As a millennial, I’m part of that generation that has a love-hate relationship with technology.

I know. I know. We’re always glued to some type of TV screen now, but I’m probably part of the last generation of youngsters that remembers a time before that was the norm.

Now we’re the guinea pigs. We’re Buster, the crash test dummy from Mythbusters they use when it’s too dangerous to use an actual person.

No one actually knows what affects technology will have on us in the long run. There’s no way to study the long terms affects yet. We’re whom they will study.

Overall, I’m okay with this. It just meant that though the long-given wisdom of parents still applied, it applied to chat rooms on the Internet just as much as it did on the playground.

It means that a legitimate way to bond with someone now includes discussing what happened during a mutual favorite show, a TV show streamed on a computer and not watched on cable.

Now that all of my friends are spread across the county, living different lives and sharing mostly only the past, the shows we watch are one of the few things we still have in common.

Often times, we schedule watching shows on the same day, sometimes even at the same time, so we can discuss them.

Does that sound slightly pathetic? Yes.

Am I OK with that? Yes.

You do what you have to do to stay connected.

Of course, sometimes this means that you accidently give someone spoilers because you think she has already watched it and she hasn’t, but that has never happened to me of course.

Mostly, technology gives us shared interests. It gives me a way to stay in touch more frequently than I would be able to call someone, though yes, I do still call people. While discussing a show, we may share funny, sad or annoying moments that would otherwise slip through the cracks if we were only able to communicate every few weeks.

People call millennials lazy and coddled and spoiled. I personally feel like that is a stereotype, but I’m biased. Every generation has its strengths and its weaknesses.

For us, that may be one in the same, though.

The technology we have been gifted is unprecedented. There’s no guidebook. Parents’ advice has to be adapted in big ways.

But for all that we may or may not be, we’re the ones testing the waters.

For better, for worse, it’s on us.

Will my children have technology that I don’t understand? I surely hope so or something has gone seriously wrong.

But they also won’t remember a time when they couldn’t Google what a guinea pig looks like or where to buy one.