86% of millennials think you’re full of shit
(and the other 14% don’t know they’re a millennial.)
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Neil Howe or William Strauss. You’ve most certainly never read the book they co-authored in 1991 called Generations. But these men and this book are solely responsible for coining the term “millennial” and therefore responsible for the downfall of civilized journalism everywhere.
You can’t blame him for his optimistic and even innocent explanation of how they came to this term. They named this group much in the way that Newman named his “Newmannium” New Year’s Eve 1999 party on Seinfeld. I suppose there’s no way Mr. Howe or the late Mr. Strauss could have imagined how badly press in 2015 might have abused the term, beating it into every conceivable article imaginable in order to feed the online content beast.
Wondering how millennials feel about sex? Restaurants? Working full time? Being unemployed? Living with their parents? Dealing with a lack of affordable housing? Dealing with a lack of affordable housing in Denver? FEAR NOT. The writers of things have you covered.
So with no shortage of coverage on said millennials, we know a lot about this overly branded generation. We know they are incredibly lazy, opting to move back home with their parents after college rather than starting their lives. They’re tech savvy. But they’re not as tech savvy as you think. They are hesitant to get married and prefer dating and casual sex. But not as much casual sex as their parents. Every article about how something millennials are, there are five articles telling you how not something they are, or how more something they are then some other generation. If you spent any time at all researching millennials, you’d likely come to one conclusion:
There are also no shortage of comparisons or extrapolations drawn from data about millennials. And the generalizations are abundant and endless; with a few cliches and a recently released poll, a writer can single-handedly classify what every person aged 15–34 thinks about the world. Not only are those of us with children, full-time jobs and mortgages lumped into the same category as high school juniors, we are fodder for pundits to discuss their ass backwards theory about why abortions in America have declined. (Because millennials.)
The pure volume of these articles showing up in our social media feeds and in our browsers every day, like overflowing sewage from a flooding city, has led the most desperate among us to turn to technology for help. You can now download a Chrome extension that will turn every mention of “millennials” to “snake people,” effectively eliminating your ability to ever see that word in your browser again. It doesn’t stop the barrage of over generalizations, though.
The push to characterize attitudes, habits and beliefs of people according to their generation are useful — to marketers and social scientists in particular — in order to find patterns and trends. The problem with this effort is that it categorically ignores the diversity of experience and the complexities of societal structures that shape our lives outside of the years in which we are born. It leads, predictably, to oversimplification of ideas and results in fairly useless analysis that may or may not actually apply to real life.
It would be interesting to see pieces that examine the backgrounds, beliefs and tendencies of people within generations; to dig deeper to find real human stories happening in the context of these giant eras. For now, we’re stuck with the daily punch in the face that is the media’s overuse of the term. At least we have snake people.
