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What does is truly mean to be a millennial? Being that I'm technically a millennial since I was born in 1994, I should be able to answer you, Pandas, but I somehow don't feel qualified. Most millennials are '90s kids, but I only spent around three sentient years in the decade.
My childhood and early teens were pure 2000s: listening to pop-punk on an MP3 player, watching Pimp My Ride and other bad reality shows on MTV, the OG YouTubers, and reading the Harry Potter books. I always think of myself as a zillennial: a person in between Gen Y and Gen Z.
But let's explore what makes millennials different from the other generations. The Pew Research Center put 1996 as the cut-off year. So, millennials, are people born between 1981 and 1996. That makes the oldest millennials 44 this year, and the youngest will be 29.
At the same time, the researchers at Pew note that the cut-off years aren't an exact science. Yet they think that 1996 is a good year to end the millennial generation because of certain socioeconomic and political factors that the people born until that year have experienced collectively.
The most notable event that shaped millennials is the 9/11 terrorist attacks, especially for American millennials. Pew claims that most Gen Zers were too young to comprehend the historical significance of it. Millennials, although they were only children too, when it happened, were of age where they could comprehend what this means to the world.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also shaped millennials profoundly. Some experts say that it's what caused the current sharp political polarization. Most millennials could also vote during the 2008 election when the first black president was elected. This win is often attributed to the youth vote and the fact that millennials were the most ethnically and racially diverse generation in American history.
On the economic front, the 2009 recession is the reason why many millennials struggled with home ownership and financial independence even when they were well into adulthood. Although Gen Z has grown up with the Internet, millennials were the ones who created the many social media spaces the youth occupies today. However, the trends and aesthetics of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are very different today from what they used to be in the millennial era.
So, what is the legacy of millennials, or, what describes them best? In the beginning of 2024, Charlie Gowans-Eglinton wrote for The Times of London that some of it might be embarrassing: living with our parents, not having a driver's license, burnout culture, and a declining fertility rate.
