I am an xennial, part of that small generation born after the last wave of Generation X and just before the first wave of millennials. People sometimes describe us as the group that grew up rewinding VHS tapes and then spent early adulthood learning how to manage digital files. That description always makes me smile, because it captures the truth of it. We lived in two different worlds before we ever stepped into a laboratory. That experience is shaping how many of us move through pathology today.
Xennials learned pathology the way nearly every pathologist before them did – with a microscope, a set of glass slides, and long stretches of quiet focus that eventually teach the eye to see more than it first thinks it can. There is nothing fast about the diagnostic process. Nothing automated. Just repetition, mentorship, and a slowly growing sense of clinical judgement, pattern, and meaning. It is still the part of the work that grounds us.
The field, though, is meeting a turning point. Digital slides are becoming more common. Computational tools are beginning to assist in tasks that once belonged entirely to the human eye. Laboratories around the world are trying to decide how quickly to adopt new systems and what those systems should look like. We understand what we will gain – and what we risk if we move too fast or without clarity. It is not simply a technological shift, it is a pivotal moment in the identity of the discipline.
This moment echoes something familiar for xennials. We were asked, early in life, to understand two ways of interpreting the world – first through physical tools and face-to-face learning, and later through digital platforms that changed how information flowed. We adjusted, sometimes awkwardly and sometimes easily, and learned how to carry lessons from both eras without dismissing either. That sense of balance feels useful now. What gives me confidence in this transition is that the future of pathology does not rest with one generation, and each group contributes something the others cannot.
Our senior colleagues bring an irreplaceable kind of judgment. Decades of experience shape the way they read a slide or consider a differential. They remember cases that taught them caution and rare entities that taught them persistence. Their willingness to explore digital workflows, even when those systems feel unfamiliar, has steadied the field more than we often acknowledge.
Our younger colleagues bring imagination and fluency in emerging tools. They move between microscope, monitor, and dataset without hesitation. More and more of them will be learning informatics and digital platforms alongside their histology, and they do not see those skills as competing. They see them as part of the same foundation. Their confidence helps the field look forward instead of sideways.
Xennials often sit between these groups. We remember the weight of the glass slide, but also understand the appeal of a digital archive that can be shared with a click. We have watched the pace of change speed up, slow down, and surge forward again. That perspective allows us to translate, to bridge, and at times to reassure. It is not a heroic position, but simply where history placed us.
The crossroads in pathology is real. Digital tools are expanding what we can see; human interpretation remains the core of what we do. The question is not whether the field will change. It already has. The question is how we will move through the change with intention and keep the discipline honest and patient centered.
If there is something I believe strongly, it is that we will move through this together. Senior colleagues provide steadiness, younger colleagues, momentum. Xennials provide continuity. And all of us, in our own ways, remain tied to the same purpose: to understand disease as clearly as we can so that others can be cared for as well as they should be.
Pathology has lasted because it evolves with thoughtfulness rather than haste. This time will be no different. The field will change, but the heart of it will not, because the people who carry it forward still believe deeply in the work.
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