At age 22, members of the Greatest Generation served in World War II, members of the Boomer Generation fought for societal change, and members of the Millennial Generation built the social media platforms that Generation Z is now addicted to. (And that's our bad....)
Generation Z started turning 22 in 2019 and they won't stop until 2034.
By Mike Reid | January 2025
If you're a member of Generation Z, what you might want to know is that generations follow a pattern, alternating between awesome and pathetic generations.
And I hate to be the one to give you the bad news, but right before your generation are the Millennials (who everybody loves), but then you're just called Generation Z, and then after you comes Generation Alpha (also known as the Baby Shark Generation).
You know that before we were the Millennials we were called Generation Y, right? But then the Baby Boomers were like, "Oh no, we cannot just name an entire generation by a single letter, we saw what happened to Gen X," and so we got a rebrand, into the Millennials.
However, as you are no doubt well aware, Boomers don't give a shit about Gen Z, which is why you still have just a single letter.
So um, do you think your generation is the awesome one, or...?
Birthday Celebrated in 2025:
The Greatest Generation will turn 98+ years old.
The Silent Generation will turn 80 to 97 years old.
Baby Boomers will turn 61 to 79 years old.
Generation X will turn 45 to 60 years old.
Millennials will turn 29 to 44 years old.
Generation Z will turn 13 to 28 years old.
The Baby Sharks will turn 0 to 12 years old.
Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't try to buck the trend.
Oh, but you don't believe me about the trend in the first place?
Ok, let's examine the evidence.
Exhibit A: First of all, the extremely old people — those in their very late 90s and 100s — are known as the Greatest Generation, which is inarguably an extremely strong name for a generation.
Just imagine for a moment if you weren't called Generation Z, but instead you were called the Greatest Generation.
Inarguably, the Greatest Generation is the stronger name.
I mean, just objectively, right?
On the other hand, the Greatest Generation didn't get named at all until 1998, so maybe there's still hope for a Gen Z rebrand?
In 2021, a digital war broke out between Generation Z and the Old Millennials — who did not handle the situation with wisdom or grace.
Exhibit B: After the Greatest Generation is the Silent Generation, which is obviously not a good name for a generation at all.
Members of the Silent Generation — like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell — were kids during the Great Depression and are now in their 80s or even 90s.
I recently asked ChatGPT if people talked about being depressed during the Depression, and GPT said kids weren't allowed to talk at all back then, that's why they're called the Silent Generation.
Exhibit C: Next come the Baby Boomers, and I don't know if you've heard much about them, but if you're a member of Gen Z, I think you'll like them a lot because once they got into their 20s, they didn't care what older people thought either.
Boomers were born starting immediately after World War II, and are now in their 60s and 70s, but they don't believe they are old.
Ok. Let's recap. We have the Greatest Generation, inarguably an awesome generation, followed by the Silent Generation — called that because they weren't even allowed to talk as kids — followed by the obviously awesome Boomers.
Greatest: Awesome.
Silents: Pathetic.
Boomers: Awesome.
Exhibit D: After the Boomers comes Generation X.
Generation X takes pride — to the extent they can — on being latchkey kids, which means that their parents ignored them.
No one even attempts to argue that growing up in the 70s or 80s was actually better than growing up in the 60s or 90s.
Look, I don't want to point fingers, but if you're wondering what's wrong with everything in America right now you might want to blame Generation X. Born in the late 1960s and 1970s, these Americans are now in their 40s and 50s, which is too old to be fluent in digital technology, but apparently too young to stand up to the Silents and Boomers who are still trying to run things.
What you have to understand about Generation X is that not only did they grow up without any parenting at all, but they also grew up without any digital technology at all.
The activity that is your entire life — doing something extremely subtle with your fingers and then having something in the digital world happen — that activity didn't exist in the 1970s or 1980s.
Released on Friday, December 2, 1983, the Thriller music video was an unfathomably exciting moment in the lives of Generation X.
And although from time to time there is a cursory attempt from Gen X to reminisce about the 1980s, you'll notice that there is absolutely no attempt at all for Gen X to rebrand as 80s kids.
So there you have it. Evidence presented and case closed. Unless Generation Z finds a way to buck this pattern, you are doomed to be the pathetic generation that follows the awesome Millennials.
Gen Z does not have nostalgia for the 90s.
What's that, you say? The pathetic ones are not Gen Z at all but in truth are the Millennials — and not all of them, just the old ones?
The very Millennials that slaved away during their 20s in offices with ping pong tables and coolers full of free Naked Juice — back then considered an extremely exotic beverage — to build you the very social media platforms that you have grown so close to?
Exhibit E: The Old Millennials. This is the crux of the controversy.
Are the Old Millennials — those born between roughly 1981 and 1985 and maybe even those born in 1980 and 1979 — an awesome or a pathetic group of Americans?
And call me biased because I was born in 1984, but I'm with Gen Z on this one: Fuck the Old Millennials, myself included.
