generational memories

definitions

I was born in the late nineties, the sort of year that makes me either Millenial or Gen Z, depending on whom you ask. Personally, I very firmly count myself in the latter category. My conviction is strongly influenced by a piece by Pew Research about how they defined the generations that I first read sometime in college.^[1] The experiences that they propose to mark the separation between Millennials and Gen Z include:

• remembering 9/11 and the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: I was in downtown DC that morning and I was still too young to remember anything at all.
• being politically conscious/active at the time of the 2008 election: my only clear memory of the 2008 election was being taught to do internet searches in a computer class with an exercise comparing political candidates, early enough that Hillary Clinton was still in the race.
• coming of age and entering the workforce at the height of the recession: honestly, even to say that I "remember" the peak of the crisis is pretty generous. What I remember is my parents (both economics professors) having roaring fights; it's only in retrospect that I can make sense of what they were arguing about.
• ubiquity of the internet and method of access: my family had internet access on a home computer for as long as I can remember; the first of my classmates got cell phones in elementary school. By the time I was old enough to be interested in/allowed on social media, it was already a little lame for teenagers to be on Facebook.

memories

trends

• Silly Bandz are the first trend I remember. They were popular enough that my school banned them because of the chaos caused by underground Silly Bandz trading rings.
• By the time my friends were old enough to really care about style, hipsters were already the butt of the joke. One friend in particular had a bunch of moustache patterned shirts and such in middle school, but moustaches as a symbol had become uncool by the time any of us were capable of considering growing one.
• Snapchat was the defining social media of my high school years. Instagram was present but not as important, and Twitter (significantly) less important still. Everyone had a Facebook account but no one really spent much time there.
• Dress code flashpoints included ripped jeans and especially leggings. The administration decided that rips were fine as long as they didn't expose skin higher than your fingertips and leggings, which were forbidden, were any tight-fitting pants without pockets.
• I was learning to cook when salted caramel everything was in style. I tried to make it once and completely blew it, which of course meant that it was now a matter of pride to learn how to do it right. It's still one of my favorite things to make, just because of the things it does for my ego.

media and tech

• I remember using VHS and casette tapes, and I remember switching over to CDs and DVDs. I have strong memories of our local video store, purveyors of my beloved The Land Before Time videos, which went under when I was fifteen; I was also aware of Netflix when it only sent out DVDs, but my family didn't start using it until it became an online thing.
• The first concert I ever went to was Taylor Swift's Fearless tour. My best friend's mom gave her tickets as a birthday gift, and she took me along.
• When I caved and read Harry Potter the summer before seventh grade, I was the only person my age I knew who read books for fun but hadn't read that. The ubiquity is hard to overstate. I was a little too young to care about the Deathly Hallows book release, but I do remember when the last movie came out.
• The first show I was really aware of as a popular interest was Glee, which was huge when I was in middle school. I was also on Tumblr during the height of the Superwholock craze, which was pretty big with my friends specifically.^[2]
• I was the first one of my friends to have a Spotify account (my brother and sister-in-law gifted me a subscription for my birthday), but within maybe a year, using some sort of music streaming service was common.

events

• My first really clear memory of a major event is the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. We'd just come home from visiting my mom's family and I remember sitting in front of the TV, watching the fireworks over the bird's nest stadium.
• This is at least as much a DC thing as it is a Gen Z thing, but I was in sixth grade when I found out that homophobia existed. I grew up surrounded by gay men, including some of our very closest family friends,^[3] and everyone in my life treated it as so completely normal that I was twelve before I learned that anyone had a problem with it.
• My high school was big into Socratic seminars; we had one just after summer break in 2014, where my English teacher tried to get us to talk cogently about the death of Michael Brown with reference to our assigned summer reading, Pudd'nhead Wilson.
• One of my cousins died of an opioid overdose when I was a teenager. It was during the third wave of the opioid crisis, as the CDC marks things, and he'd been clean for a bit; we think that he used heroin that was stronger than he expected because his dealer had recently started cutting it with fentanyl.
• I was just barely too young to vote in 2016, and let me tell you, that burned. I was the only person I knew who thought Trump would win,^[4] but being dead sure it was coming didn't make it any less devastating when it happened. The day after the election, at least a third of my classmates simply didn't show up to school.