Millennials, who knows what they're up to? Millennials are those people who were born between 1982 and 2004. There are the most active than Gen X, the previous generation, which spanned another 20 years, beginning in 1961 and ending in 1981.
While the exact time Generation X ends and the millennial generation begins depends on the person you're asking, there is a little gap between those two generations, and that is where people born between 1977 and 1985.
They don't quiet fit to either generations. And they have every reason to think that because they had an analog childhood and digital adulthood.
In short, they live with one foot in Generation X and one in Generation Y.
This is an uncomfortable position. People that were born during this brief moment, are called Xennials. They have both the cynicism of Gen Xers and the optimism of millennial: they were born between two huge generation transition.
Because nine years are not enough to qualify them to be inside a separate generation, they are regarded as micro-generation: they are not Gen-Xers, and are not millennial.
Living In Both Worlds
Xennials have both the attributes common on Generation X and millennial.
For example, they experience the moments of their childhood as children playing outdoors, engaging in games they made themselves, all before gaming consoles become something popular. They wrote postcards and write letters to distant relatives.
When they want to talk to a friend, they need to use their house phones, introducing themselves to the family members of the person they intended to reach.
They witnessed Intel 286 and 486, and the Commodore Amiga. Their first game on computers came from floppy disks, and can be played using either a keyboard or a joystick.
While that sounds like a long time ago, and actually is in terms of technology, but Xennials also grow up inside modern social media.
When the internet became popular, they were still young and curious. They can finally contact their friends without having to go through their friends' parents first. They can enjoy texting with their mobile phones, and browse the internet when it was young using dial-up modems, putting the bill sky high.
They experienced Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail.
Differentiating themselves from millennials, Xennials grew up without the stress of being photographed. They don't really do much selfies and dob't post anything they can think of on social media networks. They are not keen of being tracked or filmed.
But still, they use social media like they were born to do it, just like millennial. However, they can still remember a life without them.
According to Professor Woodman of the University of Melbourne, the psychological makeup of the typical Xennial should lie somewhere between the typical millennial and the members of Gen X.
"It was a particularly unique experience. You have a childhood, youth and adolescence free of having to worry about social media posts and mobile phones... We learned to consume media and came of age before there was Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and all these things where you still watch the evening news or read the newspaper."
Not That Pessimistic , Not That Optimistic
Xennials had a peaceful life without the interference of gadgets and the internet, they don't experience the change after the Cold War and the Iraq war like what Gen X have seen during their times. History of the world that changed politics to either the east or the west, did not concern them much.
Xennials came of age during a relatively peaceful time in the world.
For this reason, Xennials aren't depressed like Gen Xers. But at the same time not that optimistic like millennials that grew up with the information of the world on the palm of their hands. They are as pessimistic as Gen Xers, but not as tech savvy as the millennials who are considered digital natives.
Xennials were growing up as technology matured along side of them.
They had the time they needed to get used to emerging internet technologies because they were still young enough to feel right at home with it.
So while Xennials live sandwiched between two massive generation gaps, which can be depressing because they don't fit to neither of them, they certainly do hold the optimal balance.