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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.)

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.

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.

True of all generational symbologies.

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"?

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 :)

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.

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

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.

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