Almost everyone who has been reading the Korean news headlines over the last few years will be familiar with the term "MZ Generation." It is mainly used by non-experts, magazines, and internet news reporters who have nothing much to do with demographics.

Due to this term, some people have the misunderstanding that this phrase actually exists as an academic term due to the frequent misuse. The origin of this term was started by media companies trying to distinguish each generation.

They began naming them Generation X, Y, and Z, and then later on, Generation Y, who were referred to as millennials, began to be grouped with Generation Z as a representative of a younger generation.

The grouping of millennials and Generation Z has been criticized for being a false distinction that does not take into account the age difference of more than 20 years between the 1980s and early 2010s and the differences they experience in culture, generation, and media.

Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996 whereas Generation Z are people who were born between 1997 and 2012. To merge them into a one single category could be meaningful in some ways, but it would also cause errors in generalization because even people born in the same year would have different tendencies.

L.L.F reporter Min-a Lee