What exactly have we done as the vanguard of our supposedly fated to be awesome generation, besides invent social media and also dramatically scale the number of craft IPAs available?
Ok. If you're an Old Millennial and you want to understand why Gen Z hates you, try this exercise.
First, ask ChatGPT to list the top 10 or top 25 songs from each year that you were in your 20s. Then, go re-experience your 20s by watching YouTube videos of those songs. Importantly, don't just listen to the music, actually watch them as YouTube videos.
Look, I'm not saying that Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T's isn't an awesome song. I'm not saying that watching Ok Go dance on those treadmills wasn't awesome. And I'm not saying that if you got married to Train's Marry Me it wasn't awesome.
Mumford and Sons.
I actually personally attended a wedding where the couple got married to Train's Marry Me, and it was one of the best weddings I've been to.
But looking back, there was a certain naiveté to it all, no?
A naiveté that Gen Z never got to experience yourselves, because you were born far too late to remember the good old days.
But I think things are about to start looking up for Generation Z.
Because I think all of the things that Old Millennials wired our brains to do — like write out mediocre essays one damn letter at a time sometimes even in cursive — are about to be irrelevant.
I think the world is about to become so unfathomably different than nearly all of the skills that anyone over 30 thought would be essential for the rest of our lives will soon become useless.
For that reason and others, my bet's on Generation Z.
Oh fuck, we forgot all about the Baby Sharks for a moment there.
Exhibit F: Generation Alpha, aka the Baby Sharks.
Born starting in roughly 2013 and onward, we don't know much about these young sharks yet, except for by the time these kids start reaching age 13 in 2026, we're definitely not going to let them have Instagram as teenagers. Not our precious Baby Sharks.
Ok, look. The first thing you should know about the Baby Shark Generation is that their parents are mostly Millennials, which basically means that if you're a member of Generation Z you're surrounded by Millennial culture on all sides. Apologies.
The oldest of the Sharks are mostly parented by Old Millennials.
And as Old Millennials, if our parents needed something to keep us busy, we would select from any number of Disney movies on VHS, our favorites made between 1989 and 1994.
Our Boomer parents were quite happy to let their kids watch animated movies on screens, what could be wrong with that?
Released on Friday, November 17, 1989, The Little Mermaid was the first film of the golden era of Disney animation.
Our favorite, The Lion King (1994) is still great today, although the murder of young Simba's father by Simba's uncle is a pretty graphic scene. Also, the movie ends with Simba murdering his uncle in revenge. But in between all that, the movie is a lot of fun.
Yes, Aladdin (1992) certainly portrays an outdated image of the Middle East, but due to the fact that the Genie is not a human, there's room for leeway. And Beauty and the Beast (1991) is a little more traditional that we might have liked, but acceptable.
On Monday, November 2, 2020, Baby Shark became the first video in history to reach 10,000,000,000+ views. How old were you?
The problem is that when it comes to under the sea adventures, Old Millennials didn't grow up with SpongeBob (which came out in 1999) or Finding Nemo (which came out in 2003), we grew up with The Little Mermaid, made in 1989.
And while you can explain to kids that lions are lions not humans and sometimes lions murder each other and you can explain that 1990s genies were a little more eccentric than genies today, The Little Mermaid — considered in the 1990s to be one of the best kids movies of all time — is one troubling scene after another.
All of us — even extremely successful and talented people like Will Smith — can make mistakes from time to time.
So instead of The Little Mermaid, the Baby Sharks grew up on a different kind of underwater adventure, now the most watched video in the history of humanity. If watching a non-sensical but extremely addictive YouTube video on repeat as kids was a better or worse experience than The Little Mermaid only time will tell, but I think Gen Z can be glad to have missed out on both of them.
But perhaps what's most confusing about the 90s — especially if you're an Old Millennial — is that looking back on the 90s now it all looks extremely outdated, but during the actual 1990s life was exponentially better than it had been for kids in the 70s and 80s.
This episode of Boy Meets World — which first aired on Friday, March 21, 1997 — ends with Cory, Shawn, and Topanga apologizing to Mr. Feeny.
The Little Mermaid — with it's delightful musical numbers and comedic sidekicks — was an unfathomably better experience than anything made for kids up to that point in history.
But the actual 1990s wasn't all fun and games. Yes, you might get a trophy just for participating in something from time to time, but in the 1990s adults would also sometimes completely lose their shit, and kids had absolutely no recourse in those moments.
From time to time your teacher, or you soccer coach, or even your elementary school principal would just go completely nuclear.
In these moments, kids had no choice but to shut up and listen because — and this is hard to explain — the very fact that the adult was raising their voice and getting unusually angry was exactly the evidence required to prove they were right.
So at first, when people who had no memory of the actual 1990s started reminiscing fondly about the 90s, I think the people who actually grew up in the 1990s were pretty confused.
