Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Unlike their counterparts in most other developed nations, Millennials in the United States are a relatively large cohort in their nation's population, which has implications for their nation's economy and geopolitics. They generally adopt a slow-life history strategy in that compared to previous cohorts, they tend to be highly educated, be less inclined to engage in sexual intercourse, marry later, and have fewer children, or none at all. Furthermore, Millennials are much less religious than older generations, though some still identify as spiritual. Millennials have faced economic challenges posed by the Great Recession, and another one in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But they have been steadily catching up with their elders in terms of inflation-adjusted median household income and home ownership. They also maintain a high level of participation in the labor force.
Millennials are sometimes known as digital natives because they came of age when the Internet, electronic devices, and social media entered widespread usage. Despite their reputation for holding left-wing views, Millennials are not consistently aligned with liberalism. In fact, they frequently identify as politically independent, and are not idealists. Polling agency Ipsos-MORI warned that "many of the claims made about millennial characteristics are simplified, misinterpreted or just plain wrong, which can mean real differences get lost", and that "[e]qually important are the similarities between other generations—the attitudes and behaviors that are staying the same are sometimes just as important and surprising."
Terminology and etymology Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, who created the Strauss–Howe generational theory, coined the term 'millennial' in 1987. because the oldest members of this demographic cohort came of age at around the turn of the third millennium A.D. They wrote about the cohort in their books Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (1991) p. 335 and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000).
In August 1993, an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe teenagers of the day, then aged 13–19 (born 1974–1980), who were at the time defined as different from Generation X."Generation Y" Ad Age 30 August 1993. p. 16. However, the 1974–1980 cohort was later re-identified by most media sources as the last wave of Generation X, and by 2003 Ad Age had moved their Generation Y starting year up to 1982. According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that millennials is a better name than Gen Y," and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them."
Millennials are sometimes called echo boomers, due to them often being the offspring of the baby boomers, the significant increase in birth rates from the early 1980s to mid-1990s, and their generation's large size relative to that of boomers. In the United States, the echo boom's birth rates peaked in August 1990Advance Report of Final Natality Statistics, 1990, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 25 February 1993 and a twentieth-century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued. Psychologist Jean Twenge described millennials as "Generation Me" in her 2006 book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before, while in 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story titled Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation. Alternative names for this group proposed include the Net Generation, Generation 9/11, Generation Next, and The Burnout Generation.
American sociologist Kathleen Shaputis labeled millennials as the Boomerang Generation or Peter Pan Generation because of the members' perceived tendency for delaying some rites of passage into adulthood for longer periods than most generations before them. These labels were also a reference to a trend toward members living with their parents for longer periods than previous generations.Shaputis, Kathleen (2004). The Crowded Nest Syndrome: Surviving the Return of Adult Children. Clutter Fairy Publishing, Kimberly Palmer regards the high cost of housing and higher education, and the relative affluence of older generations, as among the factors driving the trend. Questions regarding a clear definition of what it means to be an adult also impact a debate about delayed transitions into adulthood and the emergence of a new life stage, Emerging Adulthood. A 2012 study by professors at Brigham Young University found that college students were more likely to define "adult" based on certain personal abilities and characteristics rather than more traditional "rite of passage" events. Larry Nelson noted that "In prior generations, you get married and you start a career and you do that immediately. What young people today are seeing is that approach has led to divorces, to people unhappy with their careers … The majority want to get married […] they just want to do it right the first time, the same thing with their careers."
Date and age range definitions Oxford Living Dictionaries describes a millennial as a person "born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s." Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines millennial as "a person born in the 1980s or 1990s."
Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Economist in 2018 that "generations are squishy concepts", but the 1981 to 1996 birth cohort is a "widely accepted" definition for millennials. Reuters also state that the "widely accepted definition" is 1981–1996.
