Who Made the Millennials?
by Miki Saxon
As I said yesterday, millennials aren’t what you think.
It’s pretty stupid to think that 80 million people would all think and act identically. Not all Boomers did drugs, not all Gen X were slackers and not all millennials were spoiled and entitled.
Just as an animal reflects how it’s raised, so does a human.
When I’m accosted by an unruly dog I hold the owners responsible.
The deprived generation of the Depression raised the entitled generation of Boomers who raised the much entitled, very special generation of Millennials, so when you look at millennials you should look to their parents — the Boomers.
Time magazine’s 2013 cover story was written with an eye to covering for its Boomer reader base. It did a good job by locking in the millennial myth.
“The Me Me Me Generation—Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.”
Not that they had much choice.
No generation grows up in a vacuum and economics plays a large role.
The first wave of millennials hit the job market in 2008.
(…) millennials were in the fourth year of the “jobless recovery,” facing high unemployment, mounting debt, and an eroded social safety net. And yet, with breathtaking cluelessness, TIME framed the millennials’ desperate search for stable work as a privileged character flaw—look at the kids too flaky to handle “choosing from a huge array of career options.”
Options maybe; actual jobs, very few.
Worse, the attitudes drummed into our heads growing up are very hard to shake at any age and some are still wreaking havoc.
Join me tomorrow for a look at what’s happening now.
Image credit: speight
January 16th, 2019 at 10:45 am
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