PicoBlog

Of late, I’ve noticed that the algorithm gods have started feeding me a steady stream of nostalgia posts targeted directly to the fact that I grew up in the 1990s. Stuff like pictures of landline telephones with a question like: Do you remember using one of these? You’re this old if you do.

I always ‘like’ these posts. It’s an easy trick to get a generation engaged – to hook them in with content that speaks to their youth and remind them of how much things have changed. Really and truly, these kind of cheap memes should really be scrolled past without mention, but nope, this geriatric millennial over here stops, every time, and hits that like button in heart-shaped confirmation of the nostalgia that only people of my age group can share.

Geriatric millennial. That’s the technical, unofficial name that has been given over to people, like me, born in the early 1980s, adjacent to the Generation Xers prior, but notable older than the Gen Z ‘young people’ who look at us with a combination of fascination and pity, if not a little frustration, I’m sure.

One meme that keeps coming up on the timeline is the Never Have I Ever - Retro Edition. It asks how many of the following items and activities you have interacted with – give yourself one point for any you haven’t done.

My score? Zero. Nil points. None. I’ve done everything on the whole list. And for many millennials like me, I would imagine the same result. It’s very telling, and gets us to the point of this essay.

One way that generation geriatric millennial has been described is as a metaphoric al bridge between otherwise distinct eras. It makes sense. We grew up in world before the internet, but came of age grappling with early online technologies. We wrote letters and made telephone calls from phone boxes, but we excel in text messaging and have had nearly every iteration of mobile phone, from brick to flip to the touchscreen ‘smart’ variety. We hung out with friends, uncontactable by parents, and rented video cassettes to be rewound after viewing. We have collections of analogue media, vinyl, cassettes, game cartridges, CDs, minidiscs. We predate streaming but have invested in Spotify and Netflix accounts.

Like any ageing group, we have our quirks too. We’re addicted to email. We can’t quite shake skinny jeans. We sigh at the thought of creating a TikTok account and we feel the need to have a landline, just in case. In a sense, if we are indeed bridges; we have our foundations rooted at one end in the old rules of the 20th century, with the other end in the digital depths of now.

What fascinates me, now that I’ve reached this point of generational development, is how far us GMs are tethered to the old, whilst reaching for the new. When I look ta my own life, I must admit that I’ve played by the rules as laid out by a world that was very much steeped in traditional (read: fixed) ideologies. I did school. I got a mortgage. I got married. I had two kids. I fit the mould of what a ‘normal’ adult is supposed to do. My lifestyle won’t raise the eyebrows of a Gen Xer, or even a (deep breath) Boomer.

Us GMs, we rebel in conventional ways too. Tattoos, piercings, long hair, bad language. If you check, these are all the kind of things that people hitting their 40s start to do as they relax into themselves. We do the stuff that, growing up, we weren’t supposed to do. (But we don’t smoke, because we know that kills you.)

Add it all up and you have a curious situation of a adults who kind of know that everything can change, but have been moulded by a world that is fixed to a very rigid, inflexible status quo. It’s why so much oxygen is spent bemoaning the ideologies and values that were fed to us vis 90s media. The toxicity of ‘lad’ culture; the latent (often blatant) homophobia; the harsh gender binaries reinforced in every sitcom, film and cartoon we were invited to watch; the inherent racism in depictions of non-western communities; I could go on. When I think back to what we watched and heard in our formative years, I genuinely wonder how we came out the other side remotely ok at all.

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