Who’s a millennial? Who isn’t? The Washington D.C.-based Pew Research Center finally puts an end to the millennial debacle after officially identifying the birth years of the millennial: if you’re born between 1981 and 1996, then surprise, surprise, you are a part of the club.
The millennials are definitely a complex age group and without Pew’s revelatory study, remain as a hazy, ambiguous bracket unspared every now and then by bludgeoning manifold stereotypes from elders: at times deemed as whiny, lazy, vain and entitled special snowflakes.
“Pew Research Center has been studying the Millennial generation for more than a decade,” wrote Michael Dimock, president of the Pew Research Center, in their official website last March 1. “But as we enter 2018, it’s become clear to us that it’s time to determine a cutoff point between Millennials and the next generation. Turning 37 this year, the oldest Millennials are well into adulthood, and they first entered adulthood before today’s youngest adults were born.”
Generational cutoff points aren’t exactly a science, and should be viewed instead as tools. While the millennial generation holds no definitive threshold, Dimock settled with 1996 as a meaningful cutoff for analytical purposes due to political, economic and social factors that defined the generation’s formative years.
Technology is considered generation-shaping as millennials came of age during the internet explosion. Fluency in social media, constant online connectivity and communication are innovations that millennials have learned to adapt to and thrive in.
“We look forward to spending the next few years studying this generation as it enters adulthood,” Dimock said in finality. “All the while, we’ll keep in mind that generations are tense through which to understand societal change, rather than a label with which to oversimplify differences between groups.”
The next time you’re at a family reunion and met with an accusing finger of an uncle who monopolizes all dinner table conversations, perhaps you can point him to Pew. Millennials aren’t that bad. JB
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