I was born in 1996 and I feel stuck between 2 generations

Enter “zillennial” in the lexicon, which defines who I am. This is for those of us born in the late 1990s, at the peak of the millennial and Gen Z markers.

I feel like I don’t belong to any generation

The closer I get to 30, the more I’ve thought about how this micro-generation I’m a part of has shaped who I am today. For example, I’ve never been in a world where I couldn’t Google something. By the time I was born, there were about 45 million people online, and by 1999, that number was 150 million, per Elon University.

My time was not what seems to be the quintessential millennial experience. AOL’s instant messenger AIM launched in 1997, but I didn’t get an account until 2009, when I was 13, when it became obsolete. I joined Facebook in 2010, but that was long after the heyday of needing a college email to sign up. I never had a Myspace and ranked my best friends.

Snapchat and Instagram have been my daily sweet spots. Now I feel too old for TikTok.

This means that millennials are often considered the generational bridge between analog and digital, but some of us have pretty much always been online.

I feel lucky to have grown up with this access, but I also appreciate that my entire life hasn’t been digitized. To quote mid-2000s icon Hannah Montana, it was “the best of both worlds.”

I don’t complete remember the historical events that marked my generation because I was too young

On a more serious note, 9/11 and the Great Recession are world events that often define the millennial generation.

I was 5 years old on September 11, 2001, and while I may remember it more than most my age, having grown up an hour outside of Manhattan, the magnitude of the day didn’t diminish until I got older.

Although I have some first-hand memories, unlike Generation Z, most millennials were older children or teenagers and therefore better able to process what happened. I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like.

Regarding the recession, I learned about it in social studies class in middle school and when my mom lost her job. But I wasn’t about to graduate college in a torturous job market, a situation many millennials have found themselves in and thus hindered their future financial success.

That’s not to say millennials haven’t faced their struggles. For example, we were barely into our careers when the pandemic, lockdown and resulting recession started.

I feel nostalgic for the things I wasn’t a part of

From boy bands to platform flip flops, I often feel nostalgic for a millennial culture that I haven’t fully experienced.

I was slightly disappointed when “Mean Girls” was big enough to get a reboot. Although when the original came out in 2004, there was no way my parents would let me watch it since I was 8 years old.

For me, the zillennial zeitgeist was the golden age of Disney Channel, TikTok (the song, not the app), Wii sports, DJ Earworm’s 2009 mixtape (does anyone else know every word?), and the discovery of Taylor Swift in her pre-teens.

A few years ago, there was a much-discussed Medium post about “geriatric millennials” being the best equipped to handle a newly hybrid workforce. I may be able to play a similar role in the future.

Yes, I remember dial-ups and tapes, but I also don’t know the dating culture without apps. I can speak both languages.

I look back on the nostalgia of Y2K fashion, but I still buy their predecessors now in stores.

Turning 30 feels a bit like “last call” on whether the millennial generation is considered young; I write with some melancholy.

But age is just a number, right? Also, my refusal to part with my skinny jeans was already considered outdated.