A frequent topic of this blog that has, rather surprisingly to me, caught a great deal of reader interest is the ongoing project to map the contours of forgotten generations. These are the cohorts who’ve been memory holed since Madison Avenue no longer finds them profitable to advertise to.
Also contra expectations, Generation Y has emerged as an enduring object of fascination. So much so that the Gen Y label has made a comeback of sorts. It makes sense with the death of the internet becoming harder and harder to ignore and the sharp delineations between pre and post-internet cohorts coming into greater relief.
Those who reject Gen Y as a category on the grounds that it’s just a way for Millennials to distance themselves from their generation’s well-publicized faults ignore that most discussions of the topic focus on Ys’ vices. In fact, examining each cohort’s besetting sins nicely highlights the real differences between them.
Whereas Millennials are infamous for their neediness, self-absorption, and thin skins, Ys tend to be slothful, tractable, and self-doubting. Recently, a commenter added a long-overlooked demerit to Ys’ list of generational vices. Gen Y tends to have a default transactional view of relationships.
Consider this series of surveys from 2013. Following the ad men, the researchers left out the Gen Y category. However, what they term “Millennials” almost exactly aligns with Generation Y, especially since they polled 18-32 year-olds when Ys were 24-34. That was right around the median age of first marriage in 2013.
That marriage data is especially significant, since it shows a striking decline in marriage among Gen Y.
Just as tellingly, Gen Y has higher divorce rates than Gen X, despite having lower marriage rates as well.
It should come as no surprise that the survey also found that Ys have lower rates of church membership and trust people less overall.
Gen Xers get grief for being cynical loners, but Ys are measurably more antisocial.
To what can we attribute this marked introversion streak, when the next generation is known for being oversocialized to the point of seeking consensus on even the smallest decision?
Beating this drum is making my arm tired, but once again we must look to the Boomers. Guilty over having neglected their Gen X first children, Baby Boomers overcompensated with Xers’ younger siblings. Only they didn’t make an effort to spend less time at work and more with their Gen Y kids. Instead, Boomers bought off Ys with TV, toys, and junk food.
The problem with bribing people to like you is it teaches them that love is conditional. If you’re brought up learning that your first and most formative relationship is predicated on you getting resources and entertainment, you come to value all relationships solely based on what you get out of them.
That’s why the common refrain from Gen Y apostates goes “I just wasn’t getting anything out of church.”
Ditto for divorced Ys. “He wasn’t making me happy anymore.”
Male Ys critically lack real-life male friendships. That deficiency goes back to their earliest interactions with other boys, most of which revolved around what a playmate had.
“I’m heading to Josh’s birthday party. His mom bought him a whole set of Generation 1 Transformers!”
“Kevin just got Super Mario Bros. 3! I’m going over there to check it out!”
“Justin bought a VCR with his paper route Christmas tips. He’s renting a bunch of tapes and having a sleepover!”
Those mercenary friendships ended when one party could no longer extract value from the other.
Even today, members of Gen Y will tell you flat out that all relationships are transactional. When pressed, they’ll argue that even parents get something out of having kids.
You can easily dismantle that nonsense by asking if he’d disown his son if the kid became a net negative.
That transactional attitude also betrays Ys’ weak or absent virtue of religion. God is the Perfect, Absolute, Self-necessary Being. Claiming that we limited beings can offer something He lacks is definitionally absurd. He gives us everything, including life itself.
Transactional views of relationships are inherently coercive. They imply that both parties must keep bribing each other to continue the relationship. That’s manipulation, not love.
That’s why no one cares when the protagonist of the “Gen Y Tale” chapter of my #1 best seller disappears.
Read it and avoid his fate.
The only male members of Gen Y who didn’t have the “Let’s go to Jimmy’s house because he has that new video game console” experience were the ones whose parents bought them every console on release day.
Those were only the rich kids, but every school had at least one. It’s easy to forget now, but adjusted for inflation, those consoles cost around $500 in today’s money. Unless your dad was an executive or owned the biggest heating & cooling co. in town, you were a one-console household. If a family did have more than one system, it was because they held on to the last-gen hardware after getting the new model.
Since console ownership broke along Sega vs Nintendo lines, many a friendship was built and maintained by one kid having a SNES while his buddy had a Genesis.
Reminds me of the forgotten trough generation that was once called the MTV generation 77-83.
