Being Dynamic
What it means to me as a child of the 80’s
I’m of a generation best defined as Analog / Digital. When I first heard these words to describe people born in the early to mid 80’s, I let out a deep and contented exhale. It made sense. I felt seen.
Too often I hear a generational moniker and have to pause, furrow my brows, and wait for some cultural reference to correctly identify who it’s referring to. I found the list below from the University of Southern California, which links to a research group dedicated to defining and disseminating generational data. Yes, that is how confusing and misleading it can be! If you’re curious, you can find more information here about the Center for Generational Kinetics.
- The Greatest Generation — born 1901–1924.
- The Silent Generation — born 1925–1945.
- The Baby Boomer Generation — born 1946–1964.
- Generation X — born 1965–1979.
- Millennials — born 1980–1994.
- Generation Z — born 1995–2012.
- Gen Alpha — born 2013–2025.
I would replace my Millenial moniker, also known as Generation Y, with analog / digital. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Millennial, aside from the generational definition, means of or relating to a period of 1000 years. It’s not enough to encompass the dynamic nature of our collective ushering from the analog to the digital.
Being dynamic has been a survival mechanism for every generation, because there is always a need to adapt. In my lifetime, the most notable change and need for adaptation has come through as a Tsunami of new technology.
Love for Analog / Digital
Unlike other generational labels like Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the often picked on Millenials, Analog /Digital was an accurate and kind assessment of my people. Almost all are used pejoratively, to highlight the worst of generational values, to call out the cultural demolishment of the preceding group.
The Analog / Digital age is a more romantic term. It links arms between the past and the present, calling out what we were, and who we have become with two simple yet strikingly visual words.
I immediately think of a clock with the boxy numbers lit up in red and a few buttons to tune the radio. That was considered digital when we were young! Now we can shout at the in-home robots to give us the time, play our music, and turn off the lights.
Ours is a rags to riches story.
Digital dreamers
As an analog kid, a lot of my dreams have come true. I use to watch hours of television, and loathed the long commercial breaks. Ads are like short films now with huge production budgets and a creative edge that the infomercials and psychic hotlines just didn’t deliver.
These were seemingly endless stretches of time to see a new episode of a favorite series. It was torture. My childhood dream, I wish there were no commercials, while holding the remote control like a magic lamp. Now, with Netflix, HBO, and all the apps I enjoy commercial free viewing in the digital age. This is no small achievement.
I can now also make my own carbonated water at home. As a kid, this was an otherworldly concept, literally as if it were from outer space. I remember an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, my brother forced me to watch on our one and only tv, and one thing stayed with me over the years: characters on the show could say a drink they wanted, orange juice, and it would pour into a cup. First it was fountain drinks in movie theaters, and now it’s an at home operation.
Still waiting on teletransportation.
Analog Education
Born in 1983, my college experience consisted of bulky macbooks in a computer lab. That is where I spent time writing a 20 page paper on one poem.
There is now an entire movement dedicated to brevity. Twitter and other platforms limiting the number of characters we can use to express ourselves. This may have been inspired by the unnecessary barrage of 20 page papers our “millennial” education required us write in college.
Our cell phones flipped. I wore mine on a chain around my neck because it was expensive as a college kid, and I didn’t want it to break. I didn’t have the luxury of being tipped for ringing up a cup of coffee as the kids do now. There was a chronically empty tip jar with a consistent flow of three one dollar bills at the end of the day.
When it comes to videos games, I am behind the times, but I do know the common analog word, joystick, sounds inappropriate now, proving that reality has not only been infused with digital, but has gone virtual as well.
A friend of mine said her five year old nephew was recently given a paperback book and started swiping the paper, like you would an iPad or Kindle to turn the page.
Where we had neon slapstick bracelets, they have smart watches. Where we had mandatory $80 graphing calculators, they have free cell phone apps. Our education seems obsolete, money and shelf space wasted on the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now in a new frontier democratizing education in the digital age.
What it means to me
I love that I can experience this time in history, even record it, and play it back from the palm of my hand if I want. My alarm clock talks to me. I can ask it to set the time and play a specific song to wake me up.
I don’t miss pressing stop and record a hundred times to get the perfect mixed cassette for a friend. I do miss making homemade playlists for friends. They come ready made now, a playlist for almost anything already curated on my Spotify app.
There was a delightful chaos in using a phone booth to call collect. I can easily recall the weight of the black phone and unruly metallic cord, the distance I kept away from my mouth to protect me from germs as I spoke into it. Who was I calling collect all the time, I now wonder.
There will be someone who reads that and has no idea what I’m talking about. It’s this joy of collective memory, a sense of belonging, that binds a group of people with these types of names.
When I say I’m nostalgic about the analog years of my life, it is by way of honoring those experiences, not actually wanting to experience them again.
I feel dynamic in the sense that, unlike my parents’ generation who worked at the same company for decades, I have enjoyed being a factotum. The accessibility to learn new things and connect with people is an extraordinary byproduct of the digital age.
I’m publishing stories with the click of a button, and people I don’t know, all over the world, may or may not read them, instantly.
These are people I may or may not meet in the real world, but I could read about or connect with just as easily as I can typing the letters out on my typewriter, or MacBook Pro. Being that I am a dynamic child of the 80’s, perhaps both.
