Diary of a Gen Z Student: I exist in a grey area between Millennial and Gen Z — I feel a bit generationally homeless

Those of us born at the end of the 90s have the luxury of opting in or out of whatever phenomena each respective generation is associated with

Fri, 17 Apr, 2026 - 02:00

Jordan Lynch

1997 was an iconic year. The death of Princess Diana, the launch of Google, and, apparently, the year the first Gen Zs were born. It also happens to be the year I was born, which makes me Gen Z, too, except I’m not really sure how I feel about that.

I exist in a strange grey area between Millennials and Gen Z — I was actually surprised I was even eligible to write for this column. I certainly don’t think of myself as Gen Z. In my mind, they’re those Zoom-schooled (thanks covid), Tik-Toking youngsters who don’t know how to go to a gig without watching it through their phone screens. But the oldest Gen Zs are 29.

I think that would surprise a lot of people. We, and I say we as I’m 28, so I guess that’s me too, are almost 30. The media are gearing up to tell us to stop buying whatever the Gen Z equivalent of avocado toast is and buy a house instead, snowflake.

But Millennial doesn’t feel quite right either. Certainly, as a child and teenager, I consumed loads of Millennial culture and understood the world through that lens more than any other. But I felt sort of distanced from it too — always chasing after my big brother, copying everything he did to try to impress him, but never quite hitting the mark.

I knew the songs but didn’t quite get the references in them. I’m old enough to remember a time without social media, but it was everywhere by the time I was in secondary school. I had Bebo and MSN, but just missed out on Myspace. I have a ‘19’ in my date of birth, but I don’t actually remember the 90s.

I’m glad to have experienced a time before smartphones, however fleeting it was. When I was a kid, we spent hours playing outside, burned CDs, or later sent each other ringtones on our brick phones via infrared. That sounds so outdated now, but it was really impressive stuff back then. I don’t know if I would have had the same freedoms were I born a few years later.

It was certainly a less complicated time. It was a golden age where we had the power of the internet, but it was a place that existed in some corner of your house, not this all-consuming thing you had to take with you everywhere.

Jordan Lynch: 'There was an innocence and an optimism about the internet then, which I think is a real hallmark of the Millennial experience that Gen Z proper missed out on.'

When we got our first computer when I was about eight, I used it for two things: playing my CDs through Windows Media Player and watching the psychedelic graphics that accompanied the songs for hours on end, and girlsgogames.com.

There was an innocence and an optimism about the internet then, which I think is a real hallmark of the Millennial experience that Gen Z proper missed out on. Everything felt so possible, and that optimism underpins what Gen Z finds pretty cringe about Millennials.

And to be fair, I get it. In a post-covid, post-MeToo, post-Donald Trump and Epstein world, that optimism can come off as gratingly naive. I’m young enough that I find it embarrassing when I see people talking about ‘adulting’ or responding to a global tragedy by posting a quote from Harry Potter.

Something that defines Gen Z is a distinct lack of optimism. None of us will ever be able to buy a house, much less retire: we’ve come of age in an increasingly scary and polarised world.

But hey, at least nobody is doing anything about global warming and the impending collapse of the world as we know it, so it doesn’t really matter, right?

Suffice to say, I feel a bit generationally homeless, and for that I am thankful. Those of us born at the end of the 90s have the luxury of opting in or out of whatever phenomena each respective generation is associated with.

And it’s led to people my age being such a blend of both that some of my peers feel a lot older than me, and some feel a lot younger than me, which feels fun.

Maybe you never ditched your skinny jeans when they went out of style, or maybe, like me, you don’t have TikTok, and you get your content on Instagram two weeks after everyone has already seen it. Or on the flip side, you’ve embraced the Y2K revival, even though you’ve already done it once before.

Those of us who live in the in-between don’t feel pigeon-holed into being one kind of person or another, and I think everyone could do with a dose of that.