Dec 3, 2018
Millennials Are Killing Middle Children
by Calle Hack
I don’t know if you have heard this before, but the Millennials are killing everything. The diamond industry, the housing market, the traditional concept of marriage, all dead. We’re like a generation of King Midas’s, if King Midas was in crippling debt and everything he touched turned into a meme. Or like a generation of Medusas’, if Medusa.” was in crippling debt and every time she looked at an industry our parent’s love it turned to socialism. In the latest trend of serial killings that Millennials have murdered into the ground is the middle child.
How many of you are middle children?
If the audience says nothing, “Omg, you all are so quiet because you know no one cares about you.”
If the audience is excited, “Omg, OK. Calm down, you all are always so desperate for attention.”
We’re a dying birth order, you guys. We’re going extinct. I, myself, am a millennial, an old millennial, and also a middle child. And I am not doing anything to save my own. I have no money and no children, let alone multiple children in order to have middle children. So, I get it. Kids are expensive. Apparently raising just one child can cost upwards of a quarter million dollars. Today, I was a nickel short when I tried to buy fruit snacks from the vending machine. So, no, I don’t have children money. I can’t go around the office asking for pocket coins to support my expensive child habit. No one in the office would even give me a nickel for the fruit snacks. I did however get a lecture on how nickels aren’t made of real nickel anymore, which did nothing for my sugar craving, but I’m a middle child and desperate for intimacy so I patiently stood there and listened.
My point is, I understand wanting to kill us off. I’m a middle child and I joke about wanting to die all the time. What I’m saying is, it’s not Millennial’s fault. They just aren’t having large families anymore. We’re a generation without religion, money, or family farm lend to tend to, so there’s just no practical reason to have middle children. Which, honestly, is every middle child’s worst fear confirmed. That is the entire crux of the Middle Child Syndrome. And now we’ve dying out from lack attention. We’re like little Tinkerbells with no Pans to pity clap us back to life every now and then.
As much as I understand and empathize — empathy, by the way, is a truly unique and universal trait among all middle children — as much as I empathize with not wanting to have a large family, you all are going to miss us. Which is also such a middle child thing of me to say, like a little kid exclaiming, “You’re going to be sorry when I’m dead!” But us middle children would never scream that, we’d write that secretly and angrily in our journals at night. It wouldn’t matter even if we did say it out loud, parents wouldn’t be able to hear us over the attention they were giving to the baby of the family or they would just respond, “Sure, I might be sorry for a little bit, but I’ll have a quarter million more in the bank. So, if I ever start feeling sad, I’ll just take a look at my savings account.”
Middle children are typically known as being over-looked or forgotten, not given the parental attention a first born or youngest born may receive. As my own origin story goes according to Hack family folklore, I was destined to be a middle child. When I was born my dad forgot to bring the baby bag to the hospital. So, he had to run back home to get the bag, but couldn’t find it, so he grabbed some of his old bartending T-shirts from a garbage of clothes and brought them to the hospital to wrap me up in for the ride home. So, my welcoming to this world was so over-looked I was swaddled in beer T-shirts plucked from a trash bag. A true middle child’s tale.
But it is because middle children are overlooked that it is thought that’s exactly what has encouraged a keen sense of injustice, empathy, and creativity. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr, Britney Spears, all middle children. So, when as the Millennial generation become parents and are being smart, mindful and proactive in their family planning to have just enough children they can afford and pay attention to, they are doing our society a grave disservice.
It’s going to be a world filled with oldest, youngest, and onlys. What an absolute horror.
Can you even imagine a world where everyone is adequately loved?! Uh, no thank you. There have been studies that have shown that most first borns become CEO’s and most babies of the family become comedians, but they don’t become comedians because they didn’t get enough love, but because they got too much love. The world is going to burn without us middles, I tell you.
Kevin Lehman, the man wrote the book on birth orders, said, “Losing middle children isn’t good for any of us. Middle children are like the pb & j in the sandwich and pretty soon we’re just going to be bread on bread.”
And we all know bread is a dying industry, because of all these gluten allergies. So, we have nothing but a boring ass world to look forward to. A world of Oreos without the cream, the rule of threes with only two, rock, paper, scissors will only be played with paper and scissors. There’s going to be less joy in this world, but we’ll never know what exactly it is that we’re missing, because no one pays attention to our existence in the first place.
This essay was presented at The Skewer’s live show, August 2018 at Cafe Mustache in Chicago. Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/theskewer/the-skewer-31-august-2018
