I kinda disagree. Big historical events can sometimes have little immediate impact on people especially if they aren't directly affected, but the cultural reverberations that may tie into those events can make a massive difference in people's lives. To the VHS hobbyist or the video rental clerk who got fired and lost their livelihood, the death knell of video rental may well have played a bigger role in shifting the era of their lives than yet another big event on TV, which is what 9/11 was largely sold to us as. I'm not disagreeing that 9/11 was a defining moment in delineating the false golden age of neoliberalism from it's subsequent gradual erosion, but I think for a lot of people, it really was the tertiary things that actually marked the material differences in their lives. So it's not folly to recognize that, and see it as a far more complicated set of cultural realities than just a single historical event, no matter how "defining" it may have been on the world stage. Or I don't know, maybe I'm full of shit.

Anything else that tries to separate two generations of people based on an arbitrary year rather than historically significant events is just nonsense.

I'd say Anything else that tries to separate two generations of people based on an arbitrary year rather than historically significant events is just nonsense. Everything has fuzzy edges. Everything cultural has extremely fuzzy edges. Generations have fuzzy edges, and tying them down to specific events doesn't take that well enough into account. And yes, I think this is true of world wars as well. That's not to say events don't play a defining role, it's just there's so much overlap and so much other context (usually cultural) that it's an oversimplification to draw the hard lines between 'before' and 'after.' Or again, maybe I'm just being stupid, nitpicky, and pedantic, but it really is how I see things when I try to draw lines between my own and my sisters generations, for example. And when I try to draw a line between her generation and my mom's (who was very young when she had my sister). And when I try to draw a line between my mom and my dad's generation, who were clearly a generation apart. I just mean it gets messy, and big historical events are not necessarily the be-all and end-all markers we should be using for making meaningful distinctions.

I agree, this is the line. And I feel like there’s a noticeable difference between people I know born anywhere between 95 and 98 that do or don’t remember. I don’t remember 9/11, which is the biggest thing that makes me consider myself a zoomer and not a millennial.