Are you a Xennial Traveler?

It’s 3 am, I’m in a hotel in Warsaw, and I’m wondering if I’m a Xennial traveler.

Don’t worry; I didn’t lose my mind. No, no, there’s nothing wrong, I can assure you. But after working for almost 6 hours tonight, I badly need a cigarette. My urge is so strong that I think I can smell the smoke. And from then on, everything becomes a chain reaction that ends up in nostalgia.

If you are a Xennial traveler, you can probably remember that in your first flight people were smoking. Or on your first long train journey, there was smoke everywhere. Let alone the hotel rooms of course. But this is not a post about cigarettes. On the contrary, this is about people attached to some certain habits due to their year of birth.

What is a Xennial

The term has been circulating the Internet for quite a while now. Xennials are a micro-generation, squeezed between the Generation-X and the Millennials. More precisely, they are born between 1977 and 1983, although some people claim that the span is a bit broader, from 1976 to 1985. I’m still quite unsure if the 1977-1983 span has a direct connection to the Starwars Trilogy. No matter what, I’m also willing to accept the broader span (between 1976 and 1985), too, because it gives this micro-generation more breathing space.

The Xennials don’t have the cynicism of Generation-Xers, nor the eccentricity of the Millennials. So, are they that cool? Of course, not. A Xennial enjoyed an analog childhood but also remembers the fast transition to the digital age. The Xennials are the first generation to adapt to digital life without any problems at all. If you are a Xennial, the chances are that you still have an old Hotmail account that still receives loads of old-style spam. If you have ever hosted a website, it was probably on Geocities (I had a couple of them actually). You still remember the dial-up tone of the Internet while you tried to download a 4 MB song from Napster (or even better: Limewire), which took almost twenty minutes. No need to say that you remember the connection dropping when your aunt called.

But long before that, when you liked a girl or a boy you made a mixtape. Your first computer as a child used a floppy disk. You were going on vacation with your parents, first carrying a Walkman, and then a Discman. I still have piles of CDs and cassettes from that time. Last but not least, you shot your first photos with analog cameras, where you had to roll the film. Your memories are grainy and blurry, like the photos of your childhood.

But what really makes you a Xennial, is that you betrayed that past easily when the digital era arrived. The Generation-Xers resisted, and they only surrendered partially; the younger Millennials might have never seen half of the things I mention here.

A Xennial traveler on the road

I often question my traveling habits, and I find myself sometimes wonder what did it change from the almost forgotten vacations with my parents. My Generation-X friends always travel with printed maps in their bags. On the other hand, my Millennial friends use Google Maps exclusively. And what do I do? I travel both with printed maps and Google Maps. I don’t know if this is some eccentricity borrowed from the Millennials or an attitude straight from the Gen-Xers. But all I know is that as a Xennial traveler I carry the goodies of both worlds. It would have been even more weight to carry if half of the things weren’t already digital. But mentally, carrying twice the things doesn’t always feel good.

The same goes for my pre-travel habits. I read a bunch of blogs, I visit the websites of tourist bureaus, but at the same time I always visit a bookstore, and I buy a couple of travel guides. Just imagine that: being on an airplane and reading a travel guide in book form -but when the food is served you switch to Pocket of Flipboard. It’s like a confess coming straight from the clash of the digital and analog era: I love paper, but I prefer something even more lightweight.

Lately, I have developed another obsession though, that comes probably straight out from nostalgia: printed photos. As if carrying one or two digital cameras is not enough, I bought myself an instant camera. You see, it was the coolest object of my childhood, friends of my parents shooting polaroids in boring gatherings. Back then it seemed like a significant technological step, nowadays is one more blast from the past. But the thing is, that the instant photos are pretty sharp nowadays. That said, polaroids are not satisfying enough. I need the blurry feeling or the picture that someone has his/her eyes shut. Is there a solution?

Yes, I often buy disposable cameras, too. The quality is shitty, the photos are blurry, the colors are desaturated. A Xennial traveler can only love them.

Xennials and the places they visit

A Xennial traveler knows how to use Social Media. He/She is a veteran of social media actually: they used Myspace or Hi5 back in the day. The Xennial traveler will upload a photo on Facebook or Instagram, and he might tweet something, too. If you meet a Xennial though, make sure to ask him/her if they use Snapchat. The chances are that this is the first social media they fail to understand. Oh, and by the way, we Xennial travelers hate adding stickers on social media photos.

One thing that I find funny is that a Xennial traveler always tries to take a selfie and still fails. Even the most delicate social media accounts of Xennials have a truly bad selfie: eyes that pop, double-chin, everything that can go bad, well, it goes wrong. Soon enough they get bored, they might even complain about the camera (“They are not that advanced yet”), and they will put the smartphone in their pocket. A true Xennial traveler will even make a joke about their first flip phone they got in their late teens.

And then, a Xennial traveler will interact with the place and the locals in a more Generation-X way. They will ask the locals for the best restaurant to eat, and they might even make a Xennial joke: it’s more of a thoughtful comment with a smirk instead of a typical let’s-be-friends Gen-X one. They will be interested in local stories, but at the same time, they will validate it with a Google search. This is something that a true Xennial traveler did back in the late ’90s using Altavista.

The lost paradise of a Xennial traveler

A certain strike of nostalgia might invade the brain of a Xennial traveler out of the blue. All of a sudden, he or she will remember the paradise cities of early youth. Back in the day, Prague was cool, and Berlin was awesome. Every Xennial traveler would daydream in the late ’90s or early ’00s to visit these two cities. The Fall of the Berlin Wall is the first historical event that a Xennial remembers anyway; Chernobyl was way too complicated.

Some of us made it to these cities back then. Our parents worried a lot. We didn’t have smartphones, and we had to use phone cards to call back home. The phonecards themselves were one of the most awesome souvenirs to bring back home. They had cool colors and strange letters. Being in a foreign country as a Xennial traveler, one always thought that he was ready for some Goonies-style adventure and available to have an affair better than the one in Before Sunrise.

And then there is always this constant nostalgia. Technology took away our analog childhood and has dehumanized us. And still, we love it, and we find it hard to remember how life without it was. Half of our life so far was pre-digital, and yet it feels that technology rewrote even our past. It’s like we never really owned a Discman, a floppy disk or a phone card from post-Wall Berlin. It’s also hard to remember traveling on the backseat without a seat-belt. We are semi-romantic and semi-robotic.

Such fools we Xennial travelers are.

The last dance

A random Polish radio station plays a playlist from the ’90s. I listen to “Why don’t you get a job?”, that old Offspring song. I wonder if there is a more typical song from that era for a Xennial. To me, it seems like the collective mindset of the 90s.

It’s now 4:30 am, and I’m still awake. I just had a cigarette, hanging half of myself out of the window. I remember the first hotel I ever stayed in the ’80s and I can still recall a lobby full of smoke. Then, the lobbyists took over. The way the world is moving, the grandchildren of a Xennial might say that “Grandpa was a junkie, he was smoking cigarettes.” Oh well.

I think I have to sleep now. Staying up till late is a constant habit from the ’90s. I am an allnighter, but I probably don’t have the guts of a Generation-Xer to walk sleepless around the city. I need a few hours of sleep and breakfast, although not a very healthy one like a true Millennial.

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Last Updated on September 5, 2020 by George Pavlopoulos