At a family gathering last month, Farhan (in his early 20s) found himself struggling to keep up in a conversation between his old cousin and her schoolfriends (about to embark on their undergraduate journeys).
The slang was unfamiliar, the meme references either meant nothing to him at all or made not a lick of sense, and when he made references to essential cultural events from the 2024 zeitgeist, he was met with polite confusion and an awkward silence.
To their elders, they’re both “Gen-Z” as they often not-so-affectionately like to refer to them as. On paper, a mere five years apart. In practice, they might as well have grown up in different decades.
Generational researchers have a name for what Farhan experienced: A “microgeneration”, or “cusp cohort” – a narrower band of people, often spanning as little as six years, who share formative experiences distinct enough to separate them from the rest of their official generational bracket.
The concept took off globally with “Zillennials”, the in-between cohort born on the seam of Millennials and Gen Z who remember a world before smartphones but came of age alongside them. Marketing researchers now track similar splits inside Gen Z itself, arguing that a 15-year generational window simply moves too slowly to capture how fast the underlying technology – and the culture riding on it – actually changes.
In Bangladesh, that fault line runs straight through the country’s own recent history. Older Gen Z, now in their early-to-mid twenties, sat for HSC exams or their A Levels under something resembling the traditional system.
Younger Gen Z did not. The 2020 batch was given a blanket “auto-pass” when the pandemic shut down exam halls entirely, and the practice recurred in 2024, when postponed exams were cancelled again amid the July Uprising, and results were built instead from earlier SSC marks.
Two cohorts within the same generation now carry two entirely different relationships to what used to be Bangladesh’s defining academic rite of passage – one that sat the exam, and one that has spent years fielding comments about the year they didn’t.
The platforms each cohort grew up on diverged just as sharply. Older Gen Z’s adolescence ran through Facebook meme pages, group chats, and the slower rhythms of a 3G-era internet. Their younger generational peers, however, have run through TikTok and Reels – a relationship that, in Bangladesh, has come with its own turbulence.
A 2021 High Court directive sought a three-month ban on TikTok, PUBG and Free Fire over addiction concerns, and in August 2024, TikTok was blocked outright alongside WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube during the quota reform protests. For younger users, a favourite app disappearing overnight by government order is simply part of how the internet works. Older Gen Z encountered no equivalent disruption at the same age.
The linguistic drift is just as visible. While older Gen Z’s can understand and partake in “Banglish” humour (a millennial staple, one would argue) built on Facebook-page one-liners and a slower meme cycle, younger Gen Z speaks in tongues imported wholesale from TikTok trends and layered onto Bangla in real time, shifting every few months rather than every few years. A phrase that defined a meme cycle for a 22-year-old can be entirely unfamiliar or already stale to a 17-year-old scrolling the same platforms.
For many (both within and outside the Gen-Z spread) who still treat this generation as one coherent audience, the gap is becoming a genuine liability. A recruiter pitching workplace flexibility to a 25-year-old and a 20-year-old may be speaking to two different sets of assumptions about hierarchy, communication and even what counts as professional.
Researchers studying microgenerations argue (rather cynically) that the label was never meant to describe a monolith in the first place – it was a marketing convenience for a 15-year span that, in a country moving as fast as Bangladesh’s digital landscape has, simply cannot hold.
What people like Farhan are experiencing at that family gathering is not a failure to relate to a much younger relative. It was two microgenerations, five years and a full platform cycle apart, discovering they no longer speak quite the same language, nor do they share the same memories, combining to two wholly distinct lived experiences.
The past, as they say, is a foreign country. But never has that foreign nation been so recent.
