Last week, my husband celebrated a milestone birthday and nothing gives a person pause quite like starting a new decade. As we reflected on the past 10 years and took inventory of where he is now, at 30, we came to the realization that we aren’t sure we belong entirely to one generation. We seem to straddle the fence between Gen X and Gen Y/Millennial – not quite as established as the 40-something Gen Xers but certainly not as on-trend with the Millennials born post-1990.
While my husband works in IT now and is extremely tech-savvy, he and I were both brought up rather traditionally, our parents subscribing to more old-school than new-age approaches to child-rearing. We like tattoos but don’t have any. We have a landline phone but could live without it. We text often but not to excess.
To confirm my suspicions that we are generational orphans, I took a short quiz that a friend of mine shared on Facebook from the Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C., to let the pros tell me how Millennial I am or am not. (It only takes a minute or two!)
My friend who originally posted this quiz scored a whopping 94 out of 100. Me? 49. No, the numbers are not transposed. I really scored a 49. It’s OK to laugh – I did! (For reference, my borderline-Boomer colleague scored a 41.)
But even if no generation can claim me, I feel like I’m in a good place and enjoy a nice balance of X and Y. My co-workers might tease me for being an 80-year-old trapped in a 28-year-old’s body but don’t I get a little credit for blogging about something a friend shared via Facebook? I’m hip! I’m with it!*
How about you? Do you fit in with your assigned generation? How did you score on Pew’s quiz? What do you think impacts how well a person belongs with his/her age group? What does this say about marketing homogeneously to Millennials – or any generation?
*If you have to say you’re hip and with it, you’re not hip and with it, are you?