The difference a generation makes
Millennials, gen-Xers approach internet in different ways
The day that my husband, Simon, and I picked up the keys to our new, billionyear-old house, I posted a photo on Instagram of a shelf of champagne, taken on the quick at the LCBO while I decided between celebratory Moet and Veuve to drink out of red cups on our new, crumbling deck.
In the doing and the documenting, I was creating a pop-and-fizz narrative of an official life event, even though I was tired and irritable when we got to the house and poured most of my drink out onto the dirt where the lawn should have been — and pushed Simon to finish the bottle of warm, now-gross champagne himself.
Weeks later, I posted an appreciative, admiring pic of Simon’s dirt tan, from doing the demolition mostly alone (I cried under my HEPA mask and took discursive journeys to Home Depot instead of helping), and then posted a photo of the pretty, swaying trees in the backyard. Both snapshots captured genuine moments of feelings about buying a house, and life, and marriage, and whatever else rises occasionally from the domestic smog of to-do lists, and budgets and arguments about what colour “cream” is.
My social-media approach was, and is, careful, if not exactly posed; obscured and zoomed in to the point of uselessness, and maybe a little smug, which is hard to avoid when you’re using the social-media style of performative happiness, especially a happiness that you didn’t really expect to happen.
Simon’s, on the other hand, seems informed by an entirely different, much earlier version of the internet and how to use it. He live-posted the multitiered renovation process in albums of photos taken at confusing, overexposed, artless angles, intended for our immediate families and any friends also in the dusty microcosm of renovating, documenting something he’d worked toward and worked hard on.
My husband is nine years older than I am. He’ll say “eight-and-three-quarters,” and I’ll say “a decade.” We had some friends in common, but we really met on Twitter, where I am cool (or was in 2008) and he was lurking.
The Instagram-versus-Facebook renovation divide is when I first understood our age and generational differences: for Simon, a gen-Xer, Facebook is an opportunity, a way to reintroduce relationships and keep them going. For me, a millennial, Facebook is an obligation, an uncuttable cord to a lot of people I met once and then never got away from.
If this historical moment is when and where change is happening with more velocity than in any previous time, with the exponential shifts in technology knocking into every part of life like a constantly exploding cloverleaf, differences in relationships across generations will be more obvious than they’ve been before.
The delineation between recent demographic cohorts is vague, but it helps to think of it like this: Generation Xers, born in the ’60s and ’70s, didn’t have the internet until they were adults, which is why they didn’t know how to metabolize social media and use Facebook (sorry) like kindergarteners with a blank sheet of paper and a fresh pack of markers. Old millennials, like me, got cellphones and email addresses in high school — which was the ideal scenario, because we got to have actual, offline childhoods, plus we know how to code — while new millennials, born after 1985-ish, grew up with the internet. (Generation Z, which started somewhere in the mid-1990s or mid-2000s, have absorbed it into their cells).
As Simon pointed out to me, his generation was the last to “be promised a better future than our parents,” while “yours was not.” Instead, what my generation got was total, liberating, terrifying freedom: no religion, no rules, no promises, no jobs, no security, no shame.
This, I think, stretches in two directions: Millennials are flexible, communicative, therapized, self-reliant and optimistic, but as my older sister, a gen-X exec-type whose career was not encouraged by “Girlboss”-style sisterhood, pointed out, millennials are more likely to clash with their older colleagues who didn’t have the expectation of summer Fridays off, or office beer.
Every relationship has differences, but between X’s and mills, the biggest one seems to be that one cohort got to be adults, and the other really didn’t.