Generation Xennial – Why it is very lucky to be born between 1977 and 1985

After an analog childhood a digital youth dawned for us … Although we are somewhere between Generation X and Generation Millennials, we have our own name. Rightly. Because we're neither millennials nor 70s kids and still somehow both.

I was born in 1984, the year Orwell said the future came about. Whenever I read about "my generation" it is a bit strange. First, because the experts disagree on whether I belong to the pessimistic-melancholy Generation X or whether I can be counted among the marginally optimistic millennials with a clear conscience. And second: Because I would not accept either one or the other. The truth is: both are not true. Or both are true. Anyone born between 1977 and 1985 cannot be pigeonholed. You need two. Fortunately, science has now recognized this and given us a name of our own: We are the XENNIALS. The in-between generation that deserves its own name.

Our analog childhood

When we were little, most of us didn't even have a computer in our house. We turned the tapes on our cassettes back on with pencils, played outside or with Playmobil all day, and let Sesame Street shower us at most in the evening. In photos we look as tasteless as the 90s kids, but technically we were still flashed from the rich neighbour's car phone and thought TETRIS was an exciting action game.

Then we got bigger and the phones got smaller and smaller

I still remember my childhood phone. It had a turntable, was green, and its long, twisted cord always got tangled in your legs when you cracked on Mama's lap while she was sitting in the phone chair. Telephone chair … lovely, isn't it? At some point a push-button phone came into the house, then suddenly there was no more cord. When I was 16, I finally bought my first monstrous phone: a Philips Savvy. A few years later a Nokia 7210 that you could play Snake on. What would be the maximum penalty for my daughter today was the greatest for me back then. It was the first time I felt like I was digitally leaving my own parents behind. I was the queen of text messaging, I could even text blindly under the table. I felt so at the navel of time. And that's what I was.

Why Xennials are a damn wacky generation

The term "Xennials" was used for the first time in 2014 in an article by the author Sarah Stankorb in Good magazine to look at the generation between Generation X and Millennials separately. She herself is "happy to be a Xennial," she writes. Why is it that? I can think of a lot of reasons …

1. I don't want to miss my analog childhood. It is estimated that the Gameboy has not made a child's life better.

2. I'm glad that the digital world didn't just confuse me in adulthood. As a teen, everything confuses you anyway. I didn't even notice that everything was changing.

3. I was 17 on September 11, 2001, but I hardly noticed the Cold War at all. So my childhood felt like a very carefree time for everyone.

4. Forget the 80s and forget the 2000s. 90s parties are still the hottest parties for good reasons. For very good reasons !!! We can proudly say: The soundtrack of our youth is the coolest of them all.

5. We have always been pioneers. We still know floppy disks, the modem noise, ICQ, Studi-VZ and myspace. We are used to the world turning quickly. That's why we still come with us today when our children tell us about their reality.

6. Go straight to work after leaving school like Generation X? Not with us! We already had the millennials' drive for self-realization in our blood and have seen something of the world.

7. We are proven more optimistic than Generation X., but not as megalomaniac and over-euphoric as our younger siblings.

This list could go on and on. But to get to the point: we got the best of both worlds. Or as Sarah Stankorb puts it: "We were born at dawn". That doesn't just sound nice. It is. We are really lucky, born at the dawn of a new era. And the best thing is: we know that too.