As millennials, we occupy a unique time in history. We were around before computers and cellphones were commonplace, coming of age just as they started to take off; we grew up in a world where there was only one global hegemonic power, the United States, unlike most of the rest of human history that had multiple world powers vying for control; we experienced both Anchorman and Mean Girls.
And, just like figuring out the exact period of time that encompasses a certain generation, trying to figure out how to collectively define our generation has generated a lot of different ideas as to how we can do so. Some of the proposed ideas come from our shared experiences: the internet, globalization, 9/11, the Great Recession. Others come from traits that we supposedly have: entitlement, idealism, cynicism, sarcasm.
My persistent efforts to get social scientists to collectively refer to us as
"Generation Pokemon Stadium" have, alas, yielded no results so far.
Amidst all the thoughtful analyses about our generation, however, is also a metric shit ton of content by people that were somehow paid to write articles that basically amount to "get off my lawn and stop it with your dag-gum hippity hop music, you hooligans!" There is no shortage of articles talking about how terrible we are as a generation, saying that we don't have any work ethic and our economic woes are the result of that (rather than, say, that whole Great Recession thing).
It'd be easy to just respond "nuh uh!" and call these people unkind names. Or even point out that, hey, if you're the generation that raised us, you're actually insulting your own parenting skills each time you talk about how spoiled we are. But, as usual, a more nuanced and thoughtful response is probably the more productive route. Why are so many older people so likely to believe we are spoiled and entitled? And might there, perhaps, be a kernel of truth to that notion?
First off, it's important to get something out of the way: we're inheriting a global economy that is pretty fucked. There's a reason we're so cynical, and there's not really much room for debate here. Income inequality is the worst it's been since right before the Great Depression, and on a world wide scale, the 85 richest people in the world have more wealth than the poorest half of the world's population. Unemployment in the United States is still severe, even for people with a degree, and it will remain so because there are a lot of jobs that are simply never coming back. It's not just one cause, either, but a number of them: shipping jobs overseas, automating jobs so that people no longer have to do them, less public sector jobs due to lower tax revenues to fund them, and many other reasons, there are a lot of jobs that are now gone forever.
And yet jobs like "millennium falcon pilot" haven't even popped up in their place
And there's something kind of cool about some of those. Some blue collar jobs are very dangerous, for instance, and making them more efficient or even automated is great. What isn't great, though, is that all of these factors together get rid of so many jobs and create such an overcrowded job market that many people simply give up, which has also made a lot of unemployment statistics look less severe than they actually are.
Put into the context of recent history, wages have stagnated over the last few decades for the middle class and actually declined for low income people. Minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, certainly isn't what it used to be. Meanwhile, healthcare costs, college tuition costs, and other vital living expenses have increased exponentially even when wages haven't.
Basically, we're inheriting a job market and economy in a condition much worse than our parents did. There's even a pretty great (yet infuriating) meme about this whole shindig.
To any older adults reading this: yes, this is actually a completely foreign concept to us.
So when you read an article about us "choosing" to put off buying houses, or have children, or get married, know that it's not actually a "choice" on our end. Yes, as a generation, a lot of us question the values of previous generations, and there are plenty of us who actually would choose to put off these things as individuals. But it's not rebelliousness or laziness or anything like that which explains this incident on the larger level- it's our economic condition.
But, surely, with our Sony Gamestations and Nintendo Playcubes, we're still spoiled, right? We grew up pampered, even if we inherited a tough economy. Surely we can find a way to both blame millennials while admitting that they don't have the same labor benefits or opportunities our parents did?
Actually, in a way, yes. Because prices for consumer electronics, such as computers, have plummeted over the last few decades. Likewise, 51% of US households own gaming consoles, with the average number per household being not one system, but two. So all of us as a society, especially us younger folks, do enjoy easier access to electronic entertainment and media.
But here's the thing that often gets missed in these conversations about all the material benefits we enjoy: it connects to our economic situation, because these low prices are the result of lower labor costs. We enjoy cheaper products, but at the expense of meager wages. So a 20-something (or someone of any age, really, since the average age of someone who works for minimum wage is 35) working a part time job while also on food stamps or a healthcare assistance program like Medi-Cal isn't a moocher if they happen to own an iPone. Rather, our current societal reality is that a cellphone is actually way, way easier to afford than medical care and many other costs of living (also, while we still think of cellphones as a luxury good, they have actually become more of a necessity now that everyone [including potential employers] assume you have one).
Feel free to keep posting those shitty, judgmental memes instead of thinking critically, though.
And I think our different economic realities help explain why a lot of older adults think millennials are so spoiled. Because I don't think most adults who say we have it easy are Disney movie villains who secretly know the truth and are saying we have it easy as some sort of conspiracy to undermine us.
When I was a preteen, a cellphone was something only a few people had. And now, about a decade and a half later, they're a necessity, along with computers. That's a weird concept for me to grasp, and I'm someone who came of age during that shift. For someone who was middle aged (or even elderly) when this shift started, people who grew up in an era without widespread cellphone and computer use, and only a fraction of the entertainment media we have available to us today? The idea that we have it rough when we have so many conveniences available to us must be hard to swallow. And they're not completely wrong, either; all of these things are pretty fucking sweet.
And beyond that, the challenges we face are a lot less romantic on paper than those faced by previous generations. A large chunk of the 20th Century was defined by the Cold War, when almost every country in the world- even the neutral ones- genuinely feared they could get wiped off the map. There was an immediate, tangible threat. Before that, it was the Great Depression, where people were starving in ridiculous numbers, and the World Wars, where millions upon millions of people died.
Today, the United States is the world's biggest superpower, and other emerging superpowers like China and India are far too economically intertwined with us for there to be a war any time soon. There are a lot of problems that stem from this situation (again, especially economic), but all out warfare or famine that threatens humanity as a whole isn't one of them. And, while my generation was around for the worst attack on US soil that we have ever suffered, none of us actually think that we are in any danger of being invaded and destroyed as a country because of how ridiculously high our military budget is.
Which is outrageous, considering all we needed to end the Cold War was a boxing match
Instead of a big war*, today our biggest problem is trying
to navigate a post-employment economy.
It's a big deal, but it doesn't have the same ring to it, especially
when as a culture we are taught to look up to the hyper-wealthy elite who have
exacerbated these conditions we face. We
have reached a point where, as a species, we aren't really struggling for
survival against the elements or each other anymore. We still suffer from both of those, but we
probably won't be wiped out by them. We're past the point of worrying about warfare or famine sealing humanity's collective fate.
So here we are as millennials, individually struggling for economic survival in a post-physical survival world. We have a lot available to us that previous generations didn't, but we also face difficulties that our parents didn't. The conditions we live in and the problems lying ahead of us are unique to our generation, and a lot of older people don't understand that. So they look down on us- not because there is something inherently wrong with Baby Boomers in particular, but because human beings in general are terrible at putting themselves in other peoples' shoes.
Hopefully, we don't repeat these same mistake and start talking shit about the generation after us.
*It should be noted that while the so-called War on Terror in the Middle East hasn't been a huge war for us in terms of lost lives and perceived threat while compared to other wars, (1)we have still lost soldiers and (2)people in the Middle East have lost many, many lives, including thousands upon thousands of innocent civilian lives, because of the pointless and costly violence we initiated
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