Why We Blame Millennials for Everything

Adam (from Adam Ruins Everything) does a really good talk at a marketing conference on why Millennials don't exist. Generational titles are never used to bring people up, but always tear a group of people down. Time magazine covers about Baby Boomers from decades ago are almost identical to those calling Millennials entitled today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Well, shouldn’t things that can’t sell their stuff anymore fail?

In Denmark where I’m from, municipalities have grouped together to build open source software as a response to a market which fails to deliver the products we want.

The industry response has been lobbying the government and trying everything in courts because it’s viewed as “job theft”. Well, not all industry, some companies have figured out software as a service, open APIs and agile corporation is where it’s at, but the big old dogs are playing the blame game.

In 10 years the old dogs won’t be around, because just like the diamond industry, they ran out of things people wanted to buy.

I mean, you can blame millennials all you want, but the most watched sporting event in 2017 was still the CSGO finals featuring a Danish team. You either adapt or you disappear because the people who are into your aged ways are only going to continue dying.

I'm going to stop blaming generational labels. I should have done it a long time ago.

I'm going to quantify the people whom I blame for everything as those with a net worth equal to or greater than an arbitrarily determined net worth of $10 million. If they're going to own everything, they need to take responsibility for everything--own it, in the colloquial sense, as well as the literal.

I am not suggesting that we "eat the rich", as it were. They seem to have some sort of brain-eating prion disease, and I don't want anyone else to catch it. Probably best that we just put down the ones that show symptoms, and burn the bodies.

As a class, they only number about 1.2 million. The rest of us are about 7.6 billion strong. We could take 'em. We know they don't know how to fight, because they always send young poor people to do it for them, and seem completely unfamiliar with self-sacrifice for the common good.

Why $10 million? Because that's "enough", in my opinion. You can retire on it, withdraw the "safe rate" of 3%, and live on this year's equivalent of $300k--which is 5 times the median household income--every year, forever (within a reasonable statistical confidence interval). You get too far ahead of that, and you start to lose touch with people who don't have "enough", at lower levels on the needs hierarchy. At that level, you still need to know how to play well with others, and not be a %%%%%% tyrant, in order to accomplish the great works that require large concentrations of capital. Above that, you start to grow less fearful of losing the trust of others.

If there is anything wrong with the Millennials, it's that they haven't yet applied their talent for killing off societal staples and institutions to quite the right people and practices. If you're a Millennial, think long and hard about your student loans and your healthcare coverage, and the people who made a conscious, calculated choice that you don't deserve to have nice things unless you serve, consume, and obey.

Put on the glasses. Just put on the f'ing glasses.

There is little I dislike more than generational labels.

It's lazy and reductionist thinking that allows people to arbitrarily draw lines in whatever way they feel will best push their narrative.

Quick, 1981/1982[1] Millennial or X?

[1] Those born in 1981/1982 graduated in 2000

I feel like there's some obvious point-missing going on here. "Millennials are killing X" is a marketing POV, and marketing fundamentally exists outside morality. It's not a moral indictment, it's just a bald statement of fact, like "the automobile is killing the horse-drawn carriage".

Disclaimer: I have not read everything that's ever been written about millennials.

I have a friend that's just inside the 1980 millennial designation and he's always talking about how horrible millennials are. If I'm not happy with my job I sound like a millennial. If I'm complaining about relationship issues or say I feel socially isolated I sound like a millennial.

When a millennial does something I hate, I tend to not want to blame them directly, so instead I attribute their behavior to a sort of group behavior. When they do something I like, it's easier to attribute their behavior to them as an individual.

I've noticed this tendency for people these days to just refuse to do work they don't like. They expect to be doing the interesting work that is reserved for people who have earned it. I tend to attribute this to millennial and their sense of entitlement. I've also seen some really driven millennials who get a lot of work done on their own initiative. I don't view them as typical millennials, but rather, as individuals who have rejected the entitled behavior of the standard millennial.

I don't know how true any of that is. I was born in '80, and my generation is entitled as shit. It just feels like, as we were realizing the lie of how entitled we were told to be, that the subsequent generation fell for even worse bullshit than we did.

The group vs group dynamic here is quite interesting because one group consists of parents of the other, though not directly. Its those "other" children and those other "parents". Millennials are simply trying to live for the future, as their parents did. But the exponential growth stalled so the extrapolation they were prepared for is no longer correct. The wealth is dispersing elsewhere globally. Domestically only those that are part of this dispersion, mostly technologists and higher echelon finance people, continue this growth.

Millenial behavior that seem wasteful like avocado toast are a type of premium mediocre consumption that they are not oblivious to. It is a dispirited but sincere effort to tell themselves and their parents (and perhaps society) that they are alright.

In truth, one generation's over optimism (not greed, as many say) causes the latter generation to be ill prepared. Neither side wants to admit this is an emergent systemic situation but rather would prefer to imagine it is controllable. Millenial's think it was something done to them. The other groups think millenials do it to themselves.

All the while the countries without these group labels are simply rolling with the punches and surviving day by day and getting smarter. The countries that have grown too accustomed to wealth due to incorrect human belief that exponential growth can continue infinitely are too busy suffering to figure out how to survive. They are getting dumber.

That was a pretty decent article until the part with video games.

Don't you just love the snake millennial chrome extention? "It seems a reader can barely go a week without seeing at least one news headline about how Snake People are “killing” some industry or product. Serpent Society is purportedly wiping out casual dining, golf, diamonds, homeownership, and bars of soap, among other consumer products; news items have also characterized the generation as lazy, vain, and always looking for a handout."

It's simple divide and conquer. The 0.1% know you need somebody to blame for them squeezing you, so they tell boomers' it's millennials' fault and vice versa.

It works pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15844087

If that doesn't work, they can always blame immigrants, Islam or blacks.

I'd agree that they are clearly getting the short end of the stick for now, but I have to wonder... if the flower children grew up to give us Iraq and Trump, what kind of monsters will our Starbucks guzzling Warby Parkers transform into?

Or maybe I'm being too pessimistic? Perhaps a little adversity will make them turn out better...

This is a plug for a book..

Personally, as a Millennial, I blame Boomers for everything.

> But it wasn’t that surprising that people play video games all day and they have bad politics.

This article is dripping with bias.

millennials ruins the millennial blaming!

Boomers are worse, a thousand-fold worse. I doubt there has ever been a generation more destructive, hypocritical, or self-unaware... I pray there is never another.