Meet the Zillennials: The luckiest micro-generation in the workforce, born between 1993 and 1998

Zillennials dodged two recessions and learned two technological languages. Now they're out-earning everyone.

I remember my father unpacking an America Online box and then waiting 45 minutes while his computer made a series of strange noises. My brother and I stood behind him, joking about how long this was taking — logging onto the supposed “information superhighway.”

The computer sat in a corner of the living room, next to his record player, where my brother and I would make mixtapes off his vinyl, using a boombox and blank cassettes. I could not have known that within a few years I’d be downloading MP3s from my dorm room, the record player and boombox already feeling like ancient artifacts. But I remembered watching my dad unpack the “internet” box — so I was open to what came next.

That accident of timing made me a “Xennial”: the micro-generation wedged between Gen X and Millennials, old enough to remember a time before computers and young enough to become bilingual, in a way, with the new technology.

Now there’s another cohort sandwiched between the tail end of Millennials and the leading edge of Gen Z, and in their infinite wisdom, the generational framers have named them “Zillennials.” They appear to be just as bilingual as the bike-riding, Oregon Trail–playing cohort that came before them — and, as it turns out, considerably luckier. Understanding why matters beyond the trend-piece taxonomy, because a third bilingual generation is forming right now, in middle-school classrooms, on the other side of the AI fault line.

The age of the plastic brain

There is a particular cognitive advantage that no career coach teaches and no MBA program replicates. It comes from having learned to think in two technological languages — from being old enough to remember the world before a rupture, and young enough to absorb the new paradigm natively, at the precise developmental window when the brain is most elastic.

The workers who best embody this advantage today are the Zillennials — born roughly between 1993 and 1998, old enough to have had a childhood of physical media, offline friendships, and desktop computers, and young enough to have absorbed the smartphone, the platform economy, and generative AI during their most formative professional years. In a labor market increasingly defined by the ability to direct and interrogate AI tools rather than simply use them, that bilingualism is proving to be a structural edge — just as it was for their Xennial forebears. PwC’s most recent Global AI Jobs Barometer found that workers with AI skills now command a 62% wage premium over peers in the same occupations globally, up sharply from 25% in 2024; relatedly, PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer found that entry-level roles in highly AI-exposed occupations are 7x more likely to require more senior-level skills such as judgment, critical thinking and stakeholder management. That sounds like the Zillennials’ music.

The neuroscience here is old, even if the framing is new. The prefrontal cortex — governing adaptability, judgment, and contextual reasoning — continues developing into the mid-20s (and, some might say, mine is still developing). Neuroscientists call the underlying capacity plasticity, from the Greek for moldable: the brain’s ability, first described by William James in 1890 and formalized by Italian psychiatrist Ernesto Lugaro in 1906, to reorganize itself in response to what it encounters. The bilingual advantage accrues to whoever happens to be inside that roughly 12-to-25 window when a technological rupture hits.

The pattern has a precedent

We Xennials came of age during exactly such a rupture. We were essentially Claire Danes’ Angela from My So-Called Life, raised in the analog world of rotary phones, physical encyclopedias, and handwritten notes before the commercial internet arrived in early adulthood.

Because our developmental window coincided almost perfectly with the digital revolution, the cohort produced something genuinely rare: workers who retained the deliberate, analog habits of structured thinking while absorbing digital fluency natively. We could evaluate the tool because we remembered the world without it. (I also remember when college friends started mentioning this Facebook.com thing I should really log onto. I resisted, at first.)

In retrospect, the result looks less like luck than like a compounding advantage. Pew Research has documented that Millennials — particularly the elder cohort — lead all other generations not just in technology ownership but in behavioral integration of technology into professional life. Only by knowing the world before a new tool appears, it stands to reason, can you integrate it into your life and your job intentionally.

But the Millennial generation did not perform uniformly. A Cambridge study published in the American Journal of Sociology found that wealthy Millennials — disproportionately those who entered stable careers before 2008 — accumulated more wealth by 35 than comparable Boomers, while the poorest Millennials fell further behind than any equivalent Boomer cohort. The generation didn’t underperform. It split — along precisely the fault lines of recession-entry timing.

That split is the key to the whole pattern: technological bilingualism compounds into a career advantage only when it isn’t wiped out by macroeconomic bad luck at the moment of labor-market entry. The Zillennials, remarkably, got both halves right.

The rupture that made Zillennials

Zillennials are living through a structurally identical moment, one technological generation later.

Born in the mid-1990s, they had early childhoods shaped by desktop internet and physical play before smartphones became ubiquitous. The iPhone launched in 2007, when the oldest Zillennials were around 12 or 13 — young enough to absorb it, old enough to remember before. They came of age professionally in the late 2010s, entered the workforce around the pandemic’s inflection point, and are now in their late 20s and early 30s: the exact career stage at which Xennials began to differentiate themselves from their generational peers.

Max Read, the former Gawker editor who now runs the Read Max newsletter, argued that an archetypal Zillennial — Zendaya — perfectly summed up the digital generational divide between herself and the (nearly Xennial) Robert Pattinson in the controversial film The Drama. The younger character never knew a world before social media, and a crucial plot point turns on that understanding of society: “How much of your past was documented? How much do you actually remember? How exposed are you? How comfortable do you feel passing judgment? Have you been granted the freedom of reinvention?” The answers to those questions, Read argues, determine “the differing relationships Millennials and Zoomers have to guilt, transgression, and forgiveness.”

