There’s no ignoring that the Millennial generation is in crisis.
Just take a look at their skyrocketing incidence of depression.
While most Americans are feeling more depressed, we’ve seen the sharpest increase among those who were aged 16-25 as of 2017.
Those ages encompass the birth years 1992-2001, which is an almost perfect match for the generational reckoning favored at this blog.
It’s probably not an accident that the first spike in depression figures came in 2013-2014, when the average Millennial was leaving adolescence. After all, that cohort was raised by television – and then the internet – to believe they could achieve any dream they set their hearts on. And what’s more, they deserved to.
What Millennials found instead when they entered the real world was that they had the same personal limitations as every prior generation – if not more.
The resulting difficulty with adapting to adult life due to a steady diet of “You can be anything you want!” marketing is what I call Nickelodeon syndrome.
Check out any post-Ground Zero (which also coincides with Millennials’ formative years) kids’ show, and you’ll notice a steady and unsubtle drum beat of “Kids are savvier and more imaginative than adults. Your mom and dad work dull 9-5 jobs because they lack ambition, but you can be a movie star/rock god/millionaire!”
This is of course a vicious and cruel lie to tell children, because vanishingly few people have the talent and resources to realize all of their ambitions as they envision them.
Equality – another evil concept peddled to children – does not exist in any measurable form among individuals. Someone who’s 5′ 4″ is not going to excel in the NBA. If your IQ is 89, you will not be founding a successful tech startup.
Diversity is real, though not in the warped sense the Death Cult intends. There is a hierarchy of being in which every on the spectrum of ability is filled. This full expression of possibilities inherent in the human condition honors God and man.
The serious mental and larger societal problems we’re seeing stem from denying the natural order. And worse, going against it. A generation is coming to grips with the fact that most of them cannot be full-time game streamers or glass ceiling-shattering female CEOs like their cartoons promised.
These internal contradictions have rendered a disturbing number of Millennials severely neurotic. Ven. Fulton Sheen compared neurosis to squeezing a tube of toothpaste with the cap still screwed on. The contents could burst out anywhere. Some medicate in various ways to deal with the pressure. Others let it erupt into frenzied attacks on the world they feel betrayed them. That is a root of campus and shitlibopolis havoc we’ve seen these recent years. Note that Millennial depression took another dramatic upturn in 2016.
The cure for Nickelodeon syndrome is a healthy dose of humility – the virtue by which one makes an accurate assessment of his ability and submits to the cosmic order accordingly. The surest and fastest way to grow in virtue is to petition God for it. But since Millennials have been taught they don’t need God since they’re Him, few are taking this route.
What’s clear is that generations X and Y are being passed over for leadership so Boomers can hand the reins over to their Millennial clones. The tragic spectacle of foreign policymakers taking cues from Reddit suggests that the handover is already in progress.
If you thought that rule by demented fossils was bad, just wait until the self-entitled neurotics who can’t boil water or change a tire take charge.
For a vision almost as scary, read my hit horror-adventure novel.
“If you thought that rule by demented fossils was bad, just wait until the self-entitled neurotics who can’t boil water or change a tire take charge.”
Well, the joke’s on you, Brian! Only a Millennial like me can possess the out-of-the-box thinking to sit down with Putin and tell him, “If you settle for taking only the Russian-majority part of Ukraine as your buffer zone, I’ll cook you the best bowl of solyanka that you’ve ever tasted.” This is because Gen X expatriots would be too busy making fun of “gamma males” during their aimless livestreams, Gen Y newpub authors would be too busy complaining about anime, and Gen Z netizens would be too busy fawning over Putin and calling him “based” and “redpilled.”
And yes, I’ve also changed a tire—and it was a crappy doughnut tire that forced me to swap my deflated front tire with the rear tire.
Oh how cute the senile old Bastards are at it again. YOU created the Current Generation. YOU raised us. YOU created the culture. YOU abused us.
Then you turn right around and whine about it like a fucking pussy.
P.s. Unlike you I’ve actually walked ten miles both ways in a snowstorm.
P.s.s. I can do auto mechanics and change tires. I have a copy of TOAD do you?
P.s.s.s. You are an abusive loser and need to be beaten to a bloody pulp, so you toughen up.
If you think I’m a Boomer or make excuses for Boomers, it’s clear you’re new here.
Try lurking long enough to read the room before launching into an effeminate tirade.
In the spirit of reading the room, you need to understand that only “D Cal” has dibs on posting the Millennial cringe here. I get away with it, because I am a client of Mr. Niemeier who has paid him actual money for his services—but if you join me in creating masssive headaches for the rest of his readers, Brian is going to ban both of us for sanity’s sake. Understand?
You provide a very good case for Millennials being the Junior Boomer generation. It’s uncanny how well you nailed it.
“Foreign policy makers taking cues from Reddit” – Now THAT is a story I have to hear more about.
That’s a leading theory as to why the West keeps doubling down on supporting the Ukraine. And now a barracks full of redditors have been blown up, leading some of their comrades to become deserters.
Wait, some of them actually went? And they died? I’d never heard of it.
A barracks at the base where Western volunteers are being trained was shelled. At least one Reddit warrior went on a rant about getting blown out of his bunk and then deserting because war wasn’t like he thought it’d be.
https://archive.ph/xqeb4
I see. The linked article talks about foreigners but doesn’t include information about anyone turning around and deserting.
Under ordinary circumstances, I charge for research. You have an internet connection. The information is out there.
Reddit casualties continue to mount
https://twitter.com/Curry92281782/status/1504514312907407365
That greentext may or may not be true, but it does dovetail with the French volunteer who suspected that someone was leaking intel.
Spot on Brian. I’m a Millennial that was raised by the TV and the internet. Even suffered from manic depression that lead to hospitalizstion around the age of 26 that changed my life forever.
I had two options: concede to my situation and continue to fall into a dark hole OR find a way to fight my illness and take back my life. I chose the latter which led me to God, a second chance, and now raising a family. A lot of my peers are still suffering. I pray that they may find this post and find help.
Thanks for writing this.
Ironically, the generation being put in charge is the generation least suited to it, and that is keeping in mind how inept my generational cohort is.
Though, let’s be fair, it’s probably not ironic at all. The people in charge want to blow everything up and reconstruct it for their own gain. Only Millennials have been trained well enough in the art of destruction for the cause, at the expense of their own souls and sanity.
Millennials would be better suited having the air let out of their tires and be forced to live in small towns amongst tiny communities. Instead, they will continue to be lead along like puppets on a string towards their own destruction for the greater good.
It doesn’t get much more evil than modernity.
If current events are any indication, there won’t be much left for them to lead.
Good! My generation always talked about changing the world when they could barely make peace with their own communities. They need to lead tiny enclaves, because those will be all that they can handle after the thought criminals trigger them.
Some good triggered butthurt in these comments. Good job, Brian. Every generation needs a good smack upside the head now and then. Or all the time.
The problem with GenX is that a) we’ve always known that we suck, and b) we don’t care. So telling us we suck has no effect. The fact that nothing can get us riled up, of course, is one of our flaws.
(what worked on me was being told I was in rebellion against Christ, which made me so mad I returned to Christ to prove it wrong)
I’ve noticed that when it comes to taking criticism, Millennials and Boomers are the worst at it (though Boomers are much worse than Millennials.) Any article criticizing any aspect of either generation is going to have a comment from someone in that generation saying that they are unfairly put upon and that they are actually superior to all other generations. In contrast articles here that criticize Gen Y are usually met with responses like “yeah, we really do waste too much time on nostalgia and are pretty naive.”
Gen X probably gets it the worst, considering that they are an “official” generation and still have gotten erased. (I’ve seen several articles with titles like “Are you a Boomer, Millennial or Zoomer? Learn about generations here.”) But I’ve never seen them react as poorly as Millennials and Boomers generally do. (They will talk about hating Boomers more than anyone else; but that’s not a reaction to Gen X being criticized, they just hate Boomers on general principle.)
Just like the Millennials, the Boomers are convinced of their own specialness. From Doonesbury back in the 70s: ”This generation is like a great comet, blazing through the firmament, carrying with it a dream as boundless as the universe itself.”
“Hey Gen-Z, you suck!”
Gen-Z: [replies with a meme]
“Hey Millennials, you suck!”
Millennial: [nervous twitch followed by autistic screeching]
“Hey Gen-Y, you suck!”
Gen-Y: “Yeah, I guess we do. But I remember the good old days before that.”
“Hey Gen-X, you suck!”
Gen-X: “Yeah, and?”
“Hey Boomers, you suck!”
Boomer: “NO WE DON”T! We’re the greatest generation to have ever been or that ever will be. We saved the world, built interstate highways on the moon, invented ROCK AND ROLL [makes air guitar] had the best bands ever like the Beatles and the Stones, and… blah blah blah blah… I’ve got THREE houses… blah blah blah… all by our bootstraps, you lazy kids… blah blah blah… [etc, for 5 paragraphs]
“Woodstock, Woodstock, Bro do you even Woodstock?”
“Woodstock was the best concert ever!” [more air guitar] “I’d tell you how I almost went there, but I gotta go. It’s Senior Swingers night!”
One thing that definitely shows that something went wrong with the post WWII generations (though I think we can really trace when the West went off the rails to WWI) is that hardship used to just be a fact of life, while now it has become a status symbol. There’s a reason orphans were believable to the Victorians reading Charles Dickens novels.
Ironically, the post WWII order diminished the difficulties that taught people things and drew them together and brought forth the kind of difficulties that simply demoralize people.
I don’t know what you would call the generation that faught in WWI, but this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWnc-ZlIo5s) shows a good example of the difference between generations. Notice what the 93 year old says at 9:40, when the interviewer says that it was all useless. The 93 year old doesn’t answer the question directly, but his response shows a great difference between how his generation thought and how the later ones think.
“I don’t know what you would call the generation that fought in WWI,”
The Lost Generation
It was the Lost Generation brought in Modernity, and the Last Generation being born now will be the ones to end it.
It’s almost poetic.
It rhymes.