Hating on millennials is totally hip right now. Here’s why we shouldn’t fall into this mean-spirited trap.
Last year, a group of friends and I volunteered with Jon Ossoff’s campaign here in Georgia’s sixth district. We phonebanked for Ossoff a few times, and one thing that struck us was how young the staffers in his office were. Millenials were running the show.
The Ossoff campaign isn’t the only example of millennials taking charge and making change. After the horrific Parkland school shooting, millennials in Florida and across the U.S. are standing up and fighting for gun law reform. And all over the U.S., millennials are running for office.
It’s so tempting – and nothing new – for earlier generations to look down on the one that comes next. Baby boomers used to think that all Generation Xers did was watch TV and play video games. Now, I guess it’s Gen X’s turn to look down on the young whippersnappers.
Or we could not do that.
MILLENNIAL MYTHS
Of course, there are lazy millennials who think the world owes them everything. There are people like that in every age group. Generalizing that attitude to an entire generation is dangerously ageist. It allows us to overlook context, throw up our hands and write off a huge slice of the population based on age.
A great BBC article by Amanda Ruggeri looked more closely at our culture’s current disdain for millennials and busted some of the popular myths about them. For example, it’s popular to point out that a huge percentage of those lazy millennials live with their parents. In fact, the living at home trend peaked in the 1940s. And most millennials who do live at home are actually working.
Ruggeri also talks about the idea that millennials are “killing marriage” by waiting longer to get married or choosing to cohabitate rather than get hitched. She points out, though, that many of those same people watched their (baby boomer) parents get divorced.
But probably the biggest millennial misconception is the idea that they are a cohesive group at all.
The organizers of the huge marketing conference, Deep Shift, asked writer Adam Conover how to appeal to millennials. You may be familiar with Conover from his popular show Adam Ruins Everything, which is a huge hit with this age group. On the show, Conover and his team of researchers take on popular misconceptions, like the safety of certain over the counter drugs and our ideas about the placebo effect.
Conover took the same approach to Deep Shift’s question about appealing to millennials. In his talk, he points out that generations are just a social construct anyway.
The talk is about 25 minutes long, but it’s an entertaining 25 minutes that are worth a watch. He points out that the way we divide up generations is pretty arbitrary. It’s not based on any demographic differences. Instead, we choose a range of birth years, then decide what defines people born within that timeframe.
In fact, Conover points out, the whole idea of naming generations began when novelist Douglas Copeland coined the term “Generation X”. Since then, Conover says, there’s been a virtual “gold rush” when it comes to naming the next generation of people. Historians Neil Howe and William Strauss won that race when they coined the term millennials, and they have made bank off of this concept.
Defining generations can be convenient, but it can also be incredibly condescending and unhelpful. While actually naming generations is relatively new, older people have complained about younger generations for centuries. Conover points to Hesiod, an economist from ancient Greece. Here’s what he had to say about the generation before him:
screenshot via YouTube
Conover goes on to share many hilarious examples of the older generation “talking smack” about the younger one and debunks the idea that millennials are lazy, narcissistic kids who are spoiled by participation trophies and will never move out of their parents’ houses.
In fact, it’s not our generation that determines whether we are selfish or not, but our age. Young people are more narcissistic, regardless of generation. As we age, we take on more responsibility. We start our careers. We pay taxes. We have kids. Our worldview changes. That’s what happens to people, regardless of generation.
To sum up his talk, Conover nails the problem with lumping all millennials together. He points out that those birth years encompass one of the most diverse groups of people in history. “You can’t treat them as a monolith, right?,” he says, “Almost any statement made about millennials as a group, other than how diverse they are, is going to be false by virtue of how diverse they are. All they are is young.”
Maybe we could stop writing off huge parts of our society based just on age and ask ourselves why we find these young adults so threatening in the first place.
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