Yes, I’m a millennial. No, I didn’t grow up with smartphones

Millennials aren’t just a generation derided, we are generation divided, and nowhere is this more apparent than our attitudes toward technology and social media, where many older millennials have more in common with Gen-Xers.

Thestar.com
May 10, 2017
By Emma Teitel

This week in news about everyone’s least favourite demographic (hint: they’re under 40, and word has it, they’re ingrates) we learned the following: According to Vogue, “Millennial men want their wives to stay at home.” According to the Washington Examiner, “Fights over Trump drive couples, especially millennials, to split up.” And, says Forbes: millennials are turning to “apps for financial clarity.”

So it goes that every week produces a fresh news cycle about what millennials do and don’t do with little context about who we actually are. And who we are is an important question when publishing stories about millions of people, some of whom are separated in age by almost 20 years.

After all, a millennial is anybody on this planet aged 18-34, an enormous gap, both psychologically and practically. It is the difference between adolescence and adulthood, financial dependence and freedom, and at the risk of being crude, cleaning up your own vomit after a night out and cleaning up your infant’s after many a night in.

Yet media continue to paint with a massively broad brush a demographic that runs the gamut from teenagers who have never heard of Kurt Cobain to 34-year-old moms who can tell you exactly where they were the day he died.

Millennials aren’t just a generation derided; we are generation divided.

“There is a lot of variation in experience and attitudes in the millennial generation,” says Jean M. Twenge, psychologist and author of Generation Me and the forthcoming book iGen, about young people born in the mid-90s and onwards.

For example, there are old millennials (those of us - myself included - born before 1995) and young millennials (those born between 1995 and 1999). Old millennials came of age when Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were famous for being famous; young millennials grew up watching the significantly more voluptuous Kardashian clan (no doubt just as vapid, but arguably far better TV for anyone with body image issues).

When old millennials think something is cool we say it’s “sick.” When young millennials think something is cool or exciting, they say it’s “lit” or “fire.” Old millennial women plucked their eyebrows to oblivion when they were in high school; young millennial women went au naturel.

But perhaps the most profound difference between old and young millennials is technology.

Young millennials, argues Twenge, or “iGen” as she refers to them, never knew adolescence without smartphones and social media. The iPhone, introduced in 2007, permeated their teenage social lives from beginning to end.

But for old millennials like me (I’m 28, I graduated from high school in 2007) social media and smartphone technology appeared smack-dab in the middle of our adolescence and college years.

When I was in high school, nobody had a smartphone. Instead, thanks to a newly invented social media website called Facebook, digital cameras blew up in popularity. From 2004 onwards, house parties in my neighbourhood became overrun with teenage girls wearing cameras around their necks, snapping photos of partygoers and then uploading them to Facebook hours later.

Many people found this new social surveillance trend annoying and invasive, especially if they had strict parents and didn’t want to be caught on camera drinking beer. I once threw a house party with a “no digital camera” policy because I didn’t want a photographic record of the mess I made while my parents were away. (Of course, nobody listened to me.)

The point being: old millennials didn’t emerge from the womb taking selfies. We were forced to rapidly adapt to a social media culture, and many of us didn’t - and still don’t - want to.

Not even Drake, apparently.

Last year, in an essay for the Ringer, a sports and pop culture website, writer Lindsay Zoladz wondered if Drake, 30, is less prolific on social media than his 24-year-old rap contemporary Chance the Rapper, precisely because he is an “old millennial.”

“Drake feels a little uneasy about it (social media) because he’s old enough to remember what human interactions were like before it came along,” writes Zoladz.

In fact, Twenge says that many older millennials actually have more in common with members of Generation X when it comes to how they use and perceive technology than they do with younger millennials. (In other words, Drake’s feelings about Twitter and Facebook are probably closer aligned with Ja Rule’s than they are with Chance the Rapper’s.)

Why does this distinction matter? Well, moving away from Drake (who doesn’t have to worry about being underpaid and overworked) it matters because old millennials, those of us in our late 20s and early 30s, make up a vast segment of the young workforce. And the popular myth that we are preternaturally obsessed with technology renders us vulnerable to exploitation because our employers - most of whom are baby boomers and Gen-Xers - assume we don’t mind being attached to our phones and laptops 24 hours a day.

They assume that, like the digital natives who comprise the younger population of our demographic, we came of age online like it was no big deal. But we didn’t. We came of age minding our own business, until a new technology changed our lives almost overnight.

And many of us remain just as uneasy about that change as our elders do.