What Generation Are We?

My kids were born in 2013 and 2019 (yeah, about a month ago), so which generation do they fall into? According to some online time-killing I did, the most recent generation is known as Generation Z, the Post-millennials, people who were born after 1997. They are the always-on generation. For them, technology like iPhones and high-speed wi-fi come as standard. They grew up in a world where the internet has always existed and only have a very faint memory of what a dial-up connection was.

Typically, a generation lasts about twenty to twenty-five years, so my kids are destined to be Generation Z. But what generation does that make me? And what other generations are there for that matter?

A little more internet rummaging and I found that the first named generation was known as the Silent Generation and includes people born between 1928 and 1945. The Silent Generation grew up in the era when children were supposed to be seen and not heard — so that name makes sense, I suppose.

Then, as a complete contrast, we had the baby boomers from 1946 to 1964; a whole load of people all born around the same time, thanks largely to the post-war euphoria of “hey, we’re not going to die, let’s fuck”.

That brings us up to Generation X, from 1965 to 1980. Known as the MTV generation, Xers were also noted for being the disaffected, slacker generation and the first to take TV for granted.

That takes us on to the Millennials…

Woh, hold on there. We’re missing something out. A small and barely recognised group of people, too late to be real Xers and not quite young enough to be Millennials, we’re the Xennials. Born between 77 and 83, we grew up in a world where the internet was still something from science-fiction films. Computers weren’t there when we started school, but they were when we finished it; even if they were gigantic clunky things taking up the entire desk with less memory than a modern-day sim card.

As Xennials, we grew up without smartphones. For us, a private conversation when you had finally plucked up the courage to speak to a girl meant a trip to the local phone box with a pocketful of 10ps. While this in itself wasn’t unique to Xennials, there’s one aspect of our youth which is unique to us: we bought original cassette tapes.

While our older brothers and sisters enjoyed the class and style of getting their music on vinyl, and our younger siblings embraced the new technology of CDs, we splashed out our music-purchasing money in the most ridiculous way.

Original cassettes — just as prone as any copied tape to getting destroyed in some maniacal tape deck but with the added advantage of costing at least ten times as much. I remember paying out close to ten pounds for classic albums like Hup and Never Loved Elvis by the Wonder Stuff, Doubt by Jesus Jones, or Life by the Inspiral Carpets. And in one horrific, garbled moment it could all be lost as your twin decks of destruction decided now was the moment to unravel all that tape and wrap it inextricably around the mechanism.

But this taught us vital skills, like open-hearted tape surgery. It was bad enough when a treasured compilation tape got chewed up, but when an original got munched, that was when those true tape doctor skills came out. I can remember meticulously flattening out and winding tapes back into their casing, and you had to be careful not to stretch them as well. Sometimes, you even needed to perform operations, like cutting out a damaged section with a craft knife and splicing it back together with the tiniest amount of sellotape.

We, Xennials were born into a world without excessive technology but for the most part, it grew up around us.

The internet took off just when we needed it, while we were at university. It was a crutch to support us in our research, but we still had to do most of the work in the library with books. From that, we learned to use technology, yet not to rely on it.

This is what separates us from Millennials. We remember a time when information was knowledge. When knowing something mattered, information was hard won and was something to be prized. We couldn’t just search on a whim for anything we wanted to know and then forget it a moment later.

When we thought we recognised an actor in a film from somewhere else, it meant hours of agonising brain racking to try and remember where we had seen them before. Now, it’s two seconds on IMDb, and we can find out everything we never knew we wanted to know about the entire supporting cast as well.

Rather than being shaped by social expectations, generations are now shaped by their technology. I can see it happening to my kids already, for them, everything is on-demand. The internet has taken away a sense of responsibility that we had to develop. My kids will never experience the thrill of getting up in an advert break and knowing you’ve only got a few minutes to race to the toilet, grab a snack and get back on the sofa before the film starts again.

I just wonder which elements of technology will eventually come to define their generation.