It’s time to give at least a shout out to the short-lived generation called Xennials. They’re the people that were born between the years 1977 and 1985 and were therefore born into a gap between the GenXer’s and the Millennial generation. These are the folks that still played outside from dawn to dusk and weren’t missed by their parents unless they didn’t come in for lunch and suppertime, the kids that didn’t know what in the world a cell phone was until later on in the 80’s, and were still not as enamored of the game systems as kids are today. They had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood, which means that they managed to get the best and worst of both worlds in a sense.
Xennials are a highly debated micro-generation since a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge them and will claim that they belong to either Generation X or Y, but in truth they exist on the cusp between them and don’t really fit into either one. This generation belongs to the kids that grew up with the cartoons that were still being run from the 70’s and the newer cartoons that were coming out in the 80’s. They got to watch the old classics like the Looney Tunes and still enjoy the newer cartoons like G.I. Joe and Voltron. They went out riding their bikes, playing with friends, and didn’t worry about child molesters and pedophiles trying to grab them on every street corner.
Halloween for Xennials was great because it was just before the time when freaks were putting razor blades into candy and treats like caramel apples were still acceptable since people knew their neighbors and could trust them. Eating candy by the bag-full was still acceptable since life was still enjoyable and not riddled with as many stresses as we seem to have today. Kids born into this generation didn’t have the luxury of testing, they had to know the phone number of their friends by memory or have them written on a list somewhere so they could call them up and see if they could go hang out. And hanging out usually meant going outside, getting some fresh air, and enjoying being young while it lasted.
Their adult years however were spent picking up the same computer skills and tech savvy that a lot of millennials were born into. The first laptops that xennials can possibly remember weighed upwards of twenty pounds or so and were huge, monochrome clunkers that ran on floppy disks and possessed barely a fraction of the memory that our smart devices have now. If you wanted to save anything larger than a short story or a research paper you’d have to back it up on a disk or possibly print it out on one of those old, screeching printers that still used the paper with the perforated edges. In other words as xennials we had to learn as we went and as the technology continued to advance, we weren’t born into any of it.
As xennials we got to live a childhood of simplicity followed by an adulthood that’s grown increasingly complex.
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