Millennials
Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996. Most millennials are the children of baby boomers and older Gen Xers, and are often the parents of Generation Alpha.
As children in the late 1980s to 2000s, millennials saw the rise of the Information Age and Internet, being described by some as the first globalized generation. As adolescents and young adults in the late 1990s to 2010s, the generation was marked by a more upbeat youth culture, elevated familiarity with the Internet and technology in general, and usage of early social media platforms such as AOL Instant Messenger, LiveJournal, and Myspace. Between the 1990s and 2010s, people from developing countries became increasingly well-educated, a factor that boosted economic growth in these countries.
Millennials across the world have suffered significant economic disruption since starting their working lives, with many facing high levels of youth unemployment, student debt, and childcare costs in the wake of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 recession. They have been called the "Unluckiest Generation" in the US and other Western countries, as the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth and more recessions since entering the workforce than any other generation in history. Across the globe, millennials and subsequent generations have postponed marriage or living together as a couple. Millennials were born at a time of declining fertility rates around the world, and continue to have fewer children than their predecessors. Those in developing countries will continue to constitute the bulk of global population growth. In developed countries, young people of the 2010s were less inclined to have sex compared to their predecessors when they were the same age. Millennials in the West are less likely to be religious than their predecessors, but may identify as spiritual.
Terminology
Members of this demographic cohort are known as millennials because the oldest became adults around the turn of the millennium. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, known for creating the Strauss–Howe generational theory, are widely credited with naming the millennials. They coined the term in 1987, around the time children born in 1982 were entering kindergarten, and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the impending new millennium as the high school graduating class of 2000. They wrote about the cohort in their books Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.In August 1993, an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe teenagers of the day, then aged 13–19, who were at the time defined as different from Generation X. However, the 1974–1980 cohort was later re-identified by most media sources as the last wave of Generation X, and by 2003 Ad Age had moved their Generation Y starting year up to 1982. According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y," and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them."
Millennials are sometimes called Echo Boomers, due to them often being the offspring of the Baby Boomers, the increase in birth rates from the early 1980s to mid-1990s, and their generation's large size comparable to that of boomers. In the United States, the echo boom's birth rates peaked in August 1990 and a twentieth-century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued. Alternative names for this group include the Net Generation, Generation 9/11, Generation Next, Generation Me, and The Burnout Generation.
In 2018, Emily St. James, writing in Vox, complained that the word "millennial" had become meaningless. The term was then being habitually applied to all teenagers, even if they were actually members of Generation Z rather than Generation Y; it was also being indiscriminately applied to members of Generation X. As of 2015 and 2017, it was reported that some people considered the word "millennial" to be an insult.
Date and age range definitions
describes a millennial as a person "born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s". Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines millennial as "a person born in the 1980s or 1990s". Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Economist in 2018 that "generations are squishy concepts", but the 1981 to 1996 birth cohort is a "widely accepted" definition for millennials. Encyclopædia Britannica defines millennials as "the term used to describe a person born between 1981 and 1996, though different sources can vary by a year or two." The U.S. Census have said that "there is no official start and end date for when millennials were born" and they do not officially define millennials, but noted in 2022 that millennials are "colloquially defined as the cohort born from 1981 to 1996."The Pew Research Center defines millennials as the people born from 1981 to 1996, choosing these dates for "key political, economic and social factors", including memory of the 11 September terrorist attacks, and impact of the war on terror, Great Recession, and rise of the Internet. The United States Library of Congress explains that date ranges are 'subjective' and the traits of each cohort are generalized based around common economic, social, or political factors that happened during formative years. They acknowledge disagreements, complaints over date ranges, generation names, and the overgeneralized "personality" of each generation. However, they cite Pew's 1981–1996 definition to define millennials. Various media outlets, think tanks, and statistical organizations have cited or used the 1981–1996 definition, including the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Brookings Institution, Gallup, the Federal Reserve Board, and Statistics Canada.
Psychologist Jean Twenge defines millennials as those born from 1980 to 1994. Likewise, Australia's McCrindle Research uses 1980 to 1994 as Generation Y birth years. The Australian Bureau of Statistics uses the years 1981 to 1995 to define millennials in a 2021 Census report. A 2023 report by the Population Reference Bureau defines millennials as those born from 1981 to 1999. CNN reports that studies sometimes define millennials as born between 1980 and 2000. A 2017 BBC report has also referred to this age range in reference to that used by National Records of Scotland. In the UK, the Resolution Foundation uses 1981–2000. The U.S. Government Accountability Office defines millennials as those born between 1982 and 2000. Sociologist Elwood Carlson, who calls the generation "New Boomers", identified the birth years of 1983–2001, based on the upswing in births after 1983 and finishing with the "political and social challenges" that occurred after the 11 September terrorist acts. Author Neil Howe, co-creator of the Strauss–Howe generational theory, defines millennials as "born 1982–2005?".
The cohorts born during the cusp years before and after millennials have been identified as "microgenerations" with characteristics of both generations. Names given to these cuspers include Xennials, Generation Catalano, the Oregon Trail Generation; Zennials and Zillennials, respectively.
Psychology
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of the 2006 book Generation Me, considers millennials, along with younger members of Generation X, to be part of what she calls "Generation Me". Twenge attributes millennials with the traits of confidence and tolerance, but also describes a sense of entitlement and narcissism, based on NPI surveys showing increased narcissism among millennials compared to preceding generations when they were teens and in their twenties. Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett of Clark University, Worcester has criticized Twenge's research on narcissism among millennials, stating "I think she is vastly misinterpreting or over-interpreting the data, and I think it's destructive". He doubts that the Narcissistic Personality Inventory really measures narcissism at all. Arnett says that not only are millennials less narcissistic, they're "an exceptionally generous generation that holds great promise for improving the world". A study published in 2017 in the journal Psychological Science found a small decline in narcissism among young people since the 1990s.Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe argue that each generation has common characteristics that give it a specific character with four basic generational archetypes, repeating in a cycle. According to their hypothesis, they predicted millennials would become more like the "civic-minded" G.I. Generation with a strong sense of community both local and global. Strauss and Howe ascribe seven basic traits to the millennial cohort: special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving. However, Arthur E. Levine, author of When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today's College Student, dismissed these generational images as "stereotypes". In addition, psychologist Jean Twenge says Strauss and Howe's assertions are overly deterministic, non-falsifiable, and unsupported by rigorous evidence.
Polling agency Ipsos-MORI warned that the word "millennials" is "misused to the point where it's often mistaken for just another meaningless buzzword" because "many of the claims made about millennial characteristics are simplified, misinterpreted or just plain wrong, which can mean real differences get lost" and that "qually important are the similarities between other generations—the attitudes and behaviors that are staying the same are sometimes just as important and surprising."
Though it is often said that millennials ignore conventional advertising, they are in fact heavily influenced by it. They are particularly sensitive to appeals to transparency, to experiences rather than things, and flexibility.
A 2015 study by Microsoft found that 77% of respondents aged 18 to 24 said yes to the statement, "When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone," compared to just 10% for those aged 65 and over.
The term has been used to denote anxiety experienced by many Japanese millennials struggling with a sense of disconnectedness and self-blaming, caused by a vast array of issues from unemployment, poverty, family problems, bullying, social withdrawal and mental ill-health.