Millennium

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 Generation X.

Millennial, term used to describe a person born between 1981 and 1996, though different sources can vary by a year or two. It was first used in the book Generations (1991) by William Strauss and Neil Howe, who felt it was an appropriate name for the first generation to reach adulthood in the new millennium. Millennials are the cohort between Generation X (Gen X; defined as those born between 1965 and 1980) and Generation Z (Gen Z; defined as those born from about 1997 to the early 2010s).

Defining events and characteristics

Comprising some 72 million individuals in the United States, millennials surpassed the baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) to become the largest generation of adults in 2019. Millennials in the United States grew up during a period of relative stability and economic prosperity. In their 2000 book, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, Howe and Strauss noted that millennials had “never known a year in which America doesn’t get richer.” The September 11, 2001, attacks, however, punctured the semblance of security millennials had known up until then. Most were old enough to remember the events and to recognize their significance. The terrorist attacks were the first of a number of crises that defined millennials’ adulthoods; others were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose costly failures made millennials question the idea of American exceptionalism; and the Great Recession of 2007–09, which contributed to millennials’ difficulty in achieving the same milestones and affluence of earlier generations. Some scholars have remarked that millennials in the West are the first modern generation to be economically worse off than their parents. This generation, however, is also known for being adaptable. Indeed, they are considered the first digital generation, quickly acclimating to new technologies, including smartphones, social media, and streaming entertainment. They are the generation that has received the most formal education. They are also more diverse and more politically liberal when compared with earlier generations (later generations show signs of eventually surpassing millennials in many of these categories).

The rise of the Internet

One of the defining characteristics of millennials around the world is that they came of age during an era of major technological shifts, especially those associated with the rise of the Internet. In the United States, millennials are the first generation to have access to computers, cell phones, and smartphones from a young age. As young adults, they were the target consumers for social media and streaming entertainment. The rapid advancement of technology, however, created a nuanced subcohort. Younger millennials, for example, tend to be more comfortable with technology than older millennials. Moreover, millennials’ experiences with the Internet vary around the globe, depending on the reliability of their country’s networks. Although parts of the non-Western world are rapidly growing their networks, Internet access remains less reliable in those places than in the West.Millennials are the first generation to integrate all manner of digital technology into their daily lives. They use social media to keep up with friends (using websites such as Facebook and apps such as Instagram and TikTok on their phones), date (on apps that include Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge), network (on the website LinkedIn), shop (on Amazon and other websites), and consume entertainment (using YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, and others). Irish author Sally Rooney, who has been called “the first great millennial novelist,” skillfully captures the types of conversations young people have over e-mail and text and how those technology-based exchanges often result in miscommunication and isolation.