young vs old millennials
Don’t Call Me a Millennial — I’m an Old Millennial
the Census Bureau’s definition (born 1982–2000) or Pew’s (about 1981–1997).
In 2015, for example, Juliet Lapidos — born the same year I was — may have put it best in a column for the New York Times headlined “Wait, What, I’m a Millennial?” “I don’t identify with the kids that Time magazine described as technology-addled narcissists, the Justin Bieber fans who ‘boomerang’ back home instead of growing up,” she writes.
Old Millennials, as I’ll call them, who were born around 1988 or earlier (meaning they’re 29 and older today), really have lived substantively different lives than Young Millennials, who were born around 1989 or later, as a result of two epochal events that occurred around the time when members of the older group were mostly young adults and when members of the younger were mostly early adolescents: the financial crisis and smartphones’ profound takeover of society. And according to Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before, there’s some early, emerging evidence that, in certain ways, these two groups act like different, self-contained generations.
Millennials, we hear over and over again, are absolutely obsessed with social media, and live their entire social lives through their smartphones. I tweet too much, sure, but I’ve never blasted a ’gram (did I say that right?); even thinking about learning how to Snapchat makes me want to take a long, peaceful nap
“The Job-Hopping Generation,” says Gallup — and are much more likely, relative to previous generations when they were in their 20s, to live at home and to put off family formation for a long time.
last week Pew released some numbers suggesting millennials aren’t any job-hoppier than Generation X was at the same age.
