Bored Panda contacted the folks behind the "Born Zillennial" page to find out some more. First, we wanted to know about its origins. "Born Zillennial was created for the BZ Creator Matt Duffy’s UF grad school course, Social Media Community Management. The goal for the assignment was to recruit 100 members, and after one TikTok went viral, the community quickly gained over 20,000 members in a 24-hour period. We now have almost 210,000 members since it was created in the Fall of 2020."

A natural question when it comes to subgroups is how deep does it go, so we asked if Zillennials themselves fall into smaller categories: "For the purposes of our group, anyone that can relate to the content shared in the group is more than welcome to partake. 58% of our group is ages 25-34, with 1996-1998 being the largest demographic in the group. That being said, we don’t have any specific subdivisions within the group that we label any further."

Of course, it's always important to consider how useful these terms are for understanding a group. "Overall, generational tags are not always super accurate because there are so many other factors that affect a person’s identity, whether it’s where they grew up, the person they grew up around, and many other socioeconomic factors. For example, some of our members are born in 2000 but have siblings that were born in 1992, and they are familiar with the content that other people in 2000 may not know about. We use the term Zillennial since it is encompassing the two major generations that impacted us growing up, and we are proof of how generational tags are not always accurate." You can find more about Born Zillenial on Instagram, Twitter, and their site here.

To add another potentially confusing word into the mix, sociologists sometimes refer to “cuspers,” as in people on the cusp of being part of one generation or another. Like the zillennials here, people born at the tail end of one generation will often have a mix of the traits possessed by both. Xennials are another example of “cuspers,” people who do not feel like they are quite fully gen x, but also not millennials.

In general, the study of differences between generations is quite old, as most even unrelated surveys will still care about age as a demographic measure. But it’s only relatively recently that scientists started creating specific terms to describe large groups. Generally, gen x was the first to receive this treatment, which was applied retroactively to baby boomers who were quickly “reduced” to just boomers. 

Despite the two very separate labels, millennials and gen z do often have more in common than different. Both are global generations, connected, generally all the time, to other people via the internet. This is just as true of current gen x and the baby boomers, but the two aforementioned groups grew up with the internet. Zillennials in particular, being on the younger edge of millennialism generally fall into the category of digital natives.

Both generations also have, at some level, experienced at least one crisis, from 2008 to Covid 19. This economic upheaval has left people less optimistic and with less faith in the economic system in general. However, both cohorts, and by extension millennials, benefit from the ocean of information out there, gaining skills, knowledge, and other benefits from the internet considerably faster than they would have from a traditional means of education. 

It’s not all similarities though. Sociologists have found that the vast majority of millennials put themselves into the millennial generation by default. Even among the technologically inclined millennials, zillennials are particularly adept, displaying a lot of creativity and skill in the digital realm. While they might not be true digital natives like gen z, by the time they were old enough to actually properly interact with the world, technology and the internet was in widespread use.

Zillenials also stand out in the sense that they are the one “cusper” generation most likely to actually see themselves as a separate, distinct “minority” generation. The existence of the “Born Zillennial” group is ample evidence that there is a segment of the population that most definitely wants to not be lumped together with the industry-destroying millennials or always-online zoomers. 

They might in some ways find a lot in common with the xennials, those born between the millennials and gen x. While zillennials are very comfortable with technology, they could still be seen as digital immigrants, as they weren't quite the “Ipad kids” of today. Both xillennials and zillennials, which sound way too similar when spoken out loud, are a bit cynical and not quite as optimistic as millennials. If you want to keep exploring these generational questions, check out our other article here.