A new generational label is causing some people on Twitter to feel as old as the wagons used in the once-popular PC game Oregon Trail.
On Friday, a Medium article titled “Why the Hybrid Workforce of the Future Depends on the ‘Geriatric Millennial’” went viral on Twitter. It deemed people born between 1980 and 1985 as, well, “geriatric millennials.”
The article is complimentary to the fringe generation — which came of age before the tech boom but adjusted to it well — and stresses that members’ comfort “with both analog and digital forms of communication” makes them ideal leaders in the workforce.
Yet, the seemingly troll-like phrase “geriatric millennials” left some totally buggin’, especially because people in their late 30s and early 40s are by no means old.
And maybe it’s because Nirvana is now played on classic rock stations; or Gen Z thinks once-panned scrunchies are cool again; or that this micro-generation as a whole has experienced an identity crisis due to being labeled everything from Xennials to the Oregon Trail Generation and Generation Catalano, but many “geriatric millennials” (and others) lashed out at the phrase on Twitter. Or made a joke of the whole thing.
And for the most part, their tweets are all that and a bag of chips: