Happy Intergenerational Day: From Tom Holland to Timothee Chalamet, This Is Why Zillennials are The BEST GENERATION!
Today is Intergenerational Day!
It is ALSO Tom Holland's birthday.
As Holland was born in '96 and it is also a holiday, I am here to tell you why Zillennials are unquestionably the best generation.
(I know, expert leaps, weren't they?)
First and foremost, many of you may find yourselves asking, "What is a Zillennial?"
What Is A "Zillennial?"
Zillennials are the micro-generation that exists between Millenials and Gen-Z.
One may be surprised to learn that this micro-generation is actually a prominent identity more and more people are coming to identify with; We are too young to be considered true Millenials. We are too old to be in with Gen-Z.
The youngest Millennials, by the book, were born in the year 1996. That means the oldest members of Gen Z were born in 1997. However, the generational divide is not some scientific cut off. It is, in fact, a marketing strategy.
Different generational groups are marketed to differently because their understanding of the world varies from the people before them. The societal sense of humor is at least a bit different. And, most importantly to the definition, the same marketing strategies don't work on them.
Maybe these cutoff lines worked in this easily defined way before, but they CERTAINLY don't anymore. The technological boom that has taken place during our lifetimes leaves Zillennials in an incredibly fascinating spot.
Glamour Magazine identified the Zillennial age group as starting in 1993 and ending in 1998, but I am going to stretch that to 1999. (Let's be real, if you were born in a year that did not start with a 2, you deserve to be with the rest of us.) Zillennials have had an interesting experience: We remember things that Millennials remember, like 90's Nick and T9 cell phones. Our early memories are shaped by a world that existed purely in the analog, a concept that would be alien to a true member of Gen-Z.
However, our formative years were pointedly struck by the rise of technology. People were getting their first iPhones in middle and high school. We watched social media begin. We weren't born into it - we grew and learned with it, and it with us. Texting started being a thing exactly when we were old enough to text.
To summarize: Zillennials simply don't fit in. If that's not the energy of our entire group, I'm not sure what is.
We Are Not Millennials
In a way, yes, these generational cut-offs are arbitrary, and here is a lot of discourse as to where the cut-offs really lie. Different generations define Millennials as being born in the late 90s and reaching early adulthood at that same time. That's a rather wide margin for error.
For the purposes of this essay, we will look at the Millennial as the someone who reached early adulthood in the early 2000s. No one born in the years 93-96 should have been considered an adult in those years. They were, at best, early age high schoolers.
Furthermore, there are a lot of things that Millenials experienced that these people definitely didn't. True Millenails had time to rock out to Destiny's Child. Now, I'm not saying you couldn't be born a fan, but by the time you were putting the music on for yourself, chances are you were tuning into Beyonce.
We Are Not Gen-Z
When you are at the edge of any group, you are not REALLY part of that group, right? The generational cutoff between Millennials and Gen-Z was DEFINITELY premature, and that was largely because no one could possibly have predicted the rise of social media. There are so many things that made up our formative years that would be absolutely foreign to those squarely siting in the Gen-Z sector.
For those born from 1993-1999, we know how to use a landline. We remember the days in school when the teacher would roll a gigantic TV with a VCR on it for movie day. We know what a VCR is. We saw cassette players get phased out, and we had collections of CDs. We had colorful Motorola cell phones. We fought tooth and nail to keep our Tommigatchis alive. We remember Britney Spears when she was free - but we probably weren't really old enough to watch most of her videos.
BUT
Unlike the Millennial we were not above social media. We were not out of the academic structure when Facebook truly took hold - we were one of the first groups to join the moment we reached the eligible age (which was 13). Our education, and the core of our social scene, was definitely post-Zuckerberg.
We Are Change
Fellow Zillennials, stop me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it feel like every time you try to do anything in this life, there are sudden structural changes? Like, tell me there weren't major shifts in your school departments that wound up changing the way things had always been done. Tradiations that had been set for years that just seemed to get revamped out of the blue.
That's because our micro-generation is one of change.
We grew up with the change in technology. We knew more than our grade school computer teachers by the time we were six. We graduated from the flip phone to the Smartphone, from AIM instant messaging to Facebook and proper texting. We graduated from college and were just getting out there when we were almost immediately thrown into a work-from-home world.
The standard way things had been done always stopped making sense when we came on the scene, because we were growing with the technology, and with the systems - we are the harbringers of change.
And That is Why We Are the Best
(Am I biased? Absolutely. A true, Zillennial '97 kid here. But on an entirely different note, I am right.)
We are living time capsules. We are the last people to have known a world where people weren't always carrying around cell phones or didn't always have a computer in their pocket. We still remember what MapQuest is. (Yeah, remember MapQuest?)
But technology has always come easily to us. We were the target demographic when Instagram came on the scene. While Gen-Zs think that TikTok was the coolest new stand-alone invention, we were part of the Vines that led the world to where it is today, and we remember when it was just some karaoke app called Musical.ly.
That is not to say that Millennials are too old to understand technology. That's not true at all. (Don't worry, you're still young!) However, there is a certain societal pulse that the "arbitrary" cutoff seems to get right.
Zillennials aren't yet beyond our years of TikToking and Hydroflasking. We are slightly less hesitant to start parting our hair in the middle than a Millennial would be. Our drawers contain both skinny jeans and flared ones.
We are the group that maintains the awareness of what came before, while still being part of the exciting new world that is taking place now.
