We talk about generations as if they’re clearly defined categories, but in reality the gaps between generational cohorts are pretty ambiguous. Being Gen Y, my perspective on current intergenerational conflicts is as close to objective as anyone but a member of the dwindling Greatest Generation.
If you’ve been paying even cursory attention to mainstream and social media, you’ve probably heard Millennials stereotyped as spoiled, narcissistic whiners who don’t know the meaning of “work ethic”. One can hardly browse the comments of any current events story without seeing Boomers answer Millennial complaints of joblessness with reminders of their technological advantages (courtesy of Boomers), or reading brusque replies from Gen Xers telling them to quit sniveling and get jobs.
Is all of the criticism leveled at Millennials fair? After researching the issue, I discovered that the answer is deeply nuanced; but it can be boiled down to “no”.
Generational Divide
The main source of hostility between Boomers, Xers, and Millennials is all parties’ lack of objectivity. This is understandable. It’s difficult to set aside one’s lived experience and consider the viewpoint of someone whose life has followed a radically different course than yours did. But tackling the present crisis requires mutual understanding, which means walking a mile in the other guy’s shoes. And because it’s the Boomers who tend to exhibit the most ignorance of Millennials, that means walking in considerably cheaper shoes.
America vs. Clown World
John Edwards popularized the political slogan “Two Americas”. He was invoking class divisions to justify government theft of certain people’s incomes, but although the phrase is charged with rhetorical smoke, there is some fire. There are two Americas–probably many more than two–and what’s relevant to the topic at hand is that Boomers live in one America, and Millennials live in another.
In fact, the differences between the America inhabited by Boomers and the place to which Millennials have been relegated is so stark and drastic, it’s more accurate to say that Millennials don’t live in America as most understand the term. Instead, they get to experience the backward strangeness of Clown World.
To any Gen Xers, and especially Boomers, reading this, it is imperative that you try to understand this concept before you proceed. Leave your formative, educational, and job experience at the door. Such conceits will not avail you to comprehend Clown World.
The Death of the Family
Few factors have a greater impact on one’s future than one’s family environment. A given Baby Boomer has a better than 90% chance of having been born to married parents. That figure plummets to less than 70% for Millennials. As if that weren’t hobbling enough, the end of the Baby Boom saw a cataclysmic spike in divorce rates (affecting Gen Xers and Millennials alike).
The takeaway here is that Boomers and Millennials (and Gen Xers) had radically different upbringings. Almost all Boomers grew up in stable homes headed by married parents who stayed married. Members of the latter two generations were far more likely to be born out of wedlock or to grow up in broken homes.
Boomers: if you feel tempted to engage a Gen Xer or Millennial’s firsthand account of latchkey kid-dom with a “Back in My Day” story, know that it probably isn’t relevant. Save everybody some time and do your best to understand the current situation.
The Degeneration of Education
Even though Millennials have spent more time in school than prior generations, they are far more poorly served by the experience. These distressing results are probably due to the US education system’s lack of focus on, well, education in favor of social indoctrination.
And here’s the depressing news. Not only are Millennials and the current crop of children not being educated, they’re being totally fleeced in the process.
Besides government subsidies, nothing has driven the student debt crisis like these two zombie memes: “Employers don’t care what degree you have because it shows that you’re trainable and self-motivated,” and “Higher education is still worth it because college graduates out-earn folks without degrees.”
Let’s put these vicious rumors to bed. First, a bachelor’s degree is no longer a feather in a job seeker’s cap. It’s more like a ticket that’s required for admission to the factory, costs more than a Maserati, and will probably leave four in five applicants on the garbage heap (better hope it’s not Tuesday).
Plus, thanks to degree inflation, Millennials have little choice but to pay tuition in excess of any consumer price index, and since those who aren’t already making six figures (which would tend to obviate the need for college anyway) can’t realistically work their way through school, they’re forced to take on crippling amounts of debt.
Second, those colorful bar graphs (usually published by the same government departments with a vested interest in student debt) showing that college graduates earn more than people without degrees are brazen propaganda. A middle manager with a degree probably earns a higher salary than a mechanic who started working right out of high school, but contrast the manager’s six-figure debt with the mechanic’s greater likelihood of living debt-free, and a very different picture emerges.
And even if Millennial college graduates are making more on paper, the decline in real wages means they’re actually poorer than their parents were at the same age.
Job Market Stagnation
To those who see Millennials as entitled whiners, telling them to “Get jobs” or “Learn to code” is unlikely to help. America’s manufacturing base has long since been sold overseas. Now, the advent of A.I. is about to replace everyone from the aforementioned coders to fast food workers.
Yes, a Boomer could pay his way through school on a part-time job or two and graduate with an MBA that guaranteed entry to the middle class. At the very least, he could walk from his high school commencement to the factory down the street and start work that day in a job that offered a living wage and a pension.
