I’m almost, but not quite, a millennial

KATY HARRINGTON

I’M an almost millennial. I was born at the tail end of 1980 — a millennial is defined as someone born between 1981-1996 — so technically I’m Generation X and yet I’m far closer in every way to a millennial than I am to a Gen Xer born in 1965. Yet I often feel out of sync with my millennial peers. I remember having to ask a younger colleague what the hell ‘bae’ meant, I can’t name a single Drake song, I haven’t a fig what a VSCO girl is and I have never and will never watch anything on TikTok.

When I was growing up we didn’t have mobile phones. If you were meeting a friend in town you met them outside the entrance to Cash’s in Cork (now Brown Thomas) and if they didn’t show up on time you just waited. No frantic text exchanges (OMG I’m on the bus, will be there soooon, sorry! 5 mins away promise! Literally around the corner. I’m here! Where r u??). No one was panicking about climate change either, but we were all anti-CFCs because of the hole in the ozone layer (which I assume my switch to roll-on deodorant solved because no one mentions it any more).

We woke up to actual alarm clocks (loud enough to wake the neighbours), waited two weeks to get our holiday snaps developed (only to discover they were all thumbs) and everyone had awful highlights and terrible hair. What I’m most grateful for is that I grew up preInstagram, which for a very silly site full of pictures of pretty people eating breakfast, seems to have taken on way too much importance today. While I feel a bit left out and have never successfully used the correct emoji in context, I’m grateful to millennials for many things, including the way their generation has made standing out, not fitting in, a badge of honour, and for the unapologetic way they put mental health and consent on the agenda. And, of course, for avocado on toast.