PAST IS PROLOGUE
Am I a Millennial or Gen Z?
What does it mean to be part of a generation?
In late 2019, I started teaching in an Irish high school. At 24, I didn’t feel all that different from the 13-year-olds I was mentoring at first, but it soon became clear that we were very different. My references went over their heads — even to what I thought were current, mainstream films, like Marvel’s Iron Man. What threw me most, however, was how different our vocabulary was when it came to using technology.
If I say, “click the floppy disk to save,” do you know what symbol I’m talking about? These students didn’t. I quickly realized that none of these kids had ever seen a hard floppy disk IRL, let alone a floppy floppy disk.
More recently, my partner Rhys and I, who were both born in 1995, were talking about generations. It’s been popular for a while now to categorize people by when they were born — boomers, Gen X, millennials, Gen Z — as a shorthand for a particular kind of experience. Being born in 1995, there are many ways that we feel like cuspie “zennials,” having gotten a taste of both experiences.
Or so we thought.
“I haven’t used a floppy disk either,” Rhys told me the other night when I brought up the story of my Irish students as an example of the…
