Web Secret 594: the Spice Girls Generation

I was attending my pregnant niece's baby shower the other day, surrounded by a demographic I rarely encounter - Millenials in their early thirties.

One of my non pregnant nieces tugged on my sleeve and told me: "We are part of a very special Millenial subgroup. The Spice Girls Generation. And when we die, we will be the last of our kind."

I nodded sagely as if fully comprehending this startling statement.

Of course, once back home I read "The Rise of the Spice Girls Generation" in order to understand what she was talking about.

The article explains that women born between Labor Day 1985 and New Year’s Eve 1991:

"...are the only people in history to have both grown up with the internet and to retain childhood memories that predate it. Born primarily in the mid-to-late 1980s, they are human bridges between two eras, whose anachronistic birth years, with their faraway century, will cause their heirs’ eyes to widen at their obituaries. Their ancestral parallels are the earliest drifters of the Lost Generation, born in the mid-to-late 1880s..."

The article does not elaborate on these thought provoking words, but instead dissects the appeal, history and legacy of the Spice Girls for that eponymously named generation.

I am not sure about the parallels between them and the extinct Lost Generation, born a century before, which came of age during World War I and wandered in confusion and aimlessness during the early post-war years. Personally, I too would have wandered the cafes of Paris if I had survived a global war that killed millions of my brethren for no reason whatsoever. It's the kind of experience that would make most people bay at the moon.

Unlike the celebrations that followed the announcement that World War II had ended, the surviving soldiers of World War I barely manifested when their conflict ended, and crawled home, utterly shattered.

No, I don't think the Spice Girls Generation in anyway resembles the Lost Generation.

But my niece is right, they are and will be special. And when they are a hundred years old, as many will be, people will still be asking them to describe what the world was like.

When they were young. Before the world changed.