Please Don’t Call Us “Generation Y”

I work part time for a small web design company; we rent our office space from a real estate agency. Today around 11:30, the woman in the cubicle outside our door took a moment off from her phone calls to nutritionists and personal trainers – she’s trying to lose 25 pounds, and fast! – to tell us that there was chocolate birthday cake in the kitchen. Without stopping to let pesky details like “I don’t talk to anyone else on this floor and certainly don’t know the person whose birthday it is” get in my way, I skipped down the hallway to steal a slice before it was all gone.

In the process, I passed the conference room, where someone was giving a presentation to a packed house about how to sell to different age groups. I cringed when I saw the slide-title, quivering ever so slightly as the middle-aged presenter smacked her pointer against the pull-down screen: GEN-Y.

Apparently we like things like the internet! And text-messaging (“SMS”). And if you don’t know something, boy-howdy you’re just plum out of luck cause we’ll go ahead and look that up for ourselves “online” and you’ll have lost a sale.

And yes, I mock, but not because I disrespect my elders – I actually find them quite charming in their cute senility, when they get all excited over learning things like how to download songs on iTunes, and how they take notes to leave by their computer so they’ll remember how to do it again in the future, when you’re not there to patiently wait as they actually read through all the terms and conditions of the service agreement1 – but rather because it angers me that they persist in referring to us as Generation Y or, even worse, the Pepsi Generation. And when I get angry I deal with it through mockery. Even if my subjects are completely undeserving of that derision, in their adorable square-framed reading glasses, purchased in bulk from Rite Aid.2

The term Generation Y came about because we were born – get this – one generation later than generation X! And Y comes after X in the alphabet!

Every generation preceding ours was given their own unique name, based on the characteristics of their demographics or epoch3:

  • The Lost Generation were those who came of age and served during WWI
  • The GI Generation – or “Greatest Generation4” – grew up in the Great Depression and served during WWII
  • The Silent Generation was born during the Great Depression but were too young to serve in WWII
  • The Baby Boomers were born in the years following WWII and came of age during the 1960s and 70s.
  • Generation Xers were born in the 60s and 70s and were thus named because they were “a group of young people, seemingly without identity, who face an uncertain, ill-defined (and perhaps hostile) future.”5 And came to be epitomized by the punk and glam rockers of the late 70s and 80s.

Each of these generation names makes sense, and is descriptive of its population. My generation is descriptively known as the Millenial generation, and is defined as those individuals who came of age in the new millennium (generally accepted to be those born between 1982 and 1995.)

So why do people persist on labeling us based on the generation that immediately preceded us?6 Not only is it lazy and disrespectful, but it just plain doesn’t make sense. For the most part, we are the children of Baby Boomers and the grand children of the GI generation. Our most significant interactions with Generation X came when they babysat us as children and forced us to listen to the Dead Kennedys, when all we wanted to do was play Math Blaster on our Macintosh LCs.

We are the Millenials. Depending on whom you ask we’re either driven or entitled, assertive or whiney, civic-minded or brainwashed liberals. We’ve supposedly been coddled all our lives and expect reward and respect without having to earn it. But then, since we’ve been told that we’re all winners our whole lives, we’re much more likely to be inclusive, team players.

So, from the deepest nucleus of my whiney, entitled heart, I’m asking you: please respect us? You don’t have to like us; after all, we don’t hold the older generations up on pedestals, and will feel no remorse in mocking your high-waisted jeans or inability to figure out touch-screen devices. But please, respect us enough to call us Millenials? And lets nip this whole “Generation-Z” crap in the bud before it really starts to take off? In exchange, we promise to teach you how to use your TiVo. We’ll even go so far as to set up season passes to both NCIS and NCIS Los Angeles.

1. Hi, Dad!
2. Hi again, dad. Well, assuming mom hasn’t walked off with – and subsequently misplaced – the purple pair you keep by the computer and you can actually read this.
3. I only listed those from the last century or so. You can check out a whole hecuva lot more of them, as well as read a really interesting theory on cyclical generationalism here
4. I take issue with this name as well, but that’s mostly thanks to a really poorly written graduation speech by Tom Brokaw given at my college graduation. It is better saved for a later rant.
5. Author John Ulrich. Thanks Wikipedia!
6. Even the Wikipedia page detailing “The Millenials” forwards to the Generation Y page.