Why the ‘Gen Y’ label had to go

So many labels have been used in the past few years to describe ostensibly the same thing. Many of us have felt caught in between Gen X and what was once referred to as Gen Y long before someone coined the sexier (and now rather demonized) label ‘Millennials’.
But many of us never really felt like we belonged to Gen Y and less-so Millennials, largely because it wasn’t long before this young pioneering group started to get a bad press. The values assigned to Millennnials didn’t resonate and over time it alienated and antagonized.
I mean if Kim Kardashian is Queen of the Millennials then this is not a group I want to be associated with. Vacuous, narcissistic, lazy, entitled, and focused on one ambition: being famous for no reason and making as much money from it as possible.
The Gen Y label had the unfortunate consequence of lumping in quite a disparate group of individuals with hugely varying ages (people born between 1980–2000) meaning that some of the oldest in our cohort were in their late thirties while others were just sixteen.
The life experiences of these two age groups are very different depending on the historical, economic, and cultural context in which they grew up and any descriptors such as ‘Gen Y’ reduced us to a homogeneous group with little in common.
That’s perhaps why many of us reacted with such a sense of relief to the idea of a cusp generation existing between Gen X-ers and Millennials called ‘Xennials’. Born between 1977 and 1983 we’re a smaller cohort but one with unique shared experiences.
The idea has come to prominence in the past month and if you want a run down on what a Xennial is and why they’re unique, check out the meme I made which ended up going viral on Facebook and helped to popularize the term in the mainstream media.
The reason why I think that this has resonated with so many people is out of a sense of disgruntlement at being bundled into the Gen Y label, a label that has never fit very well with us and one we’ve been rather quick to abandon.
Whether you like the term ‘Xennial’ or not (a lot of people don’t) or if you prefer The Lucky Ones or the Star Wars Generation, it’s time for us to shed that ill-fitting Gen Y label and celebrate our uniqueness once more. Because let’s face it, Xennials are taking over the world.
