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As Alisha Tillery wrote for Shondaland, being the oldest millennial "is to be an outlier of sorts, to really have no generation to identify with at all, yet be perfectly okay with not fitting into one box or the other."
"We are caught in a tight space that remembers the days of old (before Google, Facebook, and YouTube), but is also intrigued by the future and a new way of doing things," she added.
Jessica Guinn Johnson, an attorney in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, born in 1981, told Tillery, "I never found that I fit in the millennial mold, but identified more with Gen X."
Robert L. Reece, a University of Texas-Austin sociology professor, told Tillery there's validity in classifying oneself as a millennial but not identifying with the typical characteristics of the generation.