Is my generation ruining the world or saving it?
Did the Baby Boomers screw us up?
Are Gen-Xers playing us off each other?
Am I even a millennial?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (shrug emoji)
Before I say anything, I need to acknowledge that my inspiration here was the recent Cracked Podcast episode about Millennials, released May 8th 2017. I cannot pretend to have assembled all these thoughts on my own.
I was born within the first 30 days of what is commonly considered the beginning of "The Millennial Generation", January 1982. This consensus is based on the podcast I just listened to, but digging deeper into the subject, it is easy to see that the time-frame is highly flexible. Now, the cynic inside me is desperate to rant about how this movable date line means sometimes articles consider me a millennial and sometimes they don't. It always seems like people my age are called millennials when the article is criticizing, but I get cut out when they are praising. That is just perception bias I assume.
Although that is not entirely true. The Cracked Podcast accurately identifies this rising trend in lazy article writing which unfairly targets millennials. Clearly the older generation has been complaining about the 'youth of today' ever since language began. This is nothing new - there have always been newspapers and other media outlets which fill the dead air with uncreative bullshit about how the kids are immoral. What makes this current trend slightly more frustrating is the use of the term 'millennial' as an agreed upon factual basis. The window of time defining millennials stretches to fit the narrative, which is shaky at best.
In the past, my reaction was to try and resurrect the old term "gen-Y", and apply it to anyone born between 1975 and 1990. In my experience, this window of time yielded a much more socially similar group than the 1982-2000 range. Generation-Y was the term we used in the 90s. It is a lazy extension of Gen-X, linguistically speaking, but my generation shares many traits with those who immediately preceded us. Trends ascribed to millennials are often inacurate and sometimes completely incorrect. Lazy writers blur the lines to the point that even 14 year olds in the year 2017 are considered millennials, reducing the word to a blanket term meaning "anyone younger than me".
More often than not, the "me" who wrote the misinformed, lazy article about millennials is a generation-Xer whose overarching theory can be simplified in a single sentence : Millennials are lazy and entitled and their coddling Baby Boomer parents made them that way. It's a convenient narrative that starts fun little rage-induced arguments that cause an article to be shared a million times on social media, which is the point from the outset. There are certainly articles out there which also extol the virtues of boomers, millennials, and gen-x, but those do not gain equal traction. I understand that, as with many subjects on the internet, the reader can easily be distracted by the vocal minority and forget that most people are peaceful and do not blame the problems of the world on any one age-group. This is, ultimately, a very soft pseudo-science subject.
All that being said, here small is a list of traits commonly assigned to millennials which not only do not apply to me, but my experience was the polar opposite.
Cars. The rise of new forms of communication, and more recently ride-sharing apps, combined with rising fuel costs and increased attention on the concept of a "carbon footprint" has led to a steep decline in the need to get a driver's license as soon as possible. For the majority of the 20th century, gaining access to a vehicle has been a right of passage for American teens*. One major aspect of the inacurate narrative about my generation is that we are killing the auto industry OR we are combating global warming depending on your political allegiance. The truth is that the auto industry is changing, and habits are mutating for all age groups. The rise of social media and online gaming did not truly take hold until around 2006-07 when high speed internet had reached its tipping point, and the iphone was released. These indoor activities supplanted the need to drive everywhere all the time, and led 16 year olds to de-emphasize the need for a license. Personally, I was in my mid-20s when this tip occurred. Social media was a decade away when I attended high-school, and even though dial-up internet was around, it was widely derided, ignored, and deemed unnecessary by the majority of society.
Communication. To expand on what I began above, Millennials are often tied to the rise of social media. There is a revisionist approach to our historic relationship with the internet. Time has proven the utility of the internet and now everyone pretends they were on board all along. News media, politicians, educators, and anyone who worked in the upper tier of an office - all of these people were highly resistant to change, and constantly diminished the potential of the internet throughout the 90s. It was a thing to be mocked as a hobbyist fascination that might amount to something in another 50 years or so. The news media has been especially guilty of hypocrisy when you look at how often today they will simply read thoughts and opinions directly from the various message boards.
*I fully acknowledge that the experiences of many Americans, possibly the majority, did not permit for luxuries like a car, let alone many cars, which would permit teens to drive at age 16. Despite this fact, what is important to my argument is the overall perception of the American experience as dictated by popular culture and media which is always idealized and not entirely representational.