Those days are over.
The only jobs that offer a shot at the middle class are cubicle jockey gigs increasingly offered on a contract basis that make no promise of job security and force applicants who’ve taken on massive debt for the privilege to duke it out over a handful of positions.
Now consider that the economy never quite recovered from the 2008 crash, that almost half of the unemployed have been demoralized into giving up their job search, and that HR departments regard job seekers who’ve been fruitlessly searching this economic wasteland for six months–and thus need jobs most–as radioactive nonentities.
Different Priorities
It’s interesting that many people who’d rightly point out that the so-called gender wage gap really means that men and women want different things don’t hesitate to condemn Millennials’ work ethic based on their own, differing priorities.
Millennials don’t want to put in 80 hour weeks for 40 years at the same company in exchange for a big house they hardly get to live in and toys they never have time to play with. They value time over money and freedom over routine. These preferences are a rational response to a pathological corporate culture where the sociopaths in charge grossly undercompensate workers for their labor, and thus doing the bare minimum necessary to not get fired is a sound strategy.
Companies don’t see prospective employees as human beings with valuable experience and skills. They see them as fungible commodities to be used and tossed out like Kleenex. Meanwhile, hiring managers insist that employees embrace corporate ethics codes that read like cult manifestos and that only bind the little fish; never the sharks.
Conclusion
Millennials’ difficulties finding meaning and prosperity aren’t the result of laziness or self-entitlement. Their well-meaning elders taught them to play the game that worked for them while the rules were drastically changing. The old strategies no longer work, and Millennials who try to use them are increasingly exploited, impoverished, and deprived of hope.
Why do members of older generations, especially Baby Boomers, discount Millennials’ concerns or even mock them? The uncomfortable and unavoidable truth is that the Clown World where Millennials are forced to live was built one brick at a time by the choices and actions of their elders. It’s easier for Boomers to blame Millennials than to accept their share of responsibility for this deplorable state of affairs.
To be sure, Millennials must take responsibility as well. They can’t despair. They don’t have that luxury. The advent of Clown World wasn’t their fault, but now it’s inescapably their problem.
The decline of faith and traditional morality in recent generations is a spiritual disease inherited from their forebears. Continuing to embrace materialism and moral relativism will only impede Millennials’ ability to find the truth that can bring the freedom they deeply desire, and which offers a way out of the trap that prior generations unwittingly set for them.
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If there’s one thing I’d say as well, as a Millennial myself, it’s that I think for the vast majority of them, the die is already cast, as many of them are starting to hit their mid 30s, when brain development more or less stops. Absent a major reshuffling of the deck, I don’t see many of them having a chance to get out from under the rock that has been placed upon them, from circumstance and about 3 generations worth of brokenness finally taking their toil. (I am counting the “Greatest Generation” here, as they’re directly responsible for the Boomers and how they turned out.)
I get that it’s easy to say they can’t despair, and have to deal with the hand that has been dealt, but I think one aspect you’re missing in this thought experiment, is that folks who are beaten down hard enough for long enough, eventually cannot get back up. Similar to how a person who is denied love for long enough, cannot love anyone else in return, they effectively are damaged to the point where that really isn’t going to be something they’re capable of doing. I think the Millennials as a whole are so thoroughly beaten down now, that nothing really can be expected to grow in that polluted soil that is just filled with tares now. The best you can hope to do, is keep them docile enough that they don’t mess up the work that has to be done with the Zoomers and Gen Alpha to ensure they turn out better, which given how we’ve hit rock bottom, isn’t going to be a very tall order.
And yet, your comment occupies the largest blind spot that Millennials have been conditioned into.
Never discount grace, striking into the world like a shaft of light shining through storm clouds.
Grace would count as a Reshuffling of the Deck, in my eyes.
That’s fair.
I respect you a lot Brian, but I think I’m going to have to stop reading, to keep my anxiety from being flared up any further. God Bless in your future endeavours.
Do what’s best for your health. If you need help, get it. And know that you’re in my prayers.
The lesson that millennials need to learn most is that it doesn’t matter if you deserve what happened to you or not. Even if you can prove that you contributed in no way to your miserable situation, you’re still in it.
I’ve seen many millennials hit a significant, but overcomeable, setback. The usual reaction is to stick entirely in complaint mode and not take actions to fix things, which of course only makes the situation worse as it continues to be unresolved. Giving them advice for how to solve things is met with responses about how they shouldn’t HAVE to solve the situation, since they didn’t create it in the first place. You can see a similar attitude in the feminists who say that it’s A-OK for a woman to never learn self defense and still walk through the bad part of town at night, since she doesn’t deserve to be mugged or raped.
