We Could Have Been Gen Y

Before us, it was Gen X. After us, it is Gen Z. And somewhere in the middle, there was us. We could have been Gen Y. That was the obvious answer.

Gen X. Gen Y. Gen Z.

A perfectly reasonable sequence. But apparently, that was too much simplicity for the world to handle, so they broke the chain.

Millennials, they said. Millennials.

As if naming a generation after a calendar event was the natural next step. And I know the explanation. I do. We were coming of age around the turn of the millennium. The big moment. The new century. The future arriving in a way that made everyone equally parts excited, and equal parts scared.

Remember Y2K?

So, yes. Fine. The century was changing. We were there. But Gen X was there too. And they got named after a letter. Funnily enough, their letter sounded like a file nobody was supposed to open. Very mysterious. Gen X. Like a spy from the Cold War era named Agent X. You see the allure now. Don’t you?

The ones who came after us got a letter too. Gen Z. Sharp. A little intimidating. Like they entered the room already knowing where the settings were. They did.

And then us. We were sitting right there between X and Z. The letter was available. Alphabetically inevitable.

Instead, we got millennials.

A name that sounds like it should come with a commemorative calendar. The low-rise jeans and Nokia 3310 came later, of course, because apparently the name was only the beginning.

We did grow up in a very strange gap. We knew landlines. We knew floppy disks. We knew encyclopaedias that sat proudly in drawing rooms and made the house look more respectable. Sometimes with spines unbroken. We also knew the exact panic of someone picking up the phone while the internet was connecting. That sound still lives somewhere in my nervous system.

We recorded songs from the radio and waited for the RJ to stop talking. We groaned when they intervened before the song properly ended. We wrote on MSN and Orkut with the emotional confidence of people who had not yet discovered privacy settings. We had one family computer, usually placed in the least private part of the house, because the internet needed adult supervision. It still does.

And then the world changed. Quietly. While we were looking. Yet, it gobsmacked us.

Suddenly everything needed a password. Then a stronger password. Then a special character. Then an app. Then an update. Then a verification code sent to a phone that was, naturally, in the other room.

We were promised flying cars. Instead, we got password fatigue, workplace burnout, and overflowing cloud storage.

So perhaps millennial does make sense. It does capture the awkward timing of it all. The before. The after. The strange little stretch in between, where we were old enough to remember a world with fewer passwords and young enough to be blamed for understanding the new one.

But that does not mean I have to like it.

Gen Y would have been so much cooler. But no. We got millennials. And honestly, I am still a little annoyed about it.

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