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Why are Millennials aging way better than Boomers and Gen Z?
I have the rare distinction of landing, age-wise, on the exact year delineating two societal generations.
Born in 1981, I’m known as a “Geriatric Millennial”, falling within the first 365 days of an age range that currently spans 28–year-olds to 43-year-olds.
Had I been born just a handful of months earlier, I’d be considered Gen X — a culture I can’t say I totally understand.
I definitely identify more with Millennials given my formative years spanned the culture of that time.
Being born at this exact time has given me an interesting perspective on some major behavioral and health shifts that have completely changed the way people look, act, and age.
And as it turns out, those shifts appear to be helping my generation — the Millennials — age way better than any before or after it.
Allow me to explain.
The big shift
I feel like you can always tell who was a teenager in the 1990s — those of us who bordered the two generations.
There’s something fun, gregarious and consequence-resistant about them, but also a bit cynical, a bit rough-around-the-edges.
Put another way, we lived pretty hard.
Whenever I go to my kids’ travel sports events, I can always spot the 90s kids — they’re the ones staying up until 2 a.m. drinking and smoking all night.
But as time wore on and the Millennials started taking over the cultural Zeitgeist more and more, smoking, which used to be a failsafe sign you were cool, suddenly made you a social pariah.
It wasn’t just the result of a full-court press by governments (i.e. putting increasingly graphic images on packs, banning advertising, banning certain branding, banning smoking indoors, then on patios, and now sometimes even in parks and such).
It’s also just never cool being like your parents, right?
So I watched in real-time as my “cool” contemporaries were suddenly banned from smoking in bars to Millennials who would never touch a “cancer stick” because it was so disgusting.
