Recently, I fell down a TikTok rabbit hole. It started with one video, which was tagged ‘millennialcore.’ It was a series of clips of people in their early thirties mugging like Jim Carrey for the camera, saying things like ‘smol girl’ and ‘large boi,’ salivating over pumpkin spice-flavored treats, all set to that haunting Aphex Twin harmonium song that’s become a staple of “-core” videos. It was funny, and so I watched the whole thing, and so the algorithm served me another. And then another. And then another.
Eventually I had seen much of the ‘millennialcore’ or ‘millennial cringe’ that TikTok had to offer, and the algorithm began to show me videos from millennials angrily responding to the trend. They all started with what’s become known (and parodied) as the millennial pause. I thought: ha ha! They’re doing the pause! Thanks to the Internet, I know that’s a thing they do which makes them millennials! Post-pause, the millennials posed in slack-jawed exaggerations of teenaged laziness. They wore beanies pulled too far down their heads and, in goofy voices, threw around slang they didn’t really understand. They said: It’s bussin’, on God, no cap. They said: The nineties were the best time to be a kid. Side parts look good. You guys can’t even read!
At first, I was annoyed at the millennials. It’s fun to say no cap—if you never have, I encourage you to go ahead and try it. Also, skinny jeans are objectively awful. They are restrictive and aesthetically boring and almost always cheaply made. But then I remembered that I, too, had once worn skinny jeans. I’d worn them in high school, and so had everyone else I’d known. I hadn’t even bought my first pair of wide-leg jeans until I was a sophomore in college. Did that make me a millennial? There was no way. I have never talked on a phone with a cord attached to it. I have autocapitalization turned off on my phone. I’ve sold things on Depop, and I only use Facebook for Marketplace. I decided I was definitely Gen Z.
Then I ordered an iPhone case online, thinking its faux-gold accents were yellow-toned. I opened the package and found that, to my dismay, they were rose-toned. I asked my friends, many of whom are also toeing the generational borderline, if it was giving millennial. I felt self conscious when I pulled it out of my pocket. Please don’t judge me! I swear I don’t have an age-inappropriate fixation on the Harry Potter franchise! I swear I don’t say ‘doggo!’
Like am I crazy or does this look like yellow gold:
The phone case incident sent me back down my generational warfare rabbit hole which branched, as rabbit holes are wont to do, into a tunnel, and then a subtunnel. I googled generational start and end dates for Gen Z, then millennials, then, for good measure, the rest of the generations. I googled: who decides on generations? Mostly think tanks, it turned out. I combed the think tank websites for lists of generational traits and used them like a checklist against my own personal behaviors. I watched YouTube video essays on the great TikTok Gen Z vs. Millennial War. I did not take the “Are You Millennial Or Gen Z?” Buzzfeed quiz, because that would have been a very millennial thing to do. I came away with what felt like a firm start date for Gen Z. Some of the great deciders said 1996, but most said 1997—my birth year. This did not exactly help with my confusion.
Looking back it’s clear that, for most of my life, I had no generation. When I was a kid, people described teenagers as millennials. When I was a teenager, people described twentysomethings as millennials. Those of us born in the late 90s and early 2000s didn’t seem to have a label like that. We were just “kids these days.”
It typically takes a while for generations to get their names. Usually, a few cohorts go from birth through high school graduation before someone decides there’s any sort of cultural or societal shift happening. Eventually, the Deciders at Pew and McKinsey realize that there is one big thing which affected previous generations very deeply but has not impacted the new generation in the same way.
For my class, it was 9/11. I can’t tell you how many adults asked my friends and I, repeatedly and with shock on their faces: wait, you really don’t remember 9/11? Not remembering the day itself never seemed like that big of a deal to us. We’d grown up with its consequences, all the warrantless wiretapping and drone warfare and barking TSA agents. But it was a big enough deal to mark our birth year as the divide. Pew Research drove a stake through the year 1997 and said: this is it! Everything changes right here!
The type of shit I was on while 9/11 was happening outside:
Until recently I never even minded not having a generation. The only birth-year-related anxiety I ever felt before now was as a 13-year-old on Tumblr, when I felt a little left out of all those ‘90s kid’ posts. I was born in the 90s, but I didn’t remember them. Could I still claim to be a ‘90s kid? According to the older teens and twentysomethings on Tumblr, no, I absolutely could not!
But as I got older myself, it became clear that my friends and I were becoming cooler than the Tumblr nineties kids. The nineties kids graduated high school and college and were too busy searching for jobs to sneeringly ask us if we had ever tried Dunkaroos. Meanwhile, older women pointed at our high-waisted, rolled-cuff button-up denim shorts as we walked through town and asked: is that what the kids are wearing now? And we were plenty happy to just be ‘the kids.’ No one knew we were Zoomers yet, least of all ourselves.
Eventually we learned that we were, but just barely, and that’s become a source of anxiety for many of us. I’ve had the conversation with almost everyone I know born between 1995 and 2000. Who are we? Do we fit in with either of these groups? Who do we feel most similar to? Why can’t we have a firmer label, one that feels more fully ours?
Here is what comes up when you google ‘Gen Z’:
The question at the heart of it all is, of course: why do we want a label at all? Aside from marking a group’s shared experience (and processing) of major historical events (which it has a limited ability to do—older millennials, for instance, played a massive role in organizing the Occupy movement while the youngest millennials didn’t even have their driver’s licenses yet), what are generational groupings really for? Can they really say much about any of us?
The generational labels are very Americentric, for one. The supposed big dividing event—9/11—happened in America, after all. It had global effects, obviously, but other events probably had more defining impacts on kids in other countries. And if Zoomers grew up with iCarly and millennials grew up with Rugrats, then what of the kids in the rest of the world who grew up with no Nickelodeon channel at all? Those assessments on generational consumption habits also leave out a lot of working class people. If having an iPhone in middle school makes one a Zoomer, does that make the kids whose parents could only afford flip phones…millennials?
I have plenty in common with the youngest millennial, who graduated college just a year before me and also spent much of their early-to-mid twenties trying to carve out a new adult life in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. I don’t have much in common with the youngest Zoomer. That kid is twelve.
So the labels are a source of anxiety, and they don’t do a very good job of describing groups of people. They mostly exist, it seems, for advertising and polling and thinkpiecing. Stop making skinny jeans—the Zoomers don’t like those! Also, they don’t really like Joe Biden, but they hate Trump more. They’re ‘quiet quitting’ and they’re all nonbinary and they’re the death of free speech in the West!
It’s all bullshit, and it’s all in the service of capital, and it’s the same old panic cycle about the kids ruining everything that the olds worked so hard to build.
So none of it really matters. But also, I should probably send the phone case back and get a new one. I should get one that lets you know I’m cool, that lets you know all of my tastes and interests and values. You’ll see it and you’ll just know! We don’t even have to have a conversation! We don’t even have to acknowledge each other’s existences! Thank God it’s that easy to tell you who I am.