"You're not a 90s kid, you're a two thousands kid, which I know doesn't have the same ring to it, but that's the reality," we said.
So little happened in the 90s that 2000s kids like Jax learned everything they needed to know while waiting for the next Harry Potter book.
But then, without fail, these aspiring 90s kids would proceed to check every single required box to prove their 90s kid-ness.
And not only did these young hotshots know everything about the 90s that mattered, but their description of the 90s was so unfathomably better than our own memories of the decade that we had no choice but to allow the 2000s kids to become 90s kids.
But to understand the classic 90s kid mindset — the view from the perspective of someone who remembers 1991 — try this:
Imagine you're United States Senator Josh Hawley.
Born on Monday December 31, 1979, Josh Hawley celebrated his 10th birthday on Sunday, December 31, 1989 and then woke up the next day and it was the 1990s.
Josh Hawley was just 9 years old when The Little Mermaid came out, living in the small town of Lexington, Missouri, so maybe his parents didn't let him see the movie because it was too titillating.
On Wednesday, June 15, 1994, The Lion King was released in theaters. Four years later, Josh Hawley graduated high school as valedictorian.
But Josh Hawley was 12 when Aladdin came out in 1992, and 14 when The Lion King came out the summer before he started high school. Don't tell me young Josh Hawley didn't see The Lion King the summer after he graduated 8th grade in small town Missouri.
The Lion King was the #1 grossing movie in the world in 1994.
So yes, while technically Josh Hawley is an extremely young and tech savvy member of Gen X — basically an Old Millennial — how can you possibly argue that Josh Hawley is not a 90s kid?
Josh Hawley is 100% a 90s kid, and I think we should welcome him with arms wide open, because once you realize that Josh Hawley has a 90s kid worldview, it opens up a lot of possibilities.
But what you have to understand about the 90s kids who actually remember all of the 90s — especially if you're among those who fall into this group — is that we didn't grow up in modern times.
The 1990s? The actual 1990s?
Sure, give yourself a celebratory pat on the back that you actually remember 1991, but now also realize that was over 30 years ago.
The Little Mermaid, but for Baby Sharks.
Commercial internet wasn't even legalized until 1991, and it wasn't until 1995 — midway through the decade — that things like dial up internet and AOL became at all mainstream.
Even in 1999, just 40% of Americans — just four in ten — had dial up internet access at home.
In other words, maybe what's so wrong with Old Millennials is that we're extremely attached to the idea that we're young and tech savvy, but we're actually neither of those things anymore.
First of all we're definitely not young anymore.
And second of all it's not that we didn't grow without TikTok or Instagram. Old Millennials grew up without... the internet.
Old Millennials grew up... dangerously similarly to Generation X.
But then when we started graduating college in the early 2000s, Generation X celebrated our arrival because we were fluent with the new technology and they were tech Neanderthals.
In other words, the last time a generation announced itself as newly adult, everyone went out of their way to accommodate us, because our tech savvy and our youth were huge assets.
But if you're a Young Millennial — if you're among the last of the Millennials born in 1996, 1995, 1994, and maybe even 1993 — you didn't graduate college until the late 2010s.
And you don't remember much, if anything, from the actual 90s.
To understand the Young Millennials, imagine for a moment that you were born in 1996 — like both Eddy Burback and Jax.
In 2000, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was released and it was the first book everyone went crazy about, but you were just three or four years old. So, you probably don't remember that.
Being a wizard would be awesome if you were Harry Potter. But what if you were Ron Weasley?
On the other hand that also means that your earliest memories were formed during the peak of Pottermania, which lasted from 2000 -2007. (The seven Harry Potter books and the eight movies that would follow were vastly superior to the four Disney movies the Old Millennials grew up on, which as previously mentioned included The Little Mermaid.)
God, and if you were born in 1996 you turned 11 years old in 2007, the exact same year the last book came out. And 11 was exactly the age Harry Potter was when he first found out he was a wizard.
Young Millennials like Jax (born in 1996) grew up dreaming Hogwarts was real — but have settled for playing Muggle Quidditch ever since.
So look, I get it. People in their 30s are getting dangerously old, and people in their 40s disqualifying so. If you were born in 2002, that I was born in 1984 sounds as old as someone being born in 1966 sounds to me, which is to say it sounds disqualifyingly old.
And people in their 20s?
Well, the most reasonable among you (the last of the Millennials) grew up on Harry Potter as kids, which means your expectations for the baseline level of magic you expect in your daily lives is just totally and completely outrageous.
And the rest of you (Gen Z) got on Instagram in your early teens.
The story of Hermione Granger if she'd never gotten her letter from Hogwarts, because her family moved to France before her 11th birthday.
Y'all do realize how difficult this is going to be to accommodate given the foundation of everything in America was built by Boomers and Gen X before modern technology existed, right?
Oh, you don't care?
Well, the good news is that if there's one thing that the Boomers taught us, it's that the 20-somethings are always right.