The Star Wars Generation

My entire life I've heard various people at various times describe people who were born in the year I was born (1982) as either Generation X or as Millenials. When readiting the definition of either generational group, neither felt quite right to me.

When I saw this on Reddit a few weeks ago, it really struck a chord with me as being the first time a generational description just felt right.

Credit to Reddit user "Zurlap" who posted this which I'm assuming is his original work:

We're "Star Wars Generation". Born between 1977 and 1983, neither the cynical GenX nor the narcissist Millennials, we're a unique generation that grew up learning all the old-world skills like writing letters and mailing cheques, but never had a chance to actually use those skills in the real world as the internet exploded while we were in high school and college. Out of the generations, we're the most comfortable with technology because we grew up along side the archaic forms and learned how they actually worked. We used DOS and played with DIP switches on our motherboards and found IRQ ports for our soundcards. GenX doesn't know what the hell a sound card is, and Millennials grew up with plug&play. We remember life before cell phones, movies before CGI, music before autotune. We went to school before it became a paranoid prison after Columbine, and the change shocked us as we experienced in happening before our very eyes.

We got jobs during that quiet period of prosperity between the dot com bust and the housing crash, and consider ourselves lucky that we're not stuck like Millennials are. Millennials hate us because we sucked up the good jobs right before the economy crashed for good. We remember Han being the only one who shot. We're the ones who look back at the 90's fondly and wish things could go back to being so simple. 9/11 was the barrier between our adolescence and adulthood. We don't understand why the world turned so ridiculous just as we crossed that threshold, and are lost in uncertainty, because we remember something better, but never got to experience it.

We're the last generation that are proud to own our cars, and will take a while to accept self-driving cars. We're the last ones living the suburban home ownership dream, and the last generation that moved out of our parents houses when we were still in school and could afford it. We use our smartphones all the time and love them to death, but it still creeps us out when we see little kids using them; we think "Kids shouldn't have cellphones in school!". We will never understand the point of watching a video on youtube of someone playing a video game; we'd rather play it ourselves. We're the last ones who will join social clubs organized outside of Facebook. We're the last generation that can get away with saying "Oh I don't have Facebook, I don't need it". Jurassic Park gave us nightmares but we still went to see it in the theatres 10 times because it was literally the most awesome thing to ever happen to us as kids. We pretend we were into grunge music before it exploded, but we weren't. It was already dying when we discovered it. We wish we could have seen Nirvana in concert, and will probably tell our grandkids that we did. Good music stopped being made when The Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden broke up and Nickelback exploded on the scene. We played our parents LP collections. We recorded our favorite songs off the radio. We owned the first discmen. MP3 players represent the pinnacle of evolution in music technology, and we don't like streaming. We like being able to pick what songs we listen to next instead of having a computer do it for us.

The transition from VHS to DVD literally changed our lives, but couldn't care less about Bluray. To us, the transition from DVD to BR just isn't anywhere near as groundbreaking as it was from VHS to DVD. Michael Bay ruined action movies forever. We don't know what the hell a pokeyman is, and don't care.

Princess Leia Organa will forever define the epitome of sexy to us, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo the greatest of heroes. The Ewoks aren't that bad. Wickett? We love the little guy. Darth Vader and Boba Fett are BAD. ASS. We are the Star Wars generation.