Although the United States Census Bureau have said that "there is no official start and end date for when millennials were born" and they do not officially define millennials, a U.S. Census publication in 2022 noted that Millennials are "colloquially defined as" the cohort born from 1981 to 1996, using this definition in a breakdown of Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data. The Pew Research Center defines millennials as born from 1981 to 1996, choosing these dates for "key political, economic and social factors", including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Great Recession, and Internet explosion. The United States Library of Congress explains that "defining generations is not an exact science" however cites Pew's 1981-1996 definition to define millennials. Various media outlets and statistical organizations have cited Pew's definition including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, PBS, The Los Angeles Times, and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Brookings Institution defines the millennial generation as those born from 1981 to 1996, as does Gallup, Federal Reserve Board, American Psychological Association, and CBS.
Psychologist Jean Twenge defines millennials as those born 1980–1994. CNN reports that studies often use 1981–1996 to define millennials, but sometimes list 1980–2000. Sociologist Elwood Carlson, who calls the generation "New Boomers", identified the birth years of 1983–2001, based on the upswing in births after 1983 and finishing with the "political and social challenges" that occurred after the 9/11 terrorist acts.
The cohorts born during the cusp years before and after millennials have been identified as "microgenerations" with characteristics of both generations. Names given to these cuspers include Xennials, Generation Catalano, the Oregon Trail Generation; Zennials, and Zillennials, respectively.
Cognitive abilities Intelligence researcher James R. Flynn discovered that back in the 1950s, the gap between the vocabulary levels of adults and children was much smaller than it is in the early twenty-first century. Between 1953 and 2006, adult gains on the vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler IQ test were 17.4 points whereas the corresponding gains for children were only 4. He asserted that some of the reasons for this are the surge in interest in higher education and cultural changes. The number of Americans pursuing tertiary qualifications and cognitively demanding jobs has risen significantly since the 1950s. This boosted the level of vocabulary among adults. Back in the 1950s, children generally imitated their parents and adopted their vocabulary. This was no longer the case in the 2000s, when teenagers often developed their own subculture and as such were less likely to use adult-level vocabulary on their essays.
Psychologists Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Ryne A. Sherman analyzed vocabulary test scores on the U.S. General Social Survey () and found that after correcting for education, the use of sophisticated vocabulary has declined between the mid-1970s and the mid-2010s across all levels of education, from below high school to graduate school. Those with at least a bachelor's degree saw the steepest decline. Hence, the gap between people who never received a high-school diploma and a university graduate has shrunk from an average of 3.4 correct answers in the mid- to late-1970s to 2.9 in the early- to mid-2010s. Higher education offers little to no benefits to verbal ability. Because those with only a moderate level of vocabulary were more likely to be admitted to university than in the past, the average for degree holders declined. There are various explanations for this. Accepting high levels of immigrants, many of whom not particularly proficient in the English language, could lower the national adult average. Young people nowadays are much less likely to read for pleasure, thus reducing their levels of vocabulary. On the other hand, while the College Board has reported that SAT verbal scores were on the decline, these scores are an imperfect measure of the vocabulary level of the nation as a whole because the test-taking demographic has changed and because more students take the SAT in the 2010s then in the 1970s, which means there are more with limited ability who took it. Population aging is unconvincing because the effect is too weak.
Common culture
Millennials grew up during the 1990s, a time of peace, prosperity, and predictability that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Many White Millennials were raised by helicopter parents, but this was not a common experience among other Millennials in the United States. As adults, Millennials expect the institutions to look after their well-being. They tend to follow a slow life history strategy, preferring deep and cooperative relationships, including with their employers. Culturally, they found themselves gravitated towards apathy, irony (as seen in the 1996 song "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette), and sentimentality (represented by the music performed by Britney Spears). For many Millennials, the shock and sorrow that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 marked either the end of childhood or the start of a less happy one; it was a generational touchstone. Americans shared their flashbulb memories of where they were when they learned what had happened.
Millennial humor, a major feature of Internet memes during the 2010s, contained elements of absurdism and surrealism. Surveys of high-school seniors and college freshmen of the early 2010s found that the proportion of students who placed a high value on wealth and who did not think it was important to keep abreast of political affairs grew, while the number of those who thought it was necessary to develop "a meaningful philosophy of life" fell compared to older generations. Compared to Baby Boomers, Millennials were also less likely to be involved in an environmental cleanup effort.