Old millennials vs. new millennials
Late last month, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary in New York state’s 14th U.S. Congressional District, beating incumbent and Dem insider Joseph Crowley in a bombshell win.
The media theatre that followed inevitably took up Ocasio-Cortez’s age (also a side door into commentary about how she used to be a bartender, and is cute). “A millennial!” the coverage trilled, baffled or impressed that someone from the Avocado Toast Generation pulled it off, as if Ocasio-Cortez and her cohort were still, essentially, kids.
“Millennials,” as an idea and socioeconomic concern, has become shorthand for categorizing everything strange and unknowable about people under age 40, a generation denying the obligations and opportunities of car and home ownership, steady employment and stability, who sleep with their phones, and maybe receive new forms of language and sex and work and power in their sleep. But millennials are grown now, players, a constituency being absorbed into, and changing, the firmament.
A confusion within the confusion is a distinction that is known only or mostly to millennials themselves: the generation is better and more usefully understood (insofar as any generation can be considered in any way cohesive, beyond the social, political and cultural gales that met them) as two uneven halves of a whole, with Early or Old millennials, born in the early to mid-1980s, many of them more aligned with Generation X before them, and New, or Young, or Late millennials, born after that and for the next 15 years-ish, before Generation Z, who arrived around 2000.
What is delineated between the Old and the New is what happened in the respective youths of each group: Old Mills, such as I, experienced crushes and best friends and homework and adolescence free of the overwhelming influence of the internet, and Young Mills did not. That’s not a distinction only of nostalgic value — it colours everything that comes after.
This is, to me, luck, subjectively the wild, grassy fortune of my life.
Young Mills have their own luck, are digital geniuses, seem even further removed from the stigmas and dogmas of previous generations — see, for instance, Ocasio-Cortez — which maybe confirms the Early and Late distinction. I had a cellphone and email address and sense of “online” and its possibilities in high school, but not before, so I was still pushed outside to play (mostly, I read), but then later, transitioned easily to an al- ways-on, always-online paradigm that was largely created by my own cohort (Mark Zuckerberg is, of course, a millennial), my 10,000 hours of practice, the not entirely accurate shorthand attributed to Malcolm Gladwell about what it takes to become expert in something, achieved through sleepovers spent messing around on IM and IRC and ICQ, weekends dropping in on LAN parties (and then leaving to do something cool), and the kind of texting that, and this was obvious to us even then in our Motorola Razr fever dreams, was so slow and painful as to be nearly useless.
Sort-of-Young Mills arrived as teenagers with broadband internet; Young-Young-Mills always had it, and with it, the ubiquity of porn and a whole new schema of sociosexual values, and online bullying, and the idea that spending hours a day looking at screens was, you know, fine.
What is lost and what is gained by any innovation, from radio to Tinder, is a boring debate for the ages, much like which generation is “better,” as if that could ever . . . be, but it’s meaningful to me, having been there and then here, that the phone — the landline — was the last element of Old Mill social life that refused its user a totally online projection of themselves.
A landline mediated between a real-life and other self, only degrees away from how presmart cellphones did, but calling someone meant possibly talking to their parents, and following a script created by the social contract that seems to have been voided, even in business.
(I’ve worked with Young Mill and Gen Z journalism interns who are too uncomfortable to cold-call sources, or too comfortable in their own awkwardness to do it well, effectively bouncing themselves from a career, and maybe others, that involves some old-school social savvy.)
Land lines were bounded by time, too, which meant that after-hours contact had to be IRL.
That I was pinged via my bedroom window being hit by stones and dirt clumps liberated from my parents’ landscaping, instead of “U up?” texts is, to me, the distillation of Old Mill luck: there was a time, however brief, where Old Mills were conscious of what we were about to lose.