Were you born in 1981? (or close, within a year or two)
Do you have trouble fitting in or identifying with any particular generation, being on the fridge of all of it?
Are you an 80s kid or a 90s kid?
Are you Generation X or a Millennial?
Do you remember a time before the internet, social media, touch screens, and instant gratification access to everything online, and yet also feel completely at home with these things, since you were young and “grew up” with it as it all developed, yet at the same time feel you could live without all these things if needed (or even by choice)?
@TrabanT brought this up to me and we started talking about it in private, but seems there are a few others of you out there, so we thought it would be cool to make a public discussion and see if anyone else feels the same way.
I personally feel it is a very awkward but interesting time to have been born, to be “just ahead of” the bloom of the internet age, to have watched it grow, and to have grown with it. I don’t feel I fit in with Millennials, I’m too “grown up” for them. Yet I also don’t feel I fit in with older “pre-internet” people. I just “get” computer tech/internet tech in a way that they don’t (as a broad generalization of course).
I used to think it was funny to see a 5 year old with a cell phone, face glued to their Minecraft world, but now it worries me, as it is no longer a rare scene but an all-too-common one. I wonder how dependent they are becoming on that virtual world (not Minecraft, but the internet world, the social media world), and the fact that they are growing up with only that and no foundation of anything prior to it. And I feel that’s a strange statement for me to say, someone who was addicted to MMORPG’s (online virtual worlds) for a long time throughout the late 90s and early 2000s.
On a global, economic, political level also, the world has seen some dramatic changes over the past 20-30 years. Mass shootings and school shootings (here in the US anyway) are becoming way too prevalent. Mass killings of various sorts in other countries, while maybe not with guns, have been equally as devastating and seem to be becoming more common as well. When I was younger I don’t remember this stuff being so prevalent. Yes, something would happen once in a while, but now it’s almost commonplace and expected to see something about some devastating attack somewhere or other. Is this because the attacks are becoming more frequent, or because we have more immediate access to news about them?
From a musical perspective I don’t feel I fit in with any particular musical decade. I can’t say I’m an 80’s kid because I wasn’t really listening to music when I was 6, 7, 8… Yet I can’t really say I’m a 90’s kid because that would include a lot of the later-half of the 90s, where I was no longer a kid. So it’s like I’m a on the cusp, late 80s, early 90s is my “prime” as far as childhood exposure to music goes.
If you are an 81 kid, please contribute your thoughts, whatever they may be!
And sorry of this post is kind of disjointed, trying to pull in the main topics we already covered in private!
Also found a few articles out there about this very topic, interesting, didn’t know it was really a thing!