what years are early milennials
Probably the early '80s.
The funny thing is that when consumer sales companies decided they needed a way to identify and commodify twentysomethings in the early '90s, and this whole X thing got off the ground, they targeted people born roughly between '64-'74. The reasoning was simple: these new consumers were Definitely Not Boomers, and they also happened to be people in their early 20s entering the workforce and ready to buy shit, so a market demographic dressed-up as a New Generation was born.
As these things often go, the window for this demographic grew to encompass everyone else born in the '70s, as people who were Definitely Not Boomers kept entering their 20s, but the problem remained: there weren't that many of them compared to the Boomers. A lot of people lost a lot of sleep trying to figure out how to get these disaffected fuckers to buy shit. But the problem was about to solve itself.
You could see the flip happen in real time during the '90s. Looking back, I put the flip when the Spice Girls came out. But wherever you place the marker, there was a point sometime in '95-'96 when the overall vibe changed from a focus on stripped-down authenticity, diminished expectations, and pragmatism to bright, bombastic, larger-than-life spectacle. People started buying shit.
Some sharp people quickly figured out that wasting time on a bunch of dour fuckers wasn't really ever going to pay off, because there just wasn't that many of them. But get this -- there's suddenly a whole bunch of teenagers who have no memory of the '70s malaise. They have hazy, but favorable memories of the Reagan Era. They were too young to be affected by the Black Friday recession. There's tens of millions of them and they're going to keep coming and growing for the foreseeable future. With a great economy, they're super easy to market to and they're more than willing to buy shit and live large. And so
Gen Y The Millennials were born.
The weird thing with Millennials is that the demo window kept growing way past any reasonable date. A "generation" is really just marketing shorthand for "people in their 20s" (and maybe teenagers). It's become so ridiculous that just about everyone's a Millennial or a Boomer at this point. It was a fucking great brand, and people have a really hard time letting go of such a successful campaign, which is why I think there really hasn't been a focus on getting a good label and supposed "identity" for the current crop of young shits running around. How do you follow-up one of the most successful marketing labels of all time? Gen Z? Sounds kind of lame.