~Blogged originally by my friend Katy at her blog Exile from Conformity~
I've started to find the generation divides very interesting though the more I look into it the less that I can actually find out about my own generation.
The problem is, we kind of get lumped everywhere. Born in 1983, I and my peers, are too young to be part of Generation X though there are aspects of that generation that I'm sure we identify with. For a while we were referred to as Generation Y, but that terminology has died out and now is trying to lump our age group in with those who are identified as "Millennials" which doesn't seem accurate at all.
The Gen Xers are the historical generation, old enough to remember so many major historical events of the late 70s and the 80s, while us Gen Ys are too young to remember even those early 80s details. (I'd be hard pressed to believe anyone my age or younger actually remembers some of the early to mid 80s details. I don't remember the Challenger explosion, not at all.)
The Millennials are marked with the influence technology has had on their lives, which is why the younger generation fits the bill so much better. Most have always had easy access to computers, if not at home then at school for sure. Most have always been aware of the internet and probably have little to no memories of life without it. As part of Gen Y I vividly remember getting our first computer as well as the first time we connected to the internet. That said though, it's not as if we aren't tech savvy. We were the first group on Facebook and Myspace, both websites being birthed while we were in college and had access to those sorts of things. I remember that my college was far more upscale than some of the other college choices of my classmates because a computer was
required at the start of our first year. Not everyone else had one. We also had T10 internet connection, which I think changed my life.
We are the first users of the MP3s, the original kids who brought the Mac nation into what is is now and not the crappy computer lab computer I had that didn't have a mouse that worked properly. Yet at the same time we're different than these Millennials with their iPods in high schools and phones that do more than make phone calls. We had all that as college students, now as adults. The kids born in the 90s have a completely different lifestyle, just like we have a completely different one from those born in the 70s.
We are the lost generation, the ones bridging the gap between one and the other and as time goes forward we become more and more lost. Our older counterparts are getting into Wii's for the exercise benefits and the younger counterparts are kicking our asses in Halo online. Though at the same time, we're the gamers with six different console systems spanning 20 years worth of gaming (at least that's the case at my house).
We're hard workers who are quickly finding that our college degrees that we strove so hard to get aren't exactly what we want to do with the rest of our lives. So many of us have taken on things that we were told to love, told to expect and find ourselves on the brink or at 30 without feeling like we've accomplished much at all. We were raised with the idea that we can be whatever we want to be, we just never really sorted out what that was.
That said we're not an entirely unhappy group of people. Those I know in the lost generation find pleasure in some of the oddest things, things our younger friends take for granted or our older friends just don't get. Our hobbies are too old for us, or too young for us. We blog like mad about...everything. It's a constant attempt to catch up but another attempt to send things back to the old ways. That's life in limbo though isn't it?
