A handful of millennials reckon they’re actually the ‘luckiest people in the world’ because they’ve decided they actually belong to a different generation.
There are some people in this world who put great stock in your generation being a major defining factor in who you turn out to be and what sort of life you’re going to lead. Then there’s folks who reckon it’s a whole load of confected malarkey designed to separate essentially the same people into more easily dividable categories.
People can’t even agree where the dividing lines for each generation are, though they seem to last for about 15 years or thereabouts.
The current kids being born in 2025 are part of something called Generation Alpha – because back when someone coined the term ‘Generation X’, they started far too late in the alphabet not to have to circle back round to the beginning.
Before Generation Alpha came Gen Z, and before them are the Millennials – dreaded slayers of so many superfluous industries – but there’s supposedly another generation people don’t know about involving some of them.
See, before the Millennials came Generation X, stereotyped as an overlooked bunch, but apparently there’s something called a ‘bridge generation’ between the two called Xennials, for those who were born at the end of the 70s and start of the 80s.
The term ‘Xennial’ was originally coined back in 2014 by Sarah Stankorb in an article for GOOD, and got added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2021.
It describes someone who has the characteristics of both Generation X and the Millennials and was born between 1977 and 1983, the release years of the original Star Wars trilogy.
These are the kids who grew up in the 80s, became teenagers in the 90s and were coming into adulthood right around the time of some major technological changes, so they’re young enough to remember the world some people hold a lot of nostalgia for while being just the right age to ride the wave of a lot of the changes that chipped away at that world.
While many Millennials were just about to make their first forays into the job market when 2008 came along and took a big financial s**t on the futures of many people, the Xennials had largely already found their jobs.
Some folks discussing this online noted that they’re also known as ‘The Oregon Trail Generation’, since for many of them the first ever video game they played was the infamous Oregon Trail where you were likely to have your pixelated pioneers die horribly.
A commenter said that the British version of that would be the ‘Granny’s Garden Generation’, though writing this as a much later Millennial I played Granny’s Garden during my primary school days, which might have more to do with my old school’s unwillingness to throw out ancient computers.
One person said they’d ‘never felt comfortable with any other description’, while another said they ‘should be our own generation’ and someone else declared themselves to be ‘the luckiest person in the world’.
That’s not something many Millennials would say about themselves, constantly blamed as we are by older generations for ruining various things nobody actually liked and living our adult lives in the shadow of the 2008 financial crash.
However, there were plenty who thought these generational labels were ‘bulls**t’, so put as much or little stock into these descriptions as you like.
