The Generation That Remembers Before

Xennials are generally described as the micro-generation born somewhere around 1977–1983. I'm one of them. Born in 1978. Sometimes I think that makes us accidental time travellers.

We were born into a world before the internet, before smartphones, before streaming, before almost everything could be summoned instantly from a little rectangle in your hand. We didn't know any of that was coming. We just grew up.

I remember playing tennis on the streets of suburbia, with rules we made up as we went along. There was something wonderfully illicit about occupying a public space that way. The street wasn't a playground, but for the afternoon it became ours.

Someone would inevitably yell, "CAR!"

Every head would snap around. We'd scatter to the side of the road, wait for the car to pass and wave at the driver with enormous grins. More often than not, they'd wave back. Maybe they remembered doing exactly the same thing when they were children.

That was normal.

So was being largely unreachable. If you went outside, you were simply... outside. Nobody could text you. Nobody could track you. Nobody knew exactly where you were. And somehow, we survived.

Friday night at the video store

Friday nights were a big deal. With a brother and two sisters, we'd head to the video store and negotiate the great family question: which two movies are we getting? One for the girls. One for the boys.

There was genuine excitement in getting there early enough to find a copy of the movie you wanted, and genuine disappointment when someone else had beaten you to it. There was no streaming. No watch now. No algorithm quietly assembling an endless list of things you might enjoy.

If the movie was gone, it was gone. You picked something else.

And then there was the VHS tape itself. Sometimes it hadn't been rewound. The horror. You'd put it in, press play and discover that some inconsiderate soul had left you somewhere in the middle of the movie.

Then there was the art of programming the VCR. We knew how to do that. We also knew how to frustrate our sisters by taping He-Man over their Pop Shop music video collection. Sorry, sisters. He-Man, Castle Grayskull and plastic figurines could provide hours of entertainment. Not because the toys did anything particularly clever. Because we did. The technology was simple. Our imaginations weren't.

We carried our music around in plastic

Long car trips meant games, arguments, looking out the window and cassettes. My sisters would dutifully create tapes for our journeys, and then, fairly often, those tapes would somehow get ruined.

You'd see them beside the highway afterwards: the clear plastic shell lying abandoned, the glistening guts of shiny brown magnetic tape spilling out across the bitumen, whimpering their last songs into the wind. That image has stayed with me.

We didn't have playlists. We had mixtapes. Someone had physically selected those songs, recorded them, pressed stop at the right moment and maybe even tried to avoid getting the radio announcer talking over the end.

Music was something you carried. Something you made. Something you could lose.

And then came the CD

We had a big, boxy television with fake wood panels and a rounded screen. Alongside it sat the Hi-Fi: radio, cassette player and turntable.

Then Dad brought home a CD player.

I remember being enchanted by the thing. It was so slim. So silver. So impossibly modern. How could something that tiny possibly play music? And the CD itself? Careful. Do not touch the surface. You might smudge it. Worse, you might scratch it. This tiny silver disc with a hole punched through the middle looked like something from the future.

And apparently it used light to read music. What utter sorcery.

Then the computer arrived

I was seventeen when we got our first PC. It was 1995. Windows 95.

We had Encarta. We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica sitting in physical volumes on the shelf. If you needed information for school, you looked it up. You went to a book, found the right volume, turned pages and wrote things down.

The idea that one day an enormous proportion of humanity's accumulated knowledge would be available almost instantly through a machine sitting on your desk would have sounded ridiculous back then.

Then came dial-up.

"Oi! I'm on the phone!"

One of my sisters would yell when someone tried to connect. And then came that sound: the ping, the pong, the electronic shriek and metallic zrkzrkzzzz of the modem negotiating its way into the emerging internet. You clicked icons. You waited. And waited. Pictures downloaded line by line. You could go and make a cup of coffee and come back to discover that the photograph had finally finished rendering.

It felt miraculous. And painfully slow. We had no idea how fast it was all about to become.

The strange position of the Xennial

That's what interests me about Xennials. Not that we had better childhoods. Not that our generation is somehow superior. And certainly not that people born later somehow missed out. We simply occupy a strange little position in time. We remember before. We lived through the transition. And then we became adults in the after.

We remember when technology was something you physically interacted with: a cassette, a record, a telephone attached to the wall, a television that occupied half the room, a book, a map, a camera containing film.

Then we watched those things become smaller, faster, connected and eventually almost invisible.

The internet went from something you dialled into to something you carried everywhere. The phone went from something attached to the house to something that knows where you are. The camera disappeared into the phone. The map disappeared into the phone. The music collection disappeared into the phone.

And now the phone itself is becoming merely one doorway into something much bigger.

I'm nearly fifty now. The kid from 1978 who thought a CD player was sorcery is watching artificial intelligence arrive. That's quite a journey.

And suddenly the question isn't really about Xennials at all.

What happens next?

We're living through another enormous transition.

AI. Geopolitics. Climate. Automation. Questions about ethics, privacy, safety, work, creativity and what it actually means to be human when machines can increasingly imitate the things we once thought belonged exclusively to us. And we're doing it while generations argue with each other.

Boomers. Gen X. Millennials. Gen Z. Gen Alpha.

Labels become shorthand for everything we supposedly have in common — and everything we supposedly don't. Sometimes it feels like we're becoming increasingly skilled at telling each other why we're wrong. I'm less interested in that.

I'd rather know what happens when we actually listen.

Because perhaps there is something useful about having people around who remember different versions of the world. The people who remember the before. The people who lived through the transition. The people who were born into the digital world. And the people now growing up into whatever comes next.

None of those perspectives is more important than the others. They're simply different.

And maybe that's the point. Generation Xennial isn't here to tell you that the past was better. It's not a museum for cassette tapes. Although, frankly, we're going to talk about the cassette tapes.

It's an invitation to look at where we've come from, where we're going, and what we might learn from each other along the way.

Because if we've learned anything from watching the world change this much in a single lifetime, it's that change isn't stopping.

So perhaps we should stop yelling at each other long enough to watch it happen.

Stay and see.