Now a third rupture is underway. Generative AI, which arrived with mainstream force in 2022–2023, is reshaping white-collar work at a speed that recalls the early internet. The workers best positioned to benefit are not the most digitally native — they are those capable of directing, critiquing, and contextualizing AI outputs. That requires the dual-register thinking boundary cohorts have always exercised: fluency in the new paradigm, and a grounded memory of what the work looked like before it.

The economic dimension

If bilingualism supplies the edge, entry timing determines whether a cohort gets to use it — and here the technology argument finds a troubling mirror in the economic data. What the data reveals is less about the Zillennials’ advantage than about the damage inflicted on their cohort neighbors.

The cohort-scarring literature is unambiguous: graduating into a recession produces wage losses that persist for a decade or more, and some cohorts never fully recover. Jesse Rothstein’s NBER Working Paper in 2020 found that adverse early conditions permanently reduce new entrants’ employment probabilities, with wage-scarring effects that fade by the early 30s but employment scarring that shows no sign of abating. Critically, Rothstein identified a structural break in young college graduates’ employment rates beginning with cohorts that entered around 2005 — a decline that continued through the recovery and hit successive cohorts even as overall unemployment fell.

Hannes Schwandt and Till von Wachter’s landmark Journal of Labor Economics paper, “Unlucky Cohorts,” goes further, finding persistent earnings and wage reductions — especially for less advantaged entrants — that government transfers only partly offset. Their study covers U.S. labor-market entrants from 1976 to 2015, giving the findings unusual historical sweep across exactly the generational range this story covers.

Core Millennials — born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, squarely in the middle of their generation — graduated into the teeth of the 2008 financial crisis. Core Gen Zers, born in the early 2000s, graduated into a pandemic-fractured labor market. Both cohorts carried, or are carrying, those entry-point scars.

Zillennials, by contrast, ran slightly ahead of the worst of it. The eldest among them had established early footholds in their careers before COVID hit. A Resolution Foundation report published in June found that British workers born in the late 1990s were earning about 12% more in real terms at age 24 than those born in the late 1980s at the same age — and that those born in the early 2000s are now out-earning any cohort at that age since those born in the 1950s. The Foundation attributes the stagnation in Millennial incomes directly to the timing of recession entry. The Economist separately reported in 2024 that the typical 25-year-old Gen Zer has a household income more than 50% above that of Boomers at the same age — a generational income inflection whose benefits Zillennials, at the peak of early-career wage growth, are compounding.

An honest caveat: no study has yet directly measured boundary-cohort outperformance as a systematic phenomenon. The technology-bilingualism argument is neurologically grounded and observationally compelling, but the causal chain from prefrontal developmental timing to technological rupture to career outcomes has not been formally tested. The scarring literature is robust, but it measures damage to unlucky cohorts, not the compounding advantage of the lucky-adjacent. Skeptics of generational analysis — the sociologist Philip Cohen has called much of the genre unscientific — would say micro-generations are astrology for LinkedIn. Fair enough. But the scarring data is not astrology, the plasticity research is not astrology, and the pattern of the two aligning twice in 30 years is, at minimum, a hypothesis worth taking seriously — because it is about to make a testable prediction.

The next bilingual generation

There is a teenager alive today who, at this precise moment, occupies the same developmental position I occupied when my father unpacked that AOL box in the mid-1990s — the same position Zillennials occupied when the iPhone arrived and remade the social landscape of middle school.

That teenager is Gen Alpha — born roughly between 2010 and 2015, now between 11 and 16 years old. ChatGPT launched publicly in November 2022, when the oldest among them were 12: old enough to have spent two or three years doing homework without it, young enough to absorb it before their intellectual habits fully calcified. They are the next bilingual generation — and nobody is talking about them in these terms yet, because they haven’t entered the labor market, and generational analysis almost always arrives late.

The Xennial and Zillennial precedents let us carefully sketch what the pattern predicts. The advantage window is narrow and already closing: the bilingual benefit accrues specifically to the cohort that straddles a rupture during peak prefrontal plasticity, roughly ages 12 to 25. For Gen Alpha, that window is now open and will close around 2035. The cohort born just after them — fully AI-native, with no memory of writing an essay without a language model — may face the same contextual gap that pure digital natives faced relative to Xennials in the early 2000s: monolingual in a way they won’t recognize until it costs them something.

There is also a risk of scarring that previous bilingual generations didn’t face in quite the same form. Xennials entered the workforce before the 2008 crisis (my own first full-time job was in 2006). Zillennials established footholds before COVID. Gen Alpha will enter a labor market that AI is actively restructuring in real time — which could render their bilingual advantage insufficient, or could make it the single most valuable credential they hold.

Which outcome prevails is not entirely up to chance. For employers, the lesson of two previous bilingual cohorts is to stop screening for “digital native” and start screening for dual fluency — the ability to explain what a tool is doing and what the work was before the tool existed. For the schools now deciding whether to ban language models or teach around them, the plasticity research suggests a third option: preserve enough pre-AI practice that students remember what unassisted thinking feels like, while the window is still open. The bilingual generations weren’t made by policy. The next one could be.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com