Zillennials And The Puberty Era of Technology

Although there’s not always consensus around where the generational lines are drawn, we can roughly group people born between certain years. What makes it useful is understanding the common experiences they all share to predict behavior or understand their decision-making better.

A Quick Catch-Up

For those unfamiliar, here’s the most recent generations, captured by year. Generation X starts roughly around 1960 until 1980. Generation Y, also called Millennials, start about 1981 and end around 1997 - this is the range I fall into. Generation Z start in 1998 and end around 2012 - this is the range my wife falls into. Generation Alpha begins in 2013 and ends around 2024 - this is the range my son falls into. Generation Beta begins in 2025 to present, and this is the range my daughter falls into.

It’s funny to think that my small family of four crosses four generations!

Getting Your Own Category

Obviously, though, not everyone fits cleanly into one category or another for a variety of reasons. Temperamentally, maybe you have more in common with the generation below you, or you’re an old soul and find yourself relating more with folks of previous generations.

Such is the case for what are considered “Zillennials” - or the younger Gen Y and older Gen Z cohort - that sit between years 1992-1998. What makes this group distinct is growing up with a direct experience of the analog to digital transformation. Future generations are almost solely defined by their relationships to technology, and Zillennials were there to witness that shift first-hand.

What often gets overlooked, however, is the particular technical skillset Zillennials acquired during that era, and why.

A Skillset Gained Through Trial and Error

When personal computers became more common, the user experience was rough compared to today. We take for granted the polished user interfaces and lightning fast experience of our modern devices, and can barely remember times before the decades it took it achieve our current level of polish (some may argue, too much polish).

Dial-up internet (if you even had a connection), transitioning away from floppy disks to CDs, and 480p CRT PC displays was your primary digital experience in the last 90s and early 2000s. If 60s were roughly the computer’s inception, the 70s were infancy, and 80s were its childhood years, the 90s and 2000s era can be described as the puberty era of technology.

What characterized this? Nothing really worked right the first time.

Anyone who grew up using technology in this era became experts in trial and error. They were tinkerers and experimenters. They downloaded viruses and discovered adult content by accident. They accidentally wiped their hard drives or stumbled on a goldmine of free music. They got to experience the wild west of the web before most websites became homogenized. They built a lot of what the internet became.

Older generations, by contrast, were less reluctant to adapt for two main reasons: firstly, many of them were change resistant by nature, and secondly had something to lose if they tried to make the transition from analog to digital. For example, imagine convincing a seasoned photographer to use digital cameras instead of physical film. Even at their best, digital cameras in the late 90s and early 2000s didn’t hold a candle to the quality of a standard analog camera + digital scan. Even if they settled for the compromises of the time in favor of the promise of the benefits it would reap in the future, there were new, unfamiliar risks. You needed to know about how files worked, storage backups, data failure, and how to send your photos to someone else.

Into the late 2000s and early 2010s, you’d assume the younger Gen Z audience would just become increasingly more sophisticated with technology use because they were digital natives, right? Well, no. That’s not what happened. After the Windows Vista era, software started getting really good. Devices became more reliable, and everything was better connected. This caused an offload of effort and knowledge by younger generations that simply didn’t need to be proficient technology tinkers or troubleshooters, and were able to get away with just being mere users instead. Prolific technology use does not necessarily translate into being a competent manager, fixer, or builder of technologies.

So here we are. The Zillennials that witnessed both the before & after and the rough & tumble of technology. Not all kept up with it, but those that did have generally stronger technical skills. Generation Alpha, also sometimes called iPad babies, can use devices, especially touch-based ones, as an extension of themselves. But as soon as something goes wrong, they’re just as clueless as baby boomer Grandma.

How This Manifests In My Family

There’s a five year gap between my wife and I. We’d both be considered Zillennials, but on the respective edges of the year range. The gap in our relationship to technology is surprisingly large. That isn’t to say Esther is not technical and I am - she is an incredibly competent technology user. Other factors are at play here, also - our current familial roles, where we are in life, and our preferences - but universally we are both consistently well-positioned to handle technical troubleshooting tasks with which generations both our senior and junior struggle.

My own brother and Esther’s brother who’s my age are the same way. Naturally technical and tech-comfortable compared to most. Other than anyone who specifically went into something like cybersecurity, software development, or another similar technical field, anecdotally I’ve observed the Zillennial range of people do handle technology issues better than most.

Obviously there are exceptions - but there’s something to be said growing up in the puberty era of technology. It forced you to content with more 1s and 0s than you would have otherwise. You got to pull back the curtain and understand a bit more how these machines work, and how the software runs - really, whether you wanted to or not. It was out of necessity to use technology. And now, many elements of this are being lost, especially with artificial intelligence closing the gap.

Generational Divides Growing Exponentially

Culturally, I’ve also observed growing polarization between generations as we go on. Here’s a fun exercise I did recently at a family gathering: ask Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT to list 5 different jokes in random order, one per a generation, and have your family guess which one is which. Here’s a prompt you can use:

I'm playing a game with some friends. Generate 5 jokes for me in random order, which I will read out loud. Pair each joke with the kind of joke a generation would tell, from Baby Boomers, to Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. The game will be that my friends have to guess which joke which generation's style of humor.

This is a topic on its own - there’s a pretty obvious move from grounded, relatable humor to absurdist, internet and meme-based inside jokes. As online subcultures form, and niches of niches generate the most obscure communities you could imagine, older generations are having trouble understanding anything later generations are saying. English phrases, sayings, and idioms have changed throughout the centuries, but not at this scale. Neighboring generations could at least decipher what was being said - however there are entire conversations Gen Alpha have that even my Gen Z contemporaries cannot understand. And I don’t mean fringe swaths of the population either, I’m talking mainstream Gen Alpha-speak can sound like a complete foreign language.

It seems obvious to blame technology, and more specifically the video games and internet, for this phenomena. No longer is internet use or gaming a fringe activity for nerds. It is ubiquitous in the culture. In spite of this, there’s a growing trend among younger generations to return to analog solutions. While their parents and grandparents are trapped on the AI slop hell hole that’s currently Facebook, kids are bringing physical cameras with them and buying dumb phones. AI fatigue is partially to blame, and the prominence of doom scrolling - all coalescing into a deliberate move to touch grass, and prioritize IRL experiences again.

Such an unexpected pendulum swing notwithstanding, I anticipate whatever quirks and tendencies Gen Beta ends up having - they’ll be even stranger than whatever baby boomers can possibly fathom about “kids these days” today.