3:29pm October 12, 2014

What generation am I?

I know they’re silly demographic things but I want to know.

I always assumed I was very late Gen X, because:

My mom is a very early baby boomer (1946) and my dad is from the very late Silent Generation (1941). However much of an accident I was, they seem too old to be giving birth to Millenials.

I remember the Challenger disaster extremely clearly.

My brothers are both definitely Gen X, born in 1971 and 1966.

So I’ve always assumed that my brothers and I exemplified two ends of the same generation. I’ve also generally read that Millenials start around 1982-1985, I was born in 1980.

I know that still puts me on the cusp of Gen X and Millenial, and I know this is all made-up demographics that doesn’t neatly follow patterns, but I’m still curious.

A lot of my sense of being gen x just comes from the fact that Millenials feel younger than me. Not worse than me. Just younger somehow. I get a sense that I’m speaking to someone younger than me. And that’s fine, that’s great, it’s interesting to talk to people from different generations, or different ends of the same generation.

I do get a sense that Millenials and Gen X share a feeling that we have to pick up the pieces left by the Boomers and that this is a thankless task. Of course not all Boomers created the mess or look down on those of us who want to clean it up, some of them want to help us clean it up. But there’s still this sense of being left an inheritance of a mess we may never find our way out of.

Anyway born in 1980, both brothers firmly Gen X, parents already old for my age let alone for giving birth to Milllenials, remember Challenger vividly, Millenials always seem young to me, etc. Seem to say very late Gen X to me, but could be early Millenial. Or it could be that some people are just both if we are born in a certain year range. Because usually I hear Gen X ends in 1982ish, but I’ve heard everything from 1975 to 1987 as the cutoff date.

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