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Comment by forkLding | Hacker News Reader

I do feel like people need to stop putting the word "Millennial" in titles or treating that word as an actual definition of a group of people.

I feel grouping groups of 18 to 40 year olds (or any other arbitrary starting and ending age depending on the definition of millennial we're using) as one category called Millennial is one of the most confusing terms. You can't even use it as a scientific classification or categorization or even define a person properly using the word Millennial because definitions vary and the person could be 20, 30 or as in this article, 36.

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Well to be fair if “Millenial” is used in a caption then it’s probably about a man, halving the number of possibilities who it could be to just, dunno, a billion people or so? Because if it’s about a woman, she’s likely to just be called “woman” in headlines the same way, regardless of age. WaPo just titled “Smithsonian names woman to top post at American History Museum” a few days ago. Same nonsense. How hard is it to just state a person’s name/age/whatever the relevant characteristic is? Because is surely isn’t gender or a very vague age group statement.

I'm surprised nobody's tried to coin "millenienne" or something similar. I suppose we have the new phrase "#metoo generation", referring to the "new phenomenon" of women who object loudly to being sexually assaulted.

#me2ennial

Not to mention the "descriptivist" definitions of millennial when they use it to complain about kids in middle or high school. It may be wrong but if it becomes prevalent enough it is own meaning.

Millennial typically covers people born from the early 80's through the 90's. The oldest millennials are about 36 right now.

TIL I'm one of those millennials people keep complaining about.

I thought it was people born after the turn of the millenium.

What happended to "gen Y"?

Gen Y == Millennial

This is why there is a Generation X/Millennial "transition" group of people that is sometimes referred to a Xennials[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

It’s people who became adults around the turn of the millennium, not people born then.

Or at least people who were aware around the turn of the millennium; a 25 year old is a millennial, but an 18 year old probably isn't, for example.

Both Gen Y and Millennials were the generation after Gen X, but different analysts placed the cutoff at different points and around different events. The people who coined the phrase 'millennial' thought that generation started in '82 and ended in '02 while the people who came up with the name Gen Y were, if I recall correctly, placing the cutoffs at '78 and '98 (or thereabouts).

'Millennial' seems to have been the catchier name, so it stuck around more - I think most people who are Millennial or Gen Y are also the other.

Ended in '00 you mean? But earlier comments allude to whether the person remembers 9/11 or is aware at the turn of the millenium. So that probably results in a range from '82 to '96.

Millennial was a renaming of gen Y. People born after the turn of the millennium are normally down as gen Z, though I assume someone will come up with a snappier name for that in time. Precisely what their view on avocados is remains unclear.

Note that if you're in the older end of the cohort (mid-30s), there's some effort to rebrand those as 'Xennials', if for some reason you're really bothered by being called a millennial :)

Different groups define different age ranges for this group. The earliest would then put the age at 39 or even 40.

The point remains, however, is that the span is too great for a single term to define them to any degree whatsoever.

The one that makes most sense to me, and seems to correspond with most descriptions, is people born before the millenium who became adults after it.

The cutoff I've always heard, is if you remember 9/11. (Millenials are a primarily US phenomenon, so that would be a major cultural milestone.)

That would be damn near everyone, unless you mean people that don’t remember 9/11 are millennials, which is false. No one born in the 2000s could be a millenial, you must have been “growing up” into adolescence during the first decade of the new millennium, and must have witnessed the shift from the analog to the modern digital era.

Remembering the actual event would probably mean you were around 5 at the time, and a cutoff that gets thrown around would be 1995.

The people after 1995 are the next generation after millennials.

How old do you reckon someone would have to be to remember something like that? 5 years old? 10 years old?

Not to dox myself, but I was about five when the event happened, and my brother who is three does not recall it.

True of all generational symbologies.

"A 36-year-olds’s Tiny Satellites Are Helping China Advance in the Space Race"

Is 3 letters longer.

the guy definitely looks 36

Hey don't worry so much, Millennials are a perfectly cromulent granfaloon.

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