On being a Xennial (remembering the technological sea changes)

I’ve been hearing about the Xennial micro-generation for a while. It may have started with Generation Catalano, as defined in this 2011 blog post. (“We're not Gen X. We're not Millennials.”) Somewhat later (April 2014), maybe we were The Lucky Ones – Born In Between Gen X and Millennials. The term Xennial apparently started later in 2014, in this magazine’s point-counterpoint Reasonable People Disagree about the Post-Gen X, Pre-Millennial Generation. This 2015 blog post dubbed us the Oregon Trail Generation.

An Apple IIe running Oregon Trail

Which, why not? But Xennial seems to have stuck, maybe because r/TheOregonTrailGeneration is unwieldy, and doesn’t pluralize easily?)

Whenever the origin and whatever the term, having the late 70s and early 80s carved out into a micro-generation has always made sense to me. Gen X spans too long a range (generally, 1965 to 1980, but I’ve seen it as expansive as 1961–1981), and of course “Millenial” never quite fit (1981 to 1996; “You’re from the '70s, but I’m a '90s bitch” – Icona Pop, I Love It).

We grew up analog, and transitioned to digital as the world did.

Watching Real Time with Bill Maher the other night (S22E05 February 16, 2024, also featuring Van Jones and Ann Coulter), his interview with Dr. Jean Twenge crystalized why splitting 1977-1983 (ish) into a distinct micro-generation makes perfect sense:

Dr. Twenge: A lot of traditional theories of generations focus on major events, like how old were you when World War II happened, or Viet-Nam, or the COVID pandemic, or 9/11. But that’s not what has a big impact on values and behaviors in the long term – it really is technology. So not just smartphones and social media but things like washing machines and birth control and better medical carer and faster transportation. And that leads to things downstream, like individualism, more focus on the self and less on others. Then it also leads to something called the slow life strategy, that the entire developmental trajectory slows down because we live longer, and health care’s better, and education takes longer to finish, so kids are less independent, and teens are less likely to do adult things, like have a driver's license or a job or drink alcohol or go out on dates. Young adults marry later, have children later, settle into careers later. And then middle-age people look and feel younger than their parents or grandparents did at the same age. So it’s 60 is the new 50, 50 is the new 40. So it’s effecting everybody, but we see it the most with the younger generations, because their childhood and adolescence are so different from what especially Gen X and Boomers experienced.

Maher: I totally agree with that about technology, I’ve always said that, many times, talking to authors in this space, people think people run the world, they don’t, people react to technology [...] Let’s take my generation, my generation was the one that had TV for the first time. Most of us were born like in the 50s, some late 40s, some early 60s, Obama is one of the later ones, I’m right in the middle, 1956, TV and then birth control - that obviously changed a lot, of how people - I mean, reading. I think TV was the first thing where the reading went down, and every sort of big new technological ‘advancement’ that we have, less and less reading. Which is bad for me, I have a book coming out in June. I hear people today talk about how they would not even consider a book, this is like a thing now, like a book, I’ve heard comedians make jokes about it, ‘a book?!’ That’s where we are. So what do you think about the Polars [Gen Alpha]? Where are they gonna go with the education / reading area?

Twenge: The trend lines on this are really straight downward. So there’s a big national survey of high school seniors and they’re asked how many books they read for pleasure in the last year that weren’t assigned for school, and it’s very very stark. It used to be maybe 40% would read 6 or more books a year, and now that’s around 12. So it’s not just a perception, there’s an enormous decline. And with so many more temptations, with social media, all of these things, with algorithms being so sticky and drawing people in, where would they have time to read? When today’s teens according to Gallup spend almost 5 hours a day on social media, if you include YouTube and TikTok in that total.

(She briefly touches on the Xennial self-identification in her new book, generations: “It’s true that these birth-year cutoffs are somewhat arbitrary—if you were born between, say, 1978 and 1982, you could argue that you are either a Gen X’er or a Millennial and have a point. In fact, some people born in this span have taken to calling themselves Xennials.” Later she notes: “The boundaries of Gen X are also fuzzy. Generation X, the Douglas Coupland novel that named the generation, is actually about those born in the early 1960s, who are usually instead considered late Boomers. (Coupland himself was born in 1961.) At the other end, the later Gen X birth years bleed into early Millennials, inspiring a label (‘Xennials’) and a persistent debate about the last year of the generation: Anywhere from 1977 to 1983 has been suggested.”)

