This week’s posts on the challenges faced by the Millennial generation and ideas for how to help them meet those challenges sparked a lively discussion that ranged across multiple posts. Being an editor, I have spliced a selection of comments on related themes into the following dialogue.
Author JD Cowan starts us off:
I am old enough to remember “Girls are equal to boys, but better” as a philosophy showing up in just about everything in the 1990s. The same thing with the faux-intellectual, yet blunt browbeating of the kind Captain Planet pioneered becoming more accepted in everything instead of being a punchline. This is probably one of the major reasons I was able to escape its grasp. If you experience changes as they happen you can question why they are necessary in the first place much more easily than if they are assumed normality.
Asking why the male is always the buttmonkey in all the commercials and in comedies (which adults of the time fully embraced) and getting no satisfying answers is what eventually led me to believe something about modernity was off. If you remember asking in the late ’90s/early ’00s what the difference between a hate crime and a normal crime was, and why the distinction matters in the first place, you were probably an outlier. Much like “progress” meaning that everything you loved had to be replaced with inferior garbage, at a certain point you had to realize how fake it all was. After that, you can begin asking what is real.
This is probably the highest hurdle the Millennials face. Millennials had NO competing and clashing worldview to battle this poison pumped into them. Every other generation fell into this state out of laziness and are only now attempting to walk it back or trying to justify further decay. To Millennials, all of this is Year One because it’s all they know. And they were taught that looking back or admitting wrong is a sin.
There are signs Gen Y is waking up, but Millennials are another problem entirely. They’re the perfected psyop generation Baby Boomers had been trying to produce for three generations in a row (the first two were failures for opposite reasons), raised on unreality, and now they are nearing the age where they must either reject this path or be destroyed by it. They must do the one thing they were programmed not to do.
Pray for them. They have the toughest challenges ahead to face.
Enter friend of the blog Rudolph Harrier:
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.
Back to JD:
“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.
And to support the previous two commenters’ observations, a Millennial reader dropped into offer a trenchant personal perspective:
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.
My comment:
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.
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There are also a lot of things you can do to improve your situation/mood outside of working harder at a meaningless job staffed by people who hate you. Get hobbies, pick up new skills, join clubs/fraternities/groups (or make one yourself), work on your life situation . . . there are many options.
Don’t be hoodwinked by Boomer logic into thinking that the thing you get paid for doing is the only thing of value you can offer anyone.
Good advice. I’ll add another suggestion I heard from a private contractor online: Apply to small, independent companies that don’t have HR departments.
The Boomer obsession with money is a thing. In fairness, in my experiences with the WWII generation, they picked some of it up from their parents. The state had enough money to buy off the WWII generation though, and they were content to have survived the Great Depression/WWII for the most part.
True story: I still have one Silent Generation in law still alive. She picked out what has to be her last house or 2nd to last house with one of the biggest considerations the resale value. I am not clear how she takes it with her, but it’s a whole other discussion.
I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion, but I tend to read the myth of Pandora a bit differently. I suspect it’s a confused and garbled memory of the Fall, and the hope left in the box is a dim memory of the Protoevangelium.
That interpretation is possible. But the textual evidence makes identifying the box’s last contents with the Protoevangelium unlikely. The Greek term commonly translated as “hope” can also mean “deceptive expectation,” which wouldn’t apply to Genesis 3:15 since the biblical promise was fulfilled in Jesus and Mary.
Taken in that light, if the Pandora myth does refer to Genesis 3:15, it would be implying that the biblical promise was false, making the whole Greek myth pretty blasphemous.
I wasn’t aware of that nuance in the Greek, which does favor your interpretation. It’s entirely possible we’re both right, and the myth contains both faint memories of humanity’s beginnings and errors introduced by fable, misremembering, human despair, and diabolic influence.
The way I heard the myth, the final curse at the bottom of the box WAS a curse: it was Foreknowledge, not Hope, and if it had gotten out, people would know their futures for certain and they wouldn’t be able to have deceptive hope.
Pandora should have burned that box to ashes when she got it. Period.
Zeus thought of that. We call the container a box, but it was really a clay jar.
As a Millennial (’91) My first exposure to the, “Girls Can Do Everything Boys Can But Better!” indoctrination was the more subtle, “Girls Can Do Everything Boys Can, And Then Some!” I think it was fifth grade, we did a group project where everyone listed off things that males could do and listed off everything females could do. After discussion, we concluded that the only difference between the two was the fact females could get pregnant. I doubt that group project would fly in Clown World today, they’d probably have the teacher’s license revoked and request a public flogging.
It’s also oddly ironic- I know, Millennials abuse the word like a rented mule- that they’ve also been shoving Abortion down Millennial girls’ throats since Junior High. Younger me always felt that it was weird that people were trying to suppress and destroy what was flaunted as making Women unique from Males, but considering the lunacy I see nowadays it makes disgustingly perfect sense.
The counterpoint that’s somehow always overlooked in those discussions is that while only women can get pregnant, only men can impregnate.
Which echoes Aristotle’s definition of “female” and “male”.
Yeah, I doubt it was a coincidence that particular piece of information was never brought up by the teacher… course, a bunch of 10-Year-Olds probably aren’t informed enough on The Birds And The Bees to bring it up and challenge their teacher on it.
There is that …
As a millennial myself, I can say at least in my case, a passion for history at an early age showed me that the world isn’t always as it is now, and also, very importantly, that it can and will be changed by the people with the will to do so. Getting to the point I am now has been painful; but the loneliness of realizing childhood friends were friends of convenience and the desire for community drove me to the Church. A broken heart led me to finding real friends, who want to share skills, experiences, and the Faith with likeminded people, who will say more than ‘aww that sucks’ when you share something your struggling with.
All this requires investment of time and effort into building relationships with God and the members of His Body, where Boomers might wonder why that time isn’t invested in some ‘get ahead’ aspect of work, but the rewards are so much greater. Granted, I busted my ass to go from no real career path to one in cybersecurity at 23, but I’m at the point now where passing a 4 hour certification exam in half the time has the same affections tied to it as going to the dentist, while celebrating the Christmas octave by hosting a dinner party and surprising my friends with gifts brings both the joys of anticipation and fulfillment. Even just looking back at myself 3 years ago, sometimes it feels like looking back at a different person entirely.
To other millennial readers, yes, we are in “the bad times” right now, but God gave you the strengths you need to change that. Pick the thing you hate the most, about yourself, your work situation, where you live, whatever it is, and change that. Ignore the nation-level stuff for now. As you align yourself more with God’s will, He will magnify your strengths and heal your brokenness. None of that will be ‘comfortable’ in the moment, but to quote a song about realizing you were wrong “Everything you thought you knew will fall apart, but you’ll be all right”.
(song credit, Constellations by The Oh Hellos)
Excellent advice. Do what you can where you are with what you have.
Why is everyone so in love with AI artwork? Even when they don’t add mutant extra fingers, they’re creepy as hell.
Fallen like a crumb into the weird crevice between genX and genY… getting over the “that’s not fair” and figuring out how to make stuff work right now and play the best hand you can with the cards you were dealt is still a challenge. The world doesn’t work the way we were told it did. Grudgingly, we are writing our own guidebooks based on observation.