Snowflakes (talkin’ ‘bout my generation)

Millennials are the worst generation in history, say the papers. With our safe spaces, our unemployment, our lack of home-ownership and a thousand other reasons beside, we are the end of Western civilisation and the beginning of a slide into mediocrity as we are overtaken by China, invaded by Russia or murdered by ISIS. All three, if you read the Telegraph.

What they neglect to point out is that every generation in history has been declared the worst in history by the one preceding it with varying degrees of veracity, because every generation judges the next by their own standards.

Unemployment is only a dirty word because we treat it as such — the fact of the matter is that the entrance of computerisation and automation into the workplace have produced an explosion in productivity that would put the Industrial Revolution to shame. The only thing preventing the complete automation of many workplaces is this stigma of increasing unemployment: every coffee shop in the country could be replaced by a vending machine with no detectable loss in quality, and one member of staff is able to support 10 self-service supermarket checkouts without too much difficulty. In times past, an idle person meant a job undone, but the same simply isn’t true any more. Unemployment peaked at 8.4% in October of 2011 following the market crash and every pundit predicted honest-to-god literal armageddon. We saw businesses collapse and house prices plummet, but everything still got done. The trains ran, the lights stayed on and hospitals stayed open, and if you weren’t one of the unlucky many who lost their jobs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everything was actually pretty alright.

Owning a home is a similarly archaic concept, driven by a time when the best way to get by was to pick a job and stick to it, to “put down roots”. I’d like to think our generation are a little bit more dynamic than trees, and the market has eaten that up. We remain in jobs for shorter periods than ever before, hopping from employer to employer and industry to industry. This means that talent can flow more easily to where it is most needed and favours new startups, where the employee has a real stake in the success of a new company and that new company can grow (or fail) much faster than it would have done previously. This is partly responsible for the vibrant and cut-throat tech marketplace, where talented individuals can be head-hunted and bought up like nerdy footballers. We are the mobile generation in every sense, and buying a home makes absolutely no sense to most of us.

Not all of the accusations levelled against us are untrue or arbitrary, however. We are vain. We are entitled. We are utterly devoid of grit and (god, I hate this word) sticktoitiveness. Why?

The generation that raised us, the Baby Boomers, think they have the answer. We got medals for participation, big rounds of applause for turning up and we were told over and over that we were wonderful and awesome just the way we are. We grew up with The Hero’s Journey, a storytelling trope that utterly pervades our media and left so many of us just waiting for our Ben Kanobi or our letter from Hogwarts that just isn’t coming. We want, even expect fame and fortune to fall in our lap but have no plans for how we expect to attain it — spinsters planning their perfect wedding. Hell, there’s even a growing body of thought which lays the blame for our weird sexual issues on the “protagonist always gets the girl” cliché which leaves very unimpressive young men expecting beautiful women to fall in love with them for being Nice Guys, and build a venomous resentment towards women who reject them, even women in general. (I capitalise Nice Guys for some very specific reasons, but that’s a story for another day)

What the commentariat always neglect to point out is that they’re the dipshits who gave us the medals, who patted us on the back and produced the media that poisoned us with images of unearned glory. At best, they raised us to be what we are and we’ll have to break our own programming to be successful, but I suspect it goes deeper. I suspect that the Baby Boomers are just as entitled, just as vain and selfish as us, and that’s why we find our society where it is. Every generation since the Enlightenment has been measurably better-off than the one before in a number of key areas — politically, economically and scientifically, but the Baby Boomers were the first generation in history to grow up in a time of unbroken prosperity. This means they were ingrained with a mindset, which Peter Thiel refers to in Zero to One as indefinite optimism, where we expect things to get better without any planning or specific action on our part.

This aimless expectation of success worked out rather well for them, as they existed in a climate where success was relatively easy to obtain and systems were in place to reduce the damage done by failure. Having gone to university with no tuition fees, they entered one of many fields which were highly stable and bought an affordable home to enter the property ladder. Ultimately, they had and raised children who were as fragile as they were, and sent them into a much less stable world than the one they had found. Their penchant for short-term gain at the cost of long-term stability and growth led to the death of Keynesian economics and the beginning of monetarism, ushered in by Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. Privatisation was king, because it filled government coffers immediately and reduced government expenses for years to come. It funded tax cuts which brought more business and produced more consumer spending, further ballooning the economy.

Balloons aren’t much tougher than bubbles, though, and they still burst. When the proceeds of the privatisation ran out, the manufacturers left, and both the UK and the USA were left with service-dominated economies and few major exports. The businesses which couldn’t leave — real estate and utility companies, for example — did what any right-minded monopoly would do and gouged as best they could, causing the cost of living to skyrocket.

We don’t buy homes because the prices have shot up. We’re in debt because things that were public services now cost thousands. And we don’t have jobs because we exist in an economy so stagnant that the most qualified generation in history are fighting to pour drinks and make coffee. Our ancestors built a gold-paved road to success, then the generation before us tore it up behind them and sold it off — now they’re mocking us as we climb through the rubble.

Here’s the shit part: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who is responsible for our emotional fragility because it’s us and our kids who will suffer the consequences of a world where difficult conversations don’t occur and dangerous thoughts remain unstated (think Fahrenheit 451 with more school shootings). It doesn’t matter who caused the economy to stagnate because it’s our job to get it moving. Even if we go to the absolute extreme and say that our parents literally ruined the entire world, it’s still our decision to rebuild or to inhabit the rubble.