This is Part 1 of an ongoing Kate Things investigation exploring what happened to all the American millennial boys named Ryan.
Are you an American born between the years 1981 and 1996? If you are, you probably went to school with a boy, or many boys, named Ryan. This is especially true if you were born during the Ryan Renaissance of the 1980s, when 278,987 American mothers looked down at their squirming newborn boys and said “Let’s call him Ryan,” thereby giving this name to approximately 1.45% of the entire male population born in the 80s. These Ryans are now supposedly between the ages of 32 and 40 and yet where actually are they?
The name Ryan was so ubiquitous throughout my girlhood in suburban Minnesota that we had to differentiate one from another by using a last initial, like Bachelor contestants. There was Ryan B, who had green eyes and probably grew up to be smokin’ hot, though no amount of googling has been able to uncover evidence supporting this. There was Ryan O, who was a Jehovah's Witness and the only person in my 5th grade class who still spoke to me during the (thankfully short) reign of the WHK (We Hate Kate) Club. We had Ryan A, whose dad was a pilot and lived in the biggest house I’d ever been in, and Ryan S who, like some kind of Nicholas Sparks character, ended up marrying a girl in our class who he has known basically his entire life. There was another Ryan B (they literally had the same exact name), a Ryan L, a Ryan M… There were so many millennial child Ryans!
Ryans are not unique in their multiplicity. A quick scroll through old yearbooks* reveals that our classrooms were also overflowing with boys named John and Justin and Jason and Chris. But what’s different about these other boys is they’re still proportionately represented in our adult life. You meet them at dinner parties, roll your eyes at their dumb jokes in the office, swipe past them on dating apps, or block them on social media. Some people with these names are famous singers or actors, some have notable careers and industry klout. They existed in the past and they exist now, in 2021. But the Ryans are notably absent.
Okay, okay. I know what you’re saying. You’re listing off famous Ryans. And while I hear you, I need to tell you that you’re wrong. These famous Ryans are all Gen Xers and born before the official Ryan Heyday™️. Ryan Reynolds (who, fun fact, I share a birthday with) is married to a millennial, but was born in 1976. Ryan Seacrest and Ryan Phillippe were early-adapters and were born in 1974. Ryan Gosling just missed the cut-off and was born in 1980.
Think hard, who is a truly famous Ryan between the ages of 25 and 40? The closest I can get is Ryan Cabrera, an elder millennial born in 1982, but let’s be real he… doesn’t really count.
According to Social Security Online, a website that my nerd brother Luke directed me to, the name Ryan was solidly in the top 20 names given to boys in the US between the years of 1981 and 1996, but it was particularly popular in Minnesota, coming in as the 4th most popular boy name in both 1981 and 1984. Having grown up in a hotbed of Ryans, one could only assume that I’d collected quite a few along the way. So for science, I went through my own social media profiles to mine for Ryans.
As it turns out, I’m friends with only one person named Ryan on Facebook, which is where I presumed most Ryans would lurk as they seem to have extreme locals energy. I follow a different Ryan** on instagram, but just learned that no Ryans follow me ☹️. My Twitter existence is miraculously, but not surprisingly, 100% Ryan-free (but Ryans really don’t feel like Twitter people, if you know what I mean). Where did they all go, these Ryans from my past? Did I used to follow more and they all got raptured off social media, or did they fully disappear altogether?
Because I care about the scientific method, I started looking at other people’s Facebook profiles to see how many Ryans they knew, and a few interesting things were revealed.
For one, far too many of those freaks on Facebook give no fucks about security. Their personal details? Flaunted. Their photos? Tagged and public. Their friend lists? Available. While this was shocking to me, an estranged user of the platform, it was also wonderful for my research and I learned that the further I distanced myself from my close friends, the more Ryans I found! One woman, a former beauty queen with 2,606 Facebook friends (which, I’m sorry, is entirely too many friends!) knows 22 people named Ryan. A man with whomst I performed an elaborate lip-sync to Shakira’s Whenever, Wherever has 1,334 friends (again, why) and 15 of them are Ryans. The singular Ryan I’m friends with on that hell site has 1,170 friends (too many!!) and 17 of them are named Ryan. HE KNOWS 17 PEOPLE WITH HIS SAME NAME!
Now, these might not seem like large percentages of their overall friends, but think about how many people born before 1981 are on Facebook (including all our mothers and grandmothers). Eliminate those, and get rid of the young ones too. Now divide their followers in half to allow for gender distribution and that’s actually a lot of Ryans! And if they’re there, on Facebook, then surely they must be out here, in the world, too. But where?
I have a few theories for where they might be and why I personally don’t know them.
Maybe they’re in the military! My cousin who was/is(?) in the Marines has 1,124 friends on Facebook, 13 of which are named Ryan and look pretty military-ey. Me? I literally know nothing about the military but it seems like a lot of bad vibes and is, like, way too expensive??
Or maybe they’re all Republicans, which means we hang in very different circles/exist in entirely different worlds. After all, out of the 235 people arrested for storming the Capitol, 4 of them were named Ryan. (Zero people arrested for storming the Capitol were named Kate. 😊)
Maybe they play professional hockey or other sports that I know nothing about. What’s that one where you ski and then shoot things? That is extremely off my radar and potentially filled with Ryans!
Or maybe many of the Ryans have changed their name to Bryan bc honestly, I found a lot of those in doing this research and was actually shocked that so many people use that spelling?? It would make sense. Apparently lots of people think you’re saying Bryan instead of Ryan anyway!
The answer, dear reader, will have wait until Part 2 of this ongoing investigation, which will be available after I’ve done more anecdotal fact-finding and legal internet-stalking. In the meantime, if you have good Ryan tips, or have legal access to military databases or NHL rosters, please do reach out. I’m very invested in this mystery and I simply must get to the bottom of it!
Every week, I’ll share three to five recommendations with you. Sometimes they’ll be themed, and sometimes they won’t. Like a gumball out of a gumball machine, you’ll never know exactly what the flavour is until I tell you.
This week, I’m recommending three small pieces of content I managed to consume in some spare moments not spent on exhaustive Ryan research. They each brought me joy in different ways. Maybe they will do the same for you!
ONE | The one gay intern on Noah’s ark.
I’ve thought about this frog impression approximately 400 times since watching.
TWO | Bob The Drag Queen’s Purse First Impressions.
Drag Race UK is honestly doing the Lord’s work in keeping me light and lifted these days, and Bob’s episode recaps are a delight. (Trixie’s Pit Stop recaps of the US season are also fun but the American girls aren’t sparking as much joy as the UK girls imho.)
THREE | This episode of Pantsuit Politics.
A whole lotta people tried to explain the stock market to us this week and honestly? None of it sunk in until this episode. Sarah and Beth do such a great job of breaking it down, just as they do a great job of breaking down everything from policy proposals to impeachment proceedings. I’m always thankful to have them in my ears.
Okay! That’s quite enough for now. Thanks for letting me in your digital space and please don’t tell me about my math or grammatical errors. I look forward to sharing something else completely bananas with you next week. ✨
*I didn’t consider my yearbooks valuable enough to move across the ocean with me, so I don’t have them here. This was very problematic for my research! However, I must thank my research assistants, Luke and Angie, for digging their yearbooks out of god-knows-where and sending me photos/conducting their own research, which helped enormously with this piece of hard-hitting journalism.
**Learning that the Ryan I follow (who I initially followed as a curtesy bc he’s someone I knew from childhood and he followed me) no longer follows me is a great release. I now follow no Ryans on instagram. I am free!
This is so good I might go and read it again in the bath. Thank you, Kate