Actually I think I can to some degree just because one of the biggest factors in my youth was the internet and eventually social media. I don’t think many Gen X folks can say that and growing up on it is a very very different thing than even getting way into it at 20. My biggest social influences would have had no way to reach me while I was young if I’d been born in 1970. Even if I’d been born in 1975 I likely would have had a different and much slower exposure. I don’t think it has ever been or will ever be the same world since this vector of interaction became available en masse. Also it’s changed so much and so rapidly that I also don’t think that younger people will ever really quite have the same kind of experience with it. To me the most defining aspect of being a Millennial is that experience… well that and the explosion of video games development… oh and routine 60k educations from shit colleges often by way of pretty shady loan deals.
Adding: also when I was young I was classed as Gen X and I never really considered myself a part of anything different. But I also always had the feeling that I’d just missed something important, like whatever major shaping factors I was supposed to be responding to felt distant ultimately to my immediate experience and whatever opportunities there were seemed like they’d been well established and deeply mined by others already. I was resistant to the idea of being a millennial at first because it seemed like a catch all (and also it’s just uncomfortable to get retconned into a generation) but as time has gone on I see how much easier it became to relate once the people a few years younger than me were basically also adults. I was married to a GenXer for about ten years during which time I learned a lot about punk rock, death rock, and counterculture in general. I couldn’t get in a pissing contest but I know all the lyrics to Saturday Night at the Bookstore… for better or worse. But hey, being able to say “I’m in love with a glory hole” makes for a nice breakup line. Again though this was largely me learning about something that had already happened.
