Don't have to tell me. I was graduated and 18 when 9/11 happened. I enlisted later that year. Now these assholes wanna tell me I'm a millennial. What happened to generation Y? Oh yeah, we got ignored and lumped in w/ a bunch of asshats.
Gen Y and Millenials are synonymous terms, though. The latter is used almost exclusively to dump on us, though.
As if 9/11 wasn't bad enough, we also took the financial downturn in the late 00's on the chin--fresh debt from unprecedented college graduation rates, just as the jobs and markets disappeared. That's some bad luck there, but at least we didn't have to live through Vietnam and WW2 I guess--but they at least had favorable economies when they got home.
The economy is going strong now though with historic lows in unemployment... for some people. That's the dilema we're currently facing. Those in the big cities in engineering, law, banking, medicine, and tech are doing very, very well right now, but those in the countryside face a very different reality. This has been ignored for a long time, and yet some people still don't understand how Trump was elected and denigrate anyone in the country as ignorant. If the tables were turned, I'm sure an equally ignorant reaction would result, however. That's the reality of human behavior.
Gen Z is kind of like Gen Y, but they haven't had their world crushed yet. We had ours crushed in 2001, specifically on September 11th. Many of us weren't adults yet and we already had to be painfully aware of how cruel the world is, watching our slightly older peers go overseas to war and maybe or maybe not return. Generation Z hasn't had that moment yet. The "greatest generation" had WW2. The "silent generation" had Korean war and JFK. The boomers had JFK and Vietnam. Gen X had the height--and resolution--of the Cold War. Maybe, when it does, Gen Z will be old enough to deal with it. They still have a chance.