Let’s be honest, there are a lot of generational wars being fought right now. Gen Z has come for Millennials with the phrase “cheugy“, and Millennials have been dragged by baby boomers for years for our avocado toast and inability to afford a house (don’t forget who got us into these financial crises, please).
It appears that all the targeting has been at Millennials, to be honest. And now, another term has been coined to attack us even further — well, some of us, at least.
For those born between 1980 and 1985 — who straddle the cusp of Gen X, and only just squeeze into the definition of Millennial — the new label for them is “geriatric millennial”. Nice, right?
The term first went viral thanks to a Medium article Why the Hybrid Workforce of the Future Depends on the ‘Geriatric Millennial’, where author of the piece Erica Dhawan spoke about how this “micro-generation” are working across generational divides — and how this sub-group could be poised to lead.
Responses were swift, with many people saying that there was already a term for geriatric millennials: Xennials. The definitions for both are similar, being “the first generation to grow up with technology like PCs in their home”; being comfortable with analog and digital forms of communication; having weathered AOL Instant Messenger, Friendster, and MySpace friendship rankings while being able to navigate TikTok and ClubHouse.
People on Twitter embraced the term more openly — or took the piss, take your pick. Some embraced the new designation and implored all the damn kids to get off their lawn; others called for people to leave them alone already as they enjoyed ginger ale, diners, drive-ins and dives reruns. Meena Harris, niece of US Vice President Kamala Harris rejected and denounced the term, unless it comes with a discount code.
https://twitter.com/ohstephco1/status/1396656866508345344
Dhawan ended up penning a follow-up piece in response to the feedback the original article received — that she wrote she was “astonished” by — and said that the argument at the heart of her piece was that “the speed of technological adoption makes it wrong to see an entire generation (spanning almost a 20-year difference) as being the same.”
How long until geriatric millennials go along with it, and embrace being a grandmillennial as well?
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