Generation Y: The Millennials

Cultural reminders about Generation Y (1980 - 2000)

After X, it's Y! The generation of two team members, Guillaume and Lisa. Ah, the famous Generation Y! We often hear about it, and for good reason, it stands out in the landscape and appears as a major turning point in history as the first (and certainly not last) generation touched by the digital age.

It is estimated that Generation Y includes people born between 1980 and 2000

A generation shares characteristics based on the context of the era in which it grew up, whether political, economic, or cultural. When we talk about Generation Y, we immediately think of digital, the internet, and young people raised on the internet and media. Those also called Millennials are considered a hurried generation, accustomed to the instantaneity of social networks. They order food on Deliveroo, a taxi on Uber, do their shopping at the Drive, in short, they link all aspects of their life to new technologies. However, we, young people of this generation, have noticed that the young people of Generation X take this addiction to new technologies to another level, with cell phone use from age 10, YouTube channels at age 12, ages at which we struggled with our Windows 95 and, apart from playing Minesweeper after class, or a bit of MSN, we didn’t do much on the computer.

Beyond this digital aspect, one of the particularities of this generation is that it was not born during a world war, or conversely, its parents' generation was not impacted by these conflicts and other cold wars. Generally speaking, two other characteristics are attributed to this generation, which are not necessarily very glorious: they did not know the world without AIDS and were born in an era increasingly sensitive to the issue of ecology due to the excesses of previous generations (who had heard of veganism or seen so many organic products on shelves before our generation?)

Quick cultural reminder

In the cultural field, Generation Y was lulled by video games, can name all possible and imaginable Pokemons, and spent hours in front of Dragon Ball Z while sucking on sugar-coated lollipops while taking care of a Tamagotchi, the 2.0 pet. A large part of this generation also spent their afternoons in front of the Club Dorothée, the real Touch pas à mon poste of the time with its 8 hours of live broadcast every Wednesday and its television omnipresence. They danced to the Spice Girls or Lou Bega and Larusso on Hit Machine, but also the beginning of rap with NTM, IAM, and the legendary Tribu de Dana from the group Manau (In the valley oh, oh...)

Generation Y also devoured Harry Potter (we’re talking about purists who also read the books, of course, shame on the others), and cried/jumped for joy at France’s victory in the 1998 World Cup. This is what we call a rich generation! (And yes, we say that because it’s ours!)