Commenter Rudolph Harrier provides insightful context for Monday’s post promoting JD Cowan’s Generation Y compilation.
We can take an average member of Gen Y as being born in 1984 and an average millennial as being born in 1995.
Let’s look at some key trends and consider the relevant ages:
Cell Phone – The first phone really used for commercial usage (Motorola StarTAC) came out in 1996, and we don’t start seeing sales in the hundreds of millions until the end of 1999. So before 1996 cell phones were basically nonexistent, and they were not common before 2000. Our average Gen Y member would have been 12 when he first started seeing cellphones and 16 when they become ubiquitous. Very good chance that he could have graduated high school without using a cell phone. The millennial would have been 1 when cell phones started showing up and 5 when they became common. He would only have vague memories of a time before cell phones.
Smart Phones – Smart phones became common in about 2007, same as the rise of sites like facebook and twitter. Our Gen Y representative would have been 23, meaning that he was probably in the workforce even if he want to college. Zero impact on his childhood. Our millennial would have been 12, meaning that his high school and college years would have been full of people posting crap on social media via their cell phones.
Internet – The US crossed the 50% internet usage barrier in 2001, and the 75% barrier in 2010. I can’t find stats from before 2000, but the world internet population in 1995 was only about 3% of what it was in 2001, so maybe 1 or 2% of the US was online then. There is a big jump in internet access in 1998, though at that time there was still probably less than 10% of the US online. So we can put it at 1995 – only fanatics online. 1998 – The more tech oriented are online, but it’s still pretty strange. 2001 – Average people are now getting online. 2010 – Pretty much everyone is online, or at least knows someone online.
Gen Y representative would have been 11, 14, 17 and 26 at those times. He very well may not have used the internet outside of school until after college, and if he was online he would not have viewed at as a normal activity that everyone does.
Millennial would have been 0, 3, 6 and 15 at those times. He would have at least known people who were online in his very early childhood, and by the time he graduated high school he would have been online regularly without thinking that it was anything strange to do.
Millennials are natural citizens of the internet. Members of Generation Y are visitors. Or rather, expats from a country that no longer exists.
Once again, slapping the same label on both cohorts will not produce a model of optimal predictive or descriptive value.
Commenter Hermetic Seal gives us a view of the micro level.
I really appreciate all the writing you guys have done on this subject. I was born in ’88, the oldest of three boys, but one of the youngest in my class at school, with many of my best friends having older siblings. This placed me deep in the culture of Gen Y, and I felt a divide long before I came across your commentary on it. The biggest generational separator to me is that Gen Y had a childhood, in part or whole, before the widespread proliferation of computers around 1995 or so, and especially before the rise of the Internet and cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s. Millennials have been “connected” all of their conscious lives. It is impossible that this wouldn’t lead to a deep feeling of separation between generations separated by just a few years.
After returning from a stint in Japan about eight years ago, I started going to an evangelical nondenominational church, some years before becoming Orthodox. Most of my friends there were about five years or more younger than myself, and I often found myself baffled by their tastes. These guys would sit around playing the N64 Smash Bros all day and talk about how great Ocarina of Time was, but I remembered that whole console generation as being pretty clunky and preferred the Super Nintendo, to give one example. This experience made me feel rather isolated and unable to relate to my “peers.” For this reason, I’ve long preferred the company of guys a few years older than myself, and most internet “content creators” I enjoy fall into this age range as well.
Much of what you write about the spiritual destitution of much of Gen Y is epitomized by the sad plight of Noah Antwiler/The Spoony One. A popular media reviewer in the late 2000s of 80s and 90s media, Spoony plunged into a downward spiral of despair largely due to the factors you’ve mentioned: a lack of spiritual foundation leading to futile attempts to plug a God-shaped hole in the heart with nostalgia and consumerism.
Nostalgic entertainment can be fun in safe doses, but there is a temptation, especially strong in Gen Y, to make it the fulcrum of one’s existence, and it is this impulse which gave rise to the Consoomer phenomenon and nostalgia strip-mining scams like Disney Star Wars. The antidote to this, of course, is a proper spiritual foundation and making the pursuit of God our foundation, as we were thus designed.
And, of course, not giving money to people who hate you.
