Why “Generations” are stupid?
Okay let me start with this, I fall into the age group defined as millennial and I was born in 1993 the year Jurassic Park graced theatre, screens for the first time Snoop Dogg’s debut album sold 800,000 copies its first week and women were first allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor what a year! I am going to say something about millennials that some people may disagree with but I’m also going to give precious generations the same treatment but most of all I’m going to talk about why generation labels are pointless in the first place. Let’s start by defining what people mean when they say a generation in this context is a group of people born within a fairly arbitrary range of dates, for example, you’re a baby boomer if you were born between 1946 and 1964 you’re part of Generation X if you were born between 65 and 1980 or 61 and 81 depending on who you ask, you are millennial between 81 and 96 and kids born in or after 1997 are called postmillennial. Yup millennials are so bad that the entire next generation is defined by the fact that they’re not Millennials. Let’s play a game I’m going to list some stereotypes and you try to guess which generation I am talking about, I am talking about lazy, entitled, disrespectful, self-centered, and impatient if you guessed any generation at all you’re right George Orwell once said every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it and he was absolutely right. Here’s a quote for you try to guess what decade it comes from I see hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous your of today when I was young we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient so what do you think which decade do you think that came from the trick question, we can’t say for certain its form somewhere around the 8th century people have been lumping their children and their elders into a group for the purpose of complaining about them since basically the dawn of time does that mean complaints about any given generation are invalid, no of course not there are very specific and valid concerns about every group.
Let’s look at Millennials, for example, we’re addicted to our phones and social media, we are more depressed than any previous generation, we have very little respect for what used to be seen as a stable career and we’re incredibly entitled a lot of you would probably agree with all those and I’m sure at least as many of you disagreed let’s breakdown. There are two big problems with these stereotypes one they are by default stereotypes highly generalized assertions about a very very large group of people spanning a hugely diverse background in fact Millennials are the most diverse generation in history, now all stereotypes are based on some grain of truth however small it may be yes most of us are addicted to phone but I’m sure we all know at least one person who actively tries to distance themselves from smartphones and social media yes we have higher rates of depression than any previous generation but that’s partly due to the social media and here we reach the second problem with these stereotypes, not a single one of them is caused by some unique quality pf people born between 1981 and 1996 they’re caused by a number of factors but the mainly by the people who raised them. Yes, Millennials have been spoiled by participation trophies, seriously trophy thing is a problem when every child is given an award for being absolutely unremarkable, you end up with a generation of young adults who expect to be rewarded just for showing up, yeah that's a bad thing to expect but the Millennials who exhibit that tendency had no choice in the matter they were raised in an environment of constant praise and assertion that they can do anything.
They put their minds to we’re addicted to our smartphones why because smartphones weren’t a thing when our parents were growing up Millennials got to be the guinea pigs for a culture-wide experiment that ended up shattering our perception of reality and leading to drastically increased rates of depression and suicides. It sounds dramatic but, think about how social media works we post a status somebody likes it we get an instant hit of dopamine the same sneaky chemical that activates the reward centers of our brains when we drink or smoke or gamble, dopamine is incredibly addicting and social media is the ultimate delivery tool it’s easy we always have our phones on us and it doesn't seem as dangerous as alcohol or nicotine as far as career aspirations ago when Millennials are overwhelmingly hamstrung by crippling student loans and if we’re lucky maybe landed an unpaid internship during school and when we get out or job prospectus are still no better than our high school-educated peers the eagerness fades a little top that off with the fact that most entry-level positions pay worse adjusted for inflation than the job. Our parents landed and require five years of experience the option seems both limited and depressing, so yes Millennials have a bad attitude but the reasons are more valid than a lot of people assume this isn’t just a defense of Millennials. Each generation has to take responsibility for the environment they provide their children the baby boomers who largely held the opinion that loyalty to a company and putting in long hours was the surest way to move up in the world struggled to understand why their Gen X children were apathetic about careers and angry at society sure the boomers were well-off but many of them didn't make time for their families which led their children to strive for more independence from cooperations and a better work/life balance.
Of course, as with anything related to the generation, this is all very general there were baby boomers with a great work/life balance there were Gen Xers who didn’t drive IROC Camaros while wearing flannel shirt torn jeans and listening to Duran. Duran just like there are Millennials who just want to find a decent 9 to 5 job and support their family, unfortunately, this whole culture norm lumping huge numbers of people into generations has the negative effect of creating an us-versus-them mentality. If I hear one more person blame Millennials for killing retail chains or golf or homeownership I’m going to slap them with my avocado toast this happens with every generation society changes the way we do business changes cultural norms media job markets politicals landscapes everything changes and change is scary for the people who are too tired to keep up. Yes, technology moves quickly but that's no excuse to blame smartphones for the downfall of western civilization plenty of people are adapting to and taking advantage of every new opportunity or a breakthrough that comes their way the bottom line is this generational stereotyping is simply based on bad assumption it assumes that entire population of people share the same values the same upbringing the same likes or dislikes the same psychological tendencies like Donald Trump is a baby boomer so is Bill Gates they’re on opposite sides of every possible spectrum both very wealthy one gives 95% of his income to charity the other busted for running a fraudulent charity. Jeff Bezos is a Gen Xers so Kurt Cobain probably wouldn’t have gotten along then take Millennials LeBron James is a millennial and is so Kim Jong-un besides the fact that they both liked basketball not very much in common. The idea that generations exhibit totally different values is also wrong and counterproductive if a baby boomer and a millennial would just take the time to listen to each other rather than assuming thing based upon generational stereotypes they could very well find that they share some similar values these values could be anything from political views to adopting shelter animals to just wanting to have the time to relax with friends and family. Millennials probably triggered both groups of people asserted that generational labels are stupid and used generational labels to explain things if that sounds ridiculous it should. This counterproductive arguing about why young people re lazy or why old people are out of touch or any of the pointless fighting over inevitable social changes has been going on for as long as we’ve had recorded history and probably much longer than that maybe these so-called post-millennials can break the vicious cycles but I don’t know they seem pretty lazy.