Nerd Pride Radio

My parents are boomers. I'm Gen X. My oldest children are Millennials. My youngest children are the next generation after that.

The oldest Millenials are most often the children of later Baby Boomers. The average and younger Millennials tend to be the children of Gen-Xers.

All three of my girls thought it was terribly offensive. Thus, 3>1- I suppose I won this one!

And my daughters were split 50/50.

Mine were too busy looking at their phones to comprehend the question.

When I talk about "Millenials" I'm thinking of the core being those born in the mid-80s until about the year 2000 - thus the name, Millenials, as those who were teenagers or young kids at the turning of the Millenium. I don't know if that's what other people mean by it. However, starting somewhere around 2003 - 2005 - somewhere in there - imo young people changed very markedly in terms of how they discuss and think about things, what they expect from others, what they're prepared for intellectually and how they think about intellectual work, and so on. I can't be sure what this experience means because, after all, it was a time I myself was going through a lot of changes and started identifying a lot less as a young person and more as a parent and "adult" and such. But still - the biggest things are a strong sense of collectivism, wanting to do things as a group, the unwillingness and even inability to disagree in argument and instead a preference for keeping superficial peace on top of underlying total impasse, the failure to grasp concepts like individual ownership of intellectual work and property, a "casualness" of language and manner that affects many things, and the expectation that the rest of the world should be conforming to this rather than the other way around. That is my experience anyway.

And now my experience is that it's changing again. A totally new thing is starting to happen now, about 2015 onward.

Here's another one I forgot and this is a huge one. There was a period of time for about a decade when the young people just did not grasp sarcasm. There are always a couple who do but by and large it would pass over their heads completely undetected and once they did get it they found it very off-putting. Now all of a sudden, just recently, sarcasm is back among this particular age group and everybody finds it amusing.