I am from 77 myself with a boomer and jones parent. While both my kids are gen z.
This small cohort remembers 80’s pop culture from first runs instead of reruns and tends to understand the cohorts before and after. It has also been my experience that a lot of IT professionals came out of this cohort.
That’s how I would identify my age cohort before Generation Y was rediscovered. It is a succinct way of conveying shared cultural experiences if you want to use an exclusively media-focused lens.
Yup right there with you (’77 baby as well) – also heard it called “The Star Wars Generation” and “The Oregon Trail Generation.”
Beyond the “you do the dishes, I’ll watch that stupid action movie with you” sort of thing, transactions are a soulless way to run a relationship. As you mentioned, it’s dependent on each person being able to uphold their part of the deal. Life doesn’t happen that way. Things happen that you can’t predict and can never imagine. In those instances, it’s love, not a bargain, that matters.
That’s what chilled me when the other day’s commenter pointed out Gen Y’s biggest vice. We have a generation who don’t really know what love is.
Very sad. Those responsible are guilty of crimes against humanity.
This is one of the most relatable Gen Y posts you’ve done. I have seen this so many times over my life that it makes me head spin. It also helps explain why so many members of my cohort really don’t understand what friendship entails and they might not even have realized it themselves.
I have a Gen Y family member who did this his whole life and was always stunned to discover that people could like him for who is without expecting anything from him. I think he felt so guilty over it that he to this day really doesn’t have anything to do with any of us, of his own choosing and without any maliciousness. And he wasn’t rich, either, he just had the expectation that everything is transactional and that he has nothing to offer anyone. He appears to be doing now, but he’s still distant from the rest of us. I pray that one day he will be able to get past it.
It isn’t just him, though. This idea of life being nothing but endless product and consuming has affected Gen Y rather hard. Some even make it a point to lie about themselves or their past to seem as if they have more to offer. It is quite strange, but now I’m starting to get where this comes from.
It also explains the loneliness epidemic and the higher rates of suicide. Hopefully this can be turned around, because it isn’t going to get any better with what’s up ahead.
Plenty of prayer would be a good place to start.
Someone who can’t conceive of any relationship dynamic not built on a quid pro quo will have no concept of patience or self-sacrifice. It’s why a member of Gen Y will look at you like a space alien if you suggest enduring instead of avoiding suffering–or the slightest inconvenience.
That right there is why Hollywood, public schooling, and vaccine mandates continue unabated.
In most matters Gen Y departed from the Boomers to their own personal vices, in contrast with the millennials who are largely mirrors of the boomers. But when it comes to refraining from even minor sacrifices and trying to avoid all possible risks Gen Y is as close to the boomers as you can get.
It feels like the modern generations really are the final mutation of post-WW malaise.
Lost: Dealt with the horrors of oncoming modernity
Greats: Tried to escape suffering by building utopia
Silents: Went along with it, because it’s what they do
Boomers: Embraced pleasure as Law
Jonesers: Self-explanatory
Xers: Neglect leading to despair
Ys: No concept of suffering or hope
Mills: Once True Utopia exists we will escape suffering
Zoomers: Buy dogecoin
Last: “I’ve never seen my teacher’s face”
It feels like we wrapped all the way around again with the Mills being the Boomers’ true heirs/last stand.
Once the Greats willingly abandoned civilization and tradition we entered this unending cycle of pain for pleasure. To get out, it must be broken.
Xers: Neglect leading to despair
Ys: No concept of suffering or hope
The relationship between these two tendencies intrigues me. They echo, in a way. Or, perhaps the cynicism and despair of the Xers leads to the deeper despair of the Ys. I’m not sure why they would, since X and Y are siblings, not parent and child. I think I would rephrase the Y summary to “No hope, and no value found in suffering.” I think one can only persevere in trials and find the value in pain if one has hope, just as one cannot believe in the sanctification of illness if one does not believe in sanctification, or have the hope of glory. There are plenty of miserable Ys, and many who are trapped in mental or emotional illness, but few who would think to let the pain soften them to what God is trying to say, or teach them compassion for others who also suffer as they do.
Gen X and Y have similarities but a lot of opposing characteristics, same with Millennials. This is one of the reasons I knew Ys existed, because everything I had seen told me either of the other two categories didn’t describe us well enough.
