My Generation
The Generation Y issue was a lot of fun to put together. It was a great way to simultaneously think about the future of our world, and the past that we were molded from. It gave me a certain sense of nostalgia and a chance to take a serious trip down memory lane, and into my adolescent days of the 90s.
(Me in the 90s)
This version of me was a huge fan of Babysitter Club books, collecting Pokemon cards, and watching Power Rangers every Thursday afternoon. I played with Skip-Its and the original Super Mario’s World on Nintendo 64. Wow—those were the days.
Generation Y grew up with some pretty amazing opportunities. Although it is hard to generalise such a large amount of people, there are certain aspects of children born from the early 80s to mid 90s that really bind us together.
Any Gen Y knows the difference between Uncle Joey and Uncle Jessie. If you were to put a hundred Gen Ys in a room together, and threw on the theme song to ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’, I’d be surprised if more than none of them didn’t know every single word. More importantly, we grew up with an amazing perspective of the world. The generation Y-ers in their 20s are doing more travelling than their parents ever imagined, which is giving our generation a more global outlook. With this amazing attitude, we can only imagine the changes that will be made in politics, business, art, music, etc…
You don’t often find a generation Y who’s not proud of it. We clearly consider the cartoons and sitcoms we grew up on to be highly superior to the crap that’s on television now-a-days. And we’re not sure if we’ll ever wrap our heads around the fact that there are 8 year olds walking around with iPhones at their fingertips! (When I was you’re age….)
My personal opinion on Generation Y is that we are a linking era between the new and the old. We have grown up on revolutionizing technology, but still remember the good old days when you had to manually load up a film camera or wait for dial-up internet. We do have glimpses of the past when life moved a tiny bit slower, and TVs didn’t resemble cinema screens.
I believe that the elements of our “old soul” pasts will never escape us, as we move headstrong into a fast-paced future.