They say that Millenials fall between 1885 and 1994, or 1880-1999, or is it until 1995? Nobody really knows. And no one really knows when GenZ begins. Welcome to the middle.
If you were born between 1994-1997, you are a buffer of these generations. A blend of the two but could fall in the "either; or" category.
You were born in a time where technology was on the rise, but you still played with Barbies and went to the park - not suctioned to a screen. We knew that there were computers and social media, but we were too young for MySpace but too old for the iPhone to have been invented.
I remember emailing my grandma and getting a response and thinking it was the weirdest thing in the world. My sister, mom, and I sat crowded around our giant box computer and listened to the dialup theme song and AOL's "you've got mail".
Don't even get me started when DVDs came out. Game changer. We knew the struggle of sticking your finger in the VHS spindles to rewind it because our fingers were little at the time. We had both DVD's and tapes. We grew up with renting Goosebumps tapes from the library, but also knew the importance of the $5 DVD bin at Walmart.
We all wanted Motorola Razor cell phones and iPod Nanos. We watched Even Stevens with the older kids and also Hannah Montana with the younger ones. It's arguable that the buffer kids were stuck in a phase that we were too young for one thing but too old for another.
There were no TVs in minivans, so we improvised by bringing a box tv and shoving it in between the seats. We had Gameboy SPs and a Gamecube. We were placed at the beginning of the technology era and have embraced it since. We don't take this for granted, but let's face it we are smarter with technology than older millennials. No, not in the sense that we were 5 years old and learning phonics via iPad, but in a way that we can work on other things with our phones glued to our hands.
If you want, you can call us the millennial generation - waiting to get married, pushing our far left agenda, and swimming in debt. You can also call us GenZ - winning participation awards, glued to our iPhones and Snapchat glasses, and just starting to realize how shitty the older generations have run society thus far.
Generation Z or Millennial doesn't define who I am or my peers. I am proud to be in the middle.