Millennials(The Bastard Generation Explained)

This is an article requested by AmazingLarry to describe the dissection of the Millennial generation after her awesome article on Generation X. I didn’t forget you Larry, it just took a while for me to get with one last person I wanted to talk to before writing this (my friend from work I mention later). So I hope this helps you all to separate and understand our culture that is being “Millennial". 😊

Okay, this title definitely seems overly aggressive… that being said, it couldn’t be more perfect. And to explain why I’d like to share a quote from the movie Fight Club…

“I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential and I see it squandered. Goddamnit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man; no purpose or place. We have no Great war, no Great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t; and we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Here’s another by Rise Against…

“We are the nowhere generation
We are the kids that no one wants
We are a credible threat to the rules you set
A cause to be alarmed
We are not the names that we’ve been given
We speak a language you don’t know
We are the nowhere generation
The nowhere generation, oh-whoa"

So when I say we’re “The Bastard Generation" I truly mean we’ve been given up on and abandoned by those that curse our names and blame us for all that goes wrong in our world. And worse yet, we are the longest lasting generation label worth of people of the last century… made of three very different types of people (yet we’re criticized as one, and any one getting blamed cause us all to get blamed because no one knows us well enough to say who is doing what… that’s what happens when you pretend to know your children you never get to know).

So let’s talk about these three groups and dispel some of this discrimination.

First up we have the GenX Millennials. Yeah, that’s right… 2 in one. If you were born 1980–86 then you are probably gonna find yourself in this group. These are the Millennials with the most limited technology, the ones more involved in activities than games (or both, like D&D), and for all the chill that really defines most Millennials this group is oddly determined to draw lines too (a quiet political force). I know a guy like this at work. We both enjoy each others' company as Millennials, but having grown up with a Gen X sister and also a Jones sister the Gen X “feel" was incredibly noticable for me (a Mid Generation Millennial).

Next we have the Mid Generation Millennials. We’ll call this group the Mid Millennials. Now, let’s be clear. Because of all these issues in defining Millennials we have started saying Gen Z started in 95 onwards (and depending on whom you’re talking to is still going)… but for most of our lives we were called Millennials until Gen Z was coined and a retroactive reclaim was made. So I’m not gonna mess with that, just know Mid Millennials were born around 1987–1993 and Late Millennials were born around 1994–1999.

Mid Millennials are mostly the children our boomer parents were to busy for. We represent our parents' last chance to have a (often third) child. As such we came into the picture with more problems than support, and sadly that would become a theme in most of our lives. When your life is a battlefield, fighting every day just to keep going you don’t look for excitement… you look for peace. You dedicate yourself to finding and creating those safe spaces, and when those spaces are threatened we go from super chill to off the rails really really fast. We are the generation that made sentimentality a theme, and a word people would recognize. Our teachers weren’t around to help us, so we learned to live centered around ideals more than people. Some of those ideals would do us good, and some of those ideals would hurt us greatly (sometimes both in different places or times). When we came on the scene technology was pretty much everywhere… video games, computers, portable phones (not cells yet though). But it was still limited enough that we got outside, socialized, and learned to appreciate what the technology couldn’t give us.

Then we have the Late Millennials. These children were the first offspring of Generation Jones. By this point technology had really jumped forwards. By the time these children were old enough to go to school internet was becoming a household staple (though still dial up, by the time they got to middle school or slightly before we’d have high speed). Access to all this technology and internet means that most of these children were essentially raised almost exclusively by electronics. If it didn’t have electricity then it didn’t exist, with a few exceptions. My nephew fits into this catagory. This group latched onto Mid Millennials' abilities with electronics, but when and where attempts were often made to include them in other things there was little to no interest. So this generation essentially grew in a way that was very disconnected, even from themselves… different from the Mid Millennials being detached by our keen awareness of ourselves (feelings of shame and self loathing) the Late Millennials were more “unplugged" (like they literally ran on electricity, if you took it away they just sorta shut down, lost awareness and coping strategies, and even processing and problem solving abilities).

Though arguably the worst was yet to come… because, even though the Gen Z’s wouldn’t remember, the early 2000s were about to disrupt all our lives in such a way that we’d forever be battle scarred. Most of you are probably thinking of a particular day that turned everything on it’s head. But I remember that day, I thought an action movie playing on TV and had no idea why my parents were home when I got off the bus. So I just went to my room, just another day… Then my dad (an aircraft engineer) lost his job, news reports started rolling in with all kinds of crap that had no business being printed, people and our economy changed, and from then on things that seemed certain became unreliable… all over the course of just about a year (suddenly the world was in charge of how we lived here in America, and with the influx of the “world economy" it would remain that way… seeing costs rise 2–10 times what they were depending on the area with wages staying pretty much the same... it was clear we really were the bastard generation).

Home alone, skyrocketing divorce rates, medication to fix all our problems, the worth of God in church replaces the worth of the common people, women yelling at boys for opening the door for them (the end of chivalry), stock collapses, move after move just to keep going, and drugs and alcohol became as common in those below the age of 18 as there was teenagers, sex replaced love, and resentment replaced respect.

Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have been born. If all this world was prepared to provide us with was a lack of support ever step we took then what worth can we have?… But I built my worth in the midst of that hell, and I continue to build myself up from within the dark, and for all the abandonment we’ve faced I know now that I am worth more than I was given.

“And now I wear my scars, just like tattoos
Because I’m so damn proud, of what they put me through
I’ve learned without a doubt every mark that
Makes you feel worthless, can give you a purpose
And now I wear my scars, just like tattoos
'Cause I’m a miracle, every cut is proof
Another chapter written in the story
Of what couldn’t kill me, made me something so brave,
I wear them like tattoos"

-Citizen Soldier

Thanks for reading. ❤️‍🩹