Millennials Aren’t Killing Shit. Capitalism is Killing Us — and Rubbing it in Our Faces
It’s a pretty tired media trope at this point, but you see it every day. Some so-called journalist regurgitating a press release from some allegedly beleaguered capitalist about their poor wee struggling sector. Why do they struggle so? Because something, something, millennials.
Young people doing anything other than blindly following consumption patterns of past generations is an attack, a runination, indeed, a murder — we are regularly accused killing everything from golf, to diamonds, to napkins, to banks. Oh, and the property market. Keep an eye on the last one.
Of course, “killing” in this case is often revealed to mean “causing a minor reduction in profit margins” or “consumer slightly less inclined to purchase a useless product”, which is apparently enough to send the moral guardians of the rough-and-tumble “real world” scrambling for their rosary beads in utter self-pity.
If these headlines were true, things would be great, honestly. Imagine a world where institutionally exploitative banks, the horrendously abusive diamond industry and environmentally wasteful sanitation options were simply consumer choice-d out of existence. A world where people just opted to have nothing to do with the pillars of capitalism and signifiers of excess. A world where this really was the death-throes of capitalism were so real that the media needed to report on it.
The narrative is clear — the things that were right and good in the past, the nice things our parents enjoyed, are being wastefully ruined by a self-absorbed generation of socialist selfie-addicts. Naturally, all of this histrionics are complete bollocks. The ones inflicting all the pain here are the capitalists desperately weeping crocodile tears about how they are the true victims. Let me tell you the story of my homeland to illustrate why.
I’m Irish. For those who don’t know, the 2007 financial crisis essentially obliterated the Irish economy, as the tidal wave of global events revealed that our free-market success story was a figment. Lending institutions had thrown cash around as if holding onto it any longer would give them herpes. The state had given every fast-talking snake-oil salesman with a briefcase full of cash free rein and a tax bill of zero. Every image of Christ in the country was torn down and replaced with an icon of a two-bedroom semi-detached house located in an estate sixteen miles outside of Athlone. Accounts, both public and private, were based on people looking at any old piece of crap and valuing it with a 1 followed by as many zeros as they could fit on the page. The country had been dead for years. We just didn’t realise it.
Once the veneer cracked, change came rapidly. The right-wing governing party and their well-meaning but ultimately powerless left-wing coalition partner were hoofed out of power and replaced by the right-wing opposition party, accompanied by a well-meaning but ultimately powerless left-wing coalition partner. The state spent huge amounts of money wrenching assets from bankrupt property developers, to be held escrow and then sold back (often at a loss) to the exact same developers ten years later. Irish banks were nationalised, with the state following this by heroically allowing their executives to continue running them as they pleased with almost no governmental oversight. That job was farmed out, logically, to the same consulting and audit firms who failed before the crash to point out that the whole system was based on pixie dust and drunken handshakes made in a tent at the Galway Races.
This went about as well for the millennial generation as you could imagine. Austerity hit hard, welfare (which was lower for the under-25s) became harder to obtain, and jobs disappeared. Since 2011, over 250,000 Irish people, disproportionately the young, left the country — and this is out of an population of around 4 million. (In the interests of fairness, I should point out that in 2016, immigration finally outstripped emigration, except in one age bracket — millennials.) And now, despite this, despite record-high homelessness, despite the rise of insecure work, we are told things are better again, and to preserve this we have to stop millennials killing them.
This of course, ignores the inconvenient fact the cost of basic services has skyrocketed and rents are now higher than they were at the height of the bubble pre-crash. Indeed, we are told things are better precisely because those things are taken as some perverse indicator of economic health.
There’s an irony here that brings us back to the initial point. When capitalists were a bit short of cash, investment in jobs dried up (investment in effectively tax-free brass-plate companies continued unabated) and we were told to suck it up. And now, as a result of this, millenials have no money — and that makes us the fucking villains.
