attitude coming through…). Additionally, the generational theory of Boomer-X-Millennial applies mostly to the Western world (and arguably the white Western world).

It’s also problematic because, as a colleague and friend of mine once said, “people are being born all the time”; people don’t simply take on certain characteristics because they were born on 1st January 1980, as opposed to 31st December 1979 (widely agreed as the cut-off date for Generation X).

On that point, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether I really am a Millennial at all. Take the definition of a Millennial, for example; someone who was born between 1980 and 2000. Tick – I was born in 1984. Millennials are characterised as being digital natives (having grown up with digital technology), deriving their happiness and sense of belonging from social media (because it dominates their lifestyles) and being politically liberal, largely non-religious and eternally optimistic, bordering on ignorant to reality.

I don’t identify with a lot of that, and I know that many of my friends who were born around the same time don’t either.  Born in 1984, I was definitely too late for Generation X – I wasn’t listening to Nevermind at the age of 7. But then I feel really old when I listen to EDM (a revival of 90s dance music) or a lot of musicians who have found fame through YouTube (“isn’t YouTube for videos?”).

You know who… (Image: Melanie Laccohee)

Ok, I certainly get the idea of becoming famous on the internet – I’m not too old for that. But I also remember a time before the internet – I remember practicing how to to write an “at sign” in high school so I didn’t look dumb in front of my friends when we all swapped our first email addresses (which were mostly on Hotmail or Yahoo!). Social media occurred, thankfully, after I had left university. The schoolyard was quite homophobic too – something Millennials, I’m told, wouldn’t accept. I was old enough to understand (and now vividly remember) what was going on when the planes hit the twin towers in New York, but I wasn’t old enough to discuss it with my colleagues at work the next day.

Is it possible then, that there is another generation sandwiched between Generation X and the Millennials? Before anyone starts calling me an individualistic snowflake, here’s my argument; if you were born in the late 1970s or early 1980s (I’m thinking 1979 – 1987) and grew up in a western country , you;

• grew up with computers, but not the internet – you remember when you got your first internet connection, and you remember how the internet was a very different place “back then”
• were old enough to dance (badly) to pop music in the 1990s – 2000s, but probably a little too young for grunge (even if you appreciate it now). It’s not so much Pearl Jam or Nirvana, nor Nicki Minaj or David Guetta – it was more about the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls.
• saw 9/11 and the so-called “war on terror” as a fairly defining moment in history – you are old enough to remember it, but you’re too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall
• use social media as much as any Millennial, but baulk at the idea that you are defined by it (because you can remember a time – a lot of time – before it)
• don’t identify with the ennui-plagued, bleak outlook that Generation X is supposedly defined by, but you’re definitely more cynical than the Millennial archetype

The footage that shocked everyone (Image: CNN, YouTube)

There’s a really interesting article in Business Insider about the so-called Xennials, and while in principle I don’t like the idea of defining an entire cohort of people in such broad terms, I found myself identifying with much of what I read. Other names coined for this “micro-generation” include the Oregon Trail Generation (something that I needed to read about to understand) and Generation Catalano (which I also needed to read about to understand). Although some has been written about us, it’s nowhere near as much as has been written about the Xers or Millennials, and a column in the Guardian by Eva Wiseman suggests that’s why we seem to rely on nostalgia to identify ourselves (it’s said that there’s a lot of “do you remember this?” in Xennials’ conversations, and I admit to doing that – along with many of my friends).

Road trip time! This time, I’m driving…

In the spirit of nostalgia, I’ve put together a playlist of songs on Spotify that I listened to while I was on a road trip with my family in my mid-teens in 2000. We hit the road from Sydney to Melbourne and a lot of these songs didn’t just keep me company – they shaped my idea of what to listen to on a road trip.

I’ve thrown a few more recent songs in for good measure – some from as recently as last year – but take a listen and you’ll get the picture. I listened to this playlist on my recent journey from Melbourne to Sydney and it took me right back to 1999, 2000 and 2001 when the music was good, cargo pants were in and the internet was all about MSN Messenger.

A road trip mixtape of turn-of-the-millennium songs, saved on Spotify. How very Xennial.

Merry Christmas and happy road tripping – I hope your nostalgia rush is as strong as mine!