Whose Generation?

Pete Townshend wrote the song “My Generation” in 1965, when the generation of the time was right in the middle of defining itself as the baby boomers who were growing up to change the world with hippie love, experimental drugs, and psychedelic colors. Though that description is a slight oversimplification, the 60’s generation became and remains one of the most well-defined generations in history. Townshend’s hit song testified to that, defining part of the generation with its raw classic rock n’ roll attitude. But Roger Daltrey’s stuttering vocal part seems more suited to a different generation – mine – one that is definitely stuttering along the path to define itself.
Our spotlight was taken away by the generation that Lillian Mongeau calls the Millenials, the kids who grew up at the turn of the millennium. Well, we did that too, but they were a few years ahead of us, taking 9/11 as their devastating disaster and remembering George Bush as their first president, rather than Bill Clinton. It seems that we, being born right around 1990, got tossed out the back end of the millennial generation, not included with them, or the next generation, babies born after the year 2000.
We are the children of the 90’s. We remember the terrible rise of bubble-gum pop music, personified by Britney Spears, the short-lived popularity of boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync, and the hip look of wearing “cool shades.” We remember Bill Clinton’s scandal with Monica Lewsinky, the contested 2000 presidential election, and we were not too young to forget exactly what we were doing on the morning of September 11th, 2001. We watched all the little kids’ television shows like Barney and Power Rangers, and then the old-school Nickelodeon cartoons like Hey Arnold. We even witnessed the rise of reality TV, nobly beginning with Survivor and quickly deteriorating into socially degrading trash. Our generation mastered the internet, but we don’t exactly know when it first came into use. We all have iPods, and iTunes, and now iPhones, and at some point we all became obsessive over Myspace and/or Facebook. These are the things that define our generation, whether we like it or not.
Unfortunately, all these things also fall between the millennial generation and the babies of the 2000’s generation, which leaves us stuck in the middle. How do we define ourselves now? We are too young to be Mongeau’s Generation Y, and too old to be the generation of millennial technology. We’re a generation of transition, without a perfect fit anywhere, and that is why we have so much trouble defining ourselves.
We’ve been the retro, indie, alternative, rebellious, gay, media-driven, celebrity-oriented, couch-potato, high-achieving, the new hope, racism-free, more prejudiced than ever, and countless more descriptions generation, and the problem is that it has all been done before by previous generations. So there can be only two conclusions – either society has advanced so quickly that there is too much out there for us to define ourselves concretely; or, everything has been done before and our generation has to come to terms with being the Repeat Generation, doomed to copying a generation before us.
I suppose there is one more solution: my generation might still be in the process of defining itself, indefinable until it comes of age. If that is true, we can keep stuttering along, and it won’t even matter if people try to put us down.