I’ll share two advertising campaigns that have been run recently in Ireland, both by banks that managed to contribute to the economic crash, survive due to a huge taxpayer bailout and then go straight back to the reckless, venal practices that caused the problem in the first place. In fairness to them, they did briefly pause for breath to engage a life-ruining (sometimes life-ending) campaign to evict as many people as possible from their homes — often illegally, creating a brutal mess that is still being sorted out years later.

This is AIB’s ad, which was widely acclaimed because, sure, isn’t it lovely couple there? And they are. I’m sure Mick and Kate (who I’m assured a real. No seriously, they are actually real, I’m not being sarcastic) are wonderful people. This is one image from a huge cross-media campaign and people lapped it up. But think about the message here for a second.
Mick and Kate are not young. They are old. A mortgage in Ireland now is a 35 year term, so this makes sense, unless you pause for a second and realise that a 35 year mortgage is absolutely fucking crazytown, and only exists because the value of the asset (property! A pretty fundamental requirement!) is massively inflated because yep, you guessed it, the banks would become insolvent if they couldn’t value their property portfolio by putting down a 1 and then as many zeros as they can fit on the goddamn page.
There’s the real sinister message to anyone who is young — you can have this thing, a thing you pretty much need, but at the cost of being in debt until you are retired, basically. And Mick and Kate probably bought their house before things got crazy. It might have made sense then. Right now, for young people the choice is indebt yourself for most of the rest of your life for a fictitiously high price, or sod off.
Of course, the over-inflated price of houses has led naturally to massively over-inflated rents, so that’s an increasingly non-viable alternative for people. Heaven forbid the state do anything to correct a market failure. Naturally enough, Bank of Ireland noticed the success of AIB’s campaign, and the fact that the exorbitant cost of rent precludes many young people from saving for a mortgage deposit. The finest minds in their marketing team locked themselves away in a basement with what I can only assume was expired brandy and emerged today with an absolute rip-roarer of their own.

It’s really, really hard to fathom the thought process that went into this. Unlike the AIB ad, it’s even directly targeted at millennials. Unlike the AIB ad, it’s not a case of hoping nobody notices a sinister undertone — this ad is a straight up “Fuck you”.
Millennials, remember, are regularly lambasted for living with their parents. Accidentally, the very people who have created that situation reminded us of why — because young people can’t afford a place to live. Because the property prices that have been gleefully pumped up by banks and investment purchasers have led to high rents. Because the only way to save enough to afford a house as a young person is to pray you are lucky enough to have parents who can afford to have you at home, who live near where you work, who are happy to welcome you back home, who are alive. Orla and her boyfriend are lucky. They’re less lucky that the ad copy is so poorly written that it makes the whole arrangement sound like the family name is Habsburg, but the situation they are in with regards to their finances is spectacularly fortunate.
That’s the big “fuck you”. That’s the message from the capitalists. You want to get enough money to have a secure roof over your head? You’re happy to deal with the 35 years of debt, and the risk of financial ruin eviction and eviction if the bubble bursts a second time? Cool! All you need to do now is hope that you are fortunate enough to have a family you can fall back on, and have a good enough job that you can save for the deposit in the first place. It’s an advert for a service that doesn’t exist — it’s telling millenials how to live their lives so they too can continue to be grist to the mill of leveraging and speculation that drives the market.
After getting absolutely roasted on social media, some absolute hero on Mespil Road checked his mentions and decided the best thing to do was to hit the delete button. Sadly for them, those dang millennials have heard of the snipping tool, so their attempt to pretend this never happened didn’t quite work.
So this ad is preserved. It should be preserved. Because in 25 words, it exposed more of the bullshit that capitalism forces millennials to swallow than a thousand sputtering thinkpieces or enraged speeches ever could. The banks and the property market aren’t being “killed” by millennials. They are “killing” us.
An ad like this is just rubbing this in our faces. A reminder that capitalism can hold us to ransom and then tell us to go make sacrifices to ensure that they keep making money and can keep charging whatever they like, keep leveraging debt. It’s unsustainable, its cruel, it is driving people to flee the country, to indebt themselves, to make sacrifices that those who control the flow of money will never be willing to make. Like seriously lads, these capitalists should be upside down off the nearest lamppost.