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...