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Comment by aalleavitch | Hacker News Reader

What is this? What are you doing here? Millennials got "whiny" and "self-righteous" because we're actively under attack. The problem we have is not that we have struggles, every generation has had struggles; the problem is that the response to our attempts to rectify this situation is exactly the kind of derision you're showing here. You're essentially doing the same thing as calling a 1960s civil rights activist "uppity". You're even agreeing with the existence of the issues I'm raising and the need to speak out but feel some emotional need to respond to my perceived tone with an attack on a baseless stereotype.

Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly angry and defensive?

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> Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly angry and defensive?

I can’t speak for the person you’re asking, but I think the answer to this question is that the proposed answer to “millennials have problems” is often: more regulation and government involvement. Some people feel very strongly that this is the wrong move and it will directly impact them.

Many of millennials' problems specifically stem from a lack of government regulation. They're locked into temp jobs and self-employment because they reached adulthood in a recession driven by financial deregulation. They face massive invasions of privacy and personal autonomy as a result of lacking sufficient regulations on the usage of their personal data. They face brutally unfair treatment at the hands of tech companies giving them temp work (like Uber and Instacart) without regulations on their treatment of workers (which, by the way, artificially inflate the jobs numbers: no one thinks uber driver is a career, it is a way to be able to eat). And now we face an end to an open internet (one of the few ways to reliably start a small business) because of a lack of FCC regulation.

Libertarians need to wrap their heads around the fact that sometimes regulations are deeply necessary.

In the abstract, your opinion sounds reasonable, even righteous. Unfortunately, there's just too many actual, concrete examples of regulation locking vulnerable individuals out of markets, of property being unjustly seized/devalued, etc.

Calling out libertarians isn't constructive when they're simply reacting in their own way to wrong-sized government. They dont respond to corrupt, shitty leadership with muddled "at least they meant well" excuses.

But this is somehow the state of the discourse right now! It's laid out purely in extremes. People aren't even entertaining what ought to be the obvious conclusion given the data: there are good and bad regulations. The existence of bad regulations does not wipe out the existence of good regulations, and vice versa. Instead when I suggest that there are beneficial regulations we can put in place that would benefit a large portion of Americans, people get defensive about it! This doesn't preclude the notion that regulations can be done poorly, and that some regulations are even actively harmful. But when making arguments people rarely want to consider more than just the extreme positions.

Right, and there's truth in what you say - especially wrt extremism. Your argument brings to mind the argument that "capitalism isn't the problem, crony capitalism is". Like, if only powerful people wouldn't lie, cheat, steal and write the rules to apply differently for them.

I will concede that, on a limited basis, government - specifically in the regulatory (and law enforcement) capacity - can do some good.

I'm more pessimistic than you though and believe that the vast majority of new laws are not written for my benefit, and most of the time we - the society as a whole - would be better off without more rules. It's not about my trusting my fellow citizen more than the ruling class, my position is about my distrust of and opposition to busybodies and cronies.

If you believe - for whatever reasons - that laws are