I think the tech is very much a dividing line. 

We grew up with the Internet, but we weren’t the creators of it, not in the earliest, formative years. Marc Andreessen (born 1971) wrote the Mosaic browser that became Netscape when he was a graduate student at UIUC; it was released in 1993, when the oldest Xennials would have been 16 (that same year, AOL kicked off Eternal September). We used computers and systems designed and built by Boomers (Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, both born 1955, ushered in the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, respectively (and somewhat controversially)); Tim Berners-Lee (also born in 1955) wrote the hypertext transfer protocol that made the World Wide Web possible and brought “the information superhighway” into living rooms around the world. Bill Joy (born 1954) co-founded Sun Microsystems, the company that provided many of the world’s largest websites the servers necessary to inflate the dot-com bubble (eBay somewhat infamously relied on Sun Enterprise 10000 systems), and developed the Java programming language among other leaps forward (like the SPARC architecture).

But Xennials were the first to exist en masse in that world. I had email years before my mom could be bothered to sign up for one; my dad still uses an AOL address. I was building websites (hand-coded HTML) in 1995. We were there before social media, and adopted it quickly. We made one of the first viral videos, well, viral, and watched it blossom into a media empire. (Go Santa!)

We were there when the first, lame, MP3 players hit the shelves. We went from recording songs off the radio and laboriously making mix tapes on cassette to burning mix CDs for our college frat parties using $300 burners in the mid-90s ($600 adjusted) (prices had fallen to where you could get a lower tier unit,  from Acer, for $170 after rebates, a year later ($325 adjusted)).

We were on AIM and ICQ and would brb when we were afk. We grew up with Be Kind: Please Rewind stickers and the hell of waiting for a VCR to transfer tape from one spool to another. When the oldest of us were 21, Best Buy was still selling Sony VCRs for $430 and DVD players were $760 (both prices adjusted).

We went from slow, limited 8-bit computers being the price of a car (a nicely equipped Apple IIe in 1983, with 128K, 80-column card, two 5.25" disk drives with interface card, a monitor, a letter quality printer, and a serial card, would set you back about $5,869 in 1983 dollars ($18,500 adjusted); the 1982 Ford Escort started at $5,518) ... To cheap eMachines being essentially given away (after rebates) if you signed up for three years of Internet service, just 17 years later.

We had our Geocities pages and webrings and then we adopted tribe.net and friendster and MySpace (all c. 2003) and then Facebook (opened to the world c. 2006). We rode the wave from command line environments like DOS/ProDOS and MS-DOS to MacOS and Windows.

We saw the introduction of Caller ID and answering machines and as kids we had the first cordless phones but still had at least one pulse dial phone at home. We got car phones then Nokia bricks or Motorola flip phones, before we moved to BlackBerry and then iPhone.

As young kids we were the first to have Atari (the wood grained console exploded in 1980 and was ubiquitous  by 1982, when the oldest Xennials were 5), which reigned more or less supreme until the Nintendo NES usurped it in 1985. We were the first to shoot each other online, when Doom came out with multiplayer (on a local network) support in 1993 (dial-up in 1994), when the oldest of us were 16-17. Etc., etc.

We were there when everything was shiny and new and with every iteration we’ve been right there with the tech, for better or for ill.

We remember the days Miranda Lambert recollects in Automatic, while anticipating Orgy’s Fiction (Dreams in Digital).

We went from always on our own to being always connected, in the span of a few short years.

Dr. Twenge writes: “Technology has completely changed the way we live—and the way we think, behave, and relate to each other. Unlike the ebb and flow of wars, pandemics, and economic cycles, technological change is linear. The mode may change (say, from TV sets to streaming video), but technology keeps moving in roughly the same direction: easier, faster, more convenient, more entertaining. Technology and its aftereffects—on culture, behavior, and attitudes—have broken the old cycles of generations to form something novel. This model—let’s call it the Technology Model of Generations—is a new theory of generations for the modern world.” (generations, supra.) I would posit that we Xennials were the last to live in the slower moving model of past generations, and the first to experience the exponential explosion of technology that started to kick off in the mid-1980s.

We lived the transition.