But the varied reactions to suffering, how all three have vastly different ways of coping with it, is probably the biggest proof you need to show they grew up under very original circumstances from each other.
Gen Y is the last modern generation to know anything about religion, Christianity. Were they to finally push past their fear of suffering and abandonment and reconnect with it, they would be a force to reckon with.
We’ll just have to pray and hope that they will.
This is most definitely the case with the relative in question, and it is painful that he suffers for it. All I can do is pray and hope for the best.
I’m actually replying to your answer about Gen X and Gen Y slightly up-thread, because it’s reached maximum comment depth.
The more I think about this, the more I recognize myself in this description. It’s not a comforting realization. On the other hand, it does help me explain something I’ve been stuck on since late adolescence. The difference between ten years ago and now (or five years ago and now even) is that I’ve suffered some pain that refused to be ignored and have come back to church. That has meant renewing old disciplines, like prayer and fasting, and discovering new ones, like the commemoration of the saints and the daily office. I haven’t been practicing some of them for very long, but they already seem to be making a difference. Abstaining from good things to do better things is a very minor inconvenience, but I hope that in learning look to God in that weakness, I will learn to trust Him with more, including the hard things.
“You can easily dismantle that nonsense by asking if he’d disown his son if the kid became a net negative.”
If the boomers and the Jonesers would happily say, “Yes!” then why wouldn’t Gen Y?
Brian,
Everything you say about Gen Y is accurate. I fit most of these traits so well, I am afraid you are stalking me.
The belief that relationships are always transactional has destroyed my marriage, hurt relationships with family members, and keeps me far from God. You’re doing great work exposing these false understandings of the world!
Give the glory to God, and pray for healing and increase in charity.
And stop seeing all relationships as exclusively transactional. When given advice like that, most Ys say, “But I can’t!”
What they really mean is “But changing my default attitude will cause me temporary inconvenience and discomfort!”
Yes. Suffer it. For once, dare to experience misery without self-sedating through consooming. Such sacrifices are acceptable to Almighty God.
Real love can hurt, and hurt badly. That’s how you know it’s real. As terrible as the pain might be, it tells you that you are alive, and human.
It’s clear to me that Gen Y and Millenial vices were all caused by overcorrections to the previous generation.
Gen X was told to fend for themselves so their parents could pursue fulfilling careers, and they became cynical.
Gen Y was sedated with entertainment and taught love was something to be paid for, so they developed depression at the idea that love was something they didn’t deserve.
Millennials were taught through participation trophies and esteem building exercises that everything they did was good and made them worthy if praise, which finally explains for me why a millennial will think that disapproving of something they do is somehow unloving.
Of course, nowhere along the way did people stop and ask if maybe society shouldn’t have been re-ordered in the first place, so we’re constantly told, simultaneously, that these problems don’t exist, are good, are nothing new, and are the price of ‘progress.’
I still don’t know enough about Zoomers to see if they’re a reaction to millennial narcissism, but it’s a safe bet.
That’s how you know Millennials were groomed to be heirs to the Boomers. Any criticism of their personal preferences is taken as a personal attack. They are the avatars of Liberalism.
Hey do you think divorce played a part on Gen Y?
Born 1985.
Remember kids finding out their parent divorce but instead of the parent then making a effect on love just over brought the kids stuff. One friend was given twice the amount of birthday presents and I remember thinking at the time (9 to 11 years old) wow your parents divorcing sounds great. I thank God that my parents never divorce.
The parenting style I will say was work hard get a big house, have lot of stuff and the kids they will figure it out. Teaching the next generation was left to the teachers, priest, the coaches and friend groups. Also how you compare to other kids was important. “My child did or is this or that” was good brownie points to the Mothers while growing. So topping a sport, grades, getting in media or something that they can use was important. Also how you present yourself (though I would say is somewhat important just not superficial)
Man I would of love to spent more time getting to know my parents when I was younger. I am lucky compare to most of generations and I got to know my extended family better.
Yes, good point.
An excellent post. I thank God that I didn’t have a childhood like that. The first time I heard this model of parenting spoken of was as a satirical joke in Ratchet and Clank 2, and even then, though I couldn’t have been much older than 10, I instinctively felt deeply disgusted by it, feeling that it was somehow grotesquely wrong, not funny. I could never put into words why exactly I had that reaction, until this post did so. Thanks.
You are welcome.