Being a Xennial

I'm a Xennial (est. 1982), which is a microgeneration stuffed between Generation X and Millenials. I know it sounds like frontier Millenials are just trying to put some distance between ourselves and the Millenial generation that we find loathsome, but I think there is legitimacy here. My sister is 10 years younger than me and I feel like we had very different childhoods.

I think Xennials are marked by a transition: from analog to digital and from locally-owned businesses to national chains.

Business

I was too young to realize it at the time, but a revolution occurred during my youth in which the market severely disrupted the community. When I was about 8 or 9, my dad built a treehouse for me and my brother. I went with him to the local hardware store in town and to a local lumber yard a town over to pick up supplies. Both of those places went out of business a few years later and are currently empty.

Now, you can drive 15 minutes in either direction and get everything at Home Depot or Lowe's.

If you wanted a movie, there were three locally owned video rental stores in town. If you wanted to rent a Nintendo game, you had to know which store carried it. Kid Icarus was only at the store on the north side of town, and you had to hope no one else had rented the only copy.

By the time I was in high school, a Blockbuster moved in and all of those stores went out of business. Blockbuster carried multiple copies of everything, you could rent it for longer, it cost less, and you could get a trial version of America Online on CD-ROM. (Of course, Netflix has put Blockbuster out of business but that narrative is Major Chain disrupting Major Chain, rather than Major Chain disrupting Local Business Owner.)

In the center of town, an old Victorian home had been converted into a clothing store. A few miles away a Walmart came in a put an end to that.

The weird thing is, Xennials welcomed the new chainification of America. I had warm feelings toward Home Depot, Blockbuster, and even Walmart. I wasn't alive long enough to have an emotional connection to the Mom and Pop stores that got driven out. This is what makes Xennials unique.

But here is what I do miss: My town is a post-agricultural bedroom community. About 17,000 residents. A farm or two. A liberal arts college campus. A marina along a river. The aforementioned Walmart, Home Depot, and Blockbuster? None of them are in my town. I have to travel to a larger, neighboring town to use their services. All the locally-owned businesses they disrupted were a bike ride away. I miss that convenience.

Technology

Although I don't think I ever used a typewriter for a book report, I did use a PC  with no internet connection, which is a weird thing to think about. It's like the opposite of a Chromebook.

In high school, we didn't have social media but we did have AOL messenger, which was pretty close. But we were limited because in order to use it you had to be on the family desktop and tying up the phone line. So for the most part, if you wanted to talk to peers, you had to call them or meet up somewhere.

I don't think today's youth experience aimless driving like we did. Since we weren't attached to cell phones, we couldn't always be reached. That means we spent a lot of time just driving around, hoping to run into someone out and about.

When I entered college in the fall of 2000, two of my friends had cell phones. By the time I graduated in 2004, everyone had one. Prior to my first cell phone, I kept a paper in my wallet with everyone's phone number. Either that or you had to commit it to memory, and let me tell you: I probably knew 20 phone numbers by heart.

Our Place

Even though I'm closing in on 40, I'm still below the median age in my office. Which means that sometimes I'm the guy who has to explain technology to people. I'm talking people only 15 years older than me sometimes. And it isn't difficult technology, it's things like doing screenshots or using the find function (control+F).

Part of me used to think "This will be me someday. Technology will pass me by and some youngin' will have to help me." But maybe it won't. Maybe swift change and disruption has been a part of my life for so long that it has become the norm. 

I actually get excited about learning new technology. I'm never so comfortable with existing tech that I don't want to learn something new.

Moore's law states that the number of transistors in a circuit doubles every two years. We see similar patterns with population growth. It took 127 years for the world population to double from one billion to two and only 47 years to double from two billion to four. Since 1960, world population has grown by about one billion every 13 years. 

Eamonn Healy, talks about this exponential growth in Waking Life. 

"Two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it ... And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years ... What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime." (watch the whole scene here.)

Maybe that is already happening. I'm used to paradigm shifts and disruptive changes because they happen within my lifetime. But I'm also sensitive to my elders because I remember the old analog world.

This is what it means to be a Xennial; to have one foot in the past while excitedly finding my footing in an protean future.