Gen Z vs Millennial: What am I?
Growing up, I always thought I was a Millennial. I was the youngest of the Millennials, living on the cusp, expecting to grow up and catch up. With the title Millennial, I was associated with my older counterparts in the generation and as a result, when I spoke, older adults always listened and commented on how impressively eloquent I was for someone so young. I looked young but I spoke about college and early career moves and the economic crisis, mimicking all the media about Millennials, my older friends' and schoolmates' conversations. I was part of that.
Then the pandemic hit, and Gen Z roared to life. My friends and I teased and joked about the divide of children born into a world where the internet was a given, where a phone was a right and no longer a privilege to earn when you were old enough to drive and your parents wanted to make sure you were safe. I thought how silly, I still used a rotary phone when I lived with my grandma, I watched Saturday cartoons on a TV large enough to fit an humane aquarium.
My sister, eight years younger, she had an iPad when she was 3, that's widely different to me.
I am not Gen Z.
Then the pandemic slowed, lockdowns were lifted and I returned to my academic pursuits in person. I was older than most of my classmates but not by much, but that chasm felt large. They joked about the gaming set ups they had built in their last years of high school during lockdown, they talked about the early 2000s as some aesthetic time long ago instead of the years where they got their periods or opened FaceBook accounts. I think back to how many dresses with butterfly embroidery I wore over bootleg jeans. They want to bring that back?
But I liked my classmates, they were smart, driven, educated with the internet to see a bigger world. Only a few years apart and yet living in a larger world. What I didn't like was the professors. Before the pandemic, professors spoke to me like I was an adult, which I was. They expected me to act like the three research projects I'd done before university had qualified me to speak as a real researcher, not some assistant to the real researcher. They expected me to rise up and grow. After lockdown lifted, they talked to me like I was a child whose high school education was halted by the pandemic, a child whose development was stunted and I was still 15 inside. I was no longer a Millennial. I became a member of Gen Z.
How stupid, I thought, these students are neither children nor stunted, in fact they're leaps and bounds more developed than I was at their age.
But here is the heart of the argument. I think I became stupider. I had been studying at the university level for years at this point but because of how the professors had begun speaking to me, I became dull. They spoke to me like I was a child and in turn I struggled to speak like an adult. I hadn't gone home during the pandemic, I hadn't lived with my parents, so I hadn't been talked to like a child in a long time. It made me realize, I was a Millennial because growing up people treated me like one. I was given all the expectations in a conversation that I would respond as one. And now that I was being spoken to like a member of Gen Z, like a child who had no "real world" experience, I was stunting.
Professors, as well as other adults, must realize that the more you treat someone as a child, the more a child they will remain. Provide us, any of us, Millennials or Gen Z, with responsibility and we will rise up to the occasion. I would argue we have, and continue to do so.
But I won't start calling myself a member of Gen Z. I spent too many years being a Millennial to step back, and I don't care what anyone says. Talk to me as you wish, I am an adult and a very tired one at that.
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
annaxmalina
dededos
janainaart
