genuinely being asked if I remember 9/11 as a way to disambiguate if I'm a millennial or a zoomer is a pet peeve of mine since I'm not american, so it just... didn't hit here the same way, ya know. I do have a similar Disaster Memory of the Boxing Day Tsunami of three years later, which is... weird actually because it didn't affect my country?
I think this is actually a great example of how "generations" don't make much sense without cultural context. The Baby Boomers were kind of an exception in that their cultural context was "too young to remember WWII but their parents definitely do" because it was, you know, a world war. Covid might have a similar impact.
But the truth is that most of what it means to me to be "a millennial" is rooted in things like 9/11 and its authoritarian/militaristic aftermath, the long shadow of the 2008 recession, and widespread-but-slow internet access in the early 2000s. None of these things is universal. "Millennial", at least as I use the term, is largely a kind of Westerner
people have told me this before and. Honestly I don't super agree. Because we also had expansion of the internet, the war on terror, etc in my country. People tell me the generations are Just Western but that runs directly counter to my experiences growing up in Asia tbh. Much of it remains extremely applicable here!