The biggest trouble here is that boomers have conditioned millennials to view the advice “you need to take responsibility for improving your own life” as synonymous with “you’re a lazy entitled brat who ruined your own life.” The point of the former advice is NOT to cast blame on the millennial, but instead to state a fact: your situation sucks, and if you do nothing about it it’s only going to worse, so start looking for solutions.
I think that millennials would benefit a great deal from stoic philosophy from the likes of Epictetus (and of course they would benefit much more from Christian Faith, but for many of them that is going to be a hard first step.) In particular I think of this quote:
“You, who have received these powers free and as your own, use them not: you do not even see what you have received, and from whom; some of you being blinded to the giver, and not even acknowledging your benefactor, and others, through meanness of spirit, betaking yourselves to fault finding and making charges against God. Yet I will show to you that you have powers and means for greatness of soul and manliness but what powers you have for finding fault and making accusations, do you show me.”
It is a profound realization to say that even if you cannot control the world, you can at least control your response to the world. Unfortunately there is such an instinct to reject statements as victim blaming and the like that I think that most millennials won’t realize the truth of such statements before hitting rock bottom. Of course, by the Grace of God all things are possible.
You’re shedding light on the elephant in the room: out-of-control, widespread effeminacy.
Deal with Millennials, Zoomers, and about half of Gen Y males, and you soon discover that 20-35 year old men talk and act like 50 year-old women.
“Giving them advice for how to solve things is met with responses about how they shouldn’t HAVE to solve the situation, since they didn’t create it in the first place.”
In my opinion, this particular problem is caused by their baked in atomization and alienation, and being told that We’re All In This Together (they all grew up with High School Musical, remember) when they know from experience that they’re actually not. It’s a trust issue coming from two-faced nature of how they grew up. IE: They believe they are being hoodwinked into doing something for someone else. Show a Millennial that you are trustworthy, that you aren’t a shyster, long enough, and that shell can be cracked. Unfortunately, that takes work that only a functioning community can provide.
But there is no way in the world a Baby Boomer would have ever had the patience to do any of that. The NPC programming should have been enough, according to them. That is all they care about. Their parents dying didn’t make the Baby Boomers into the adults in the room, it somehow made them regress. This makes them yet another obstacle that has to be surmounted to enact any real change.
That’s why I keep saying that the younger generations have to stick together at this point. We don’t have an elder generation to look up to, and nothing has been left for us to pick up from them. We have to work around both that knowledge and with each other to find a path forward. We can’t keep making snarky jokes and dunking on everyone for internet points like it’s still the ’00s. Those days are gone, and no one is laughing anymore.
Thankfully, I do some some change in small ways, but it’s not going to be overnight. We’re all going to have to learn some patience. The universe doesn’t run on our schedule.
Why in God’s name would we keep trying for something better? My last employer stole from me after buying his teenage daughter a porsche and telling me they couldn’t afford to give me a raise. The one before that fired me for refusing the vax.
We can’t despair? We have nothing in this world to hope for. At this point putting in hard work only benefits the elder generations that pulled the ladder up behind them or the myriad of fecund invaders they gleefully invited in so they could avoid paying a fair wage.
Nothing I do can positively impact the welfare of my nation, and I got bored of hedonism after my mid 20s. I have no reason to thrive. We don’t owe you being hopeful.
A woman was given a box holding all the evils of the world. She was warned not to open it but did anyway. After all the other contents escaped, all that remained inside was hope.
Most people who tell you that story forget the fact that the box held only evils.
The hope left inside was false hope – staking your happiness on finding fulfillment in the world.
But this world is not the object of real hope, and it was never meant to be.
This earth is not the place for happiness and ease. It’s a battleground where your decisions echo in eternity.
So you’re right, you don’t owe me anything. God, on the other hand, bought you at the price of His Son’s life. And you _will_ pay every penny.
Break’s over. Back to the trenches.
Millennials will be a difficult case for recovery because they lack faith, not just in God, but their fellow man of all ages.
They were indoctrinated into believing God isn’t real.
Their elders lied to them about how the game of life was played then
Their elders blamed them for all their problems since birth
Their peers were never faithful in platonic or romantic relationships (everyone wants a loyal companion but no one wants to be loyal themselves)
Their souls have been ripped out and any solution like “seeking God” is seen no differently than a door to door salesman or a mega church preacher – all cons and lies.
This is why the RPC is easily able to prey on young men. It doesn’t require God to hit the gym, become ripped, and be attractive enough to bang any low hanging fruit that comes your way. Christianity is seen as a feminine religion anyway so it forms a greater wedge between men and Christ.
To be honest, I want to see my generation defy the odds, but they need to get out of their own way. For now, perseverance is the virtue we need to be acting on. I just hope the damage isn’t so great that when some Millennials see their peers “make it” they don’t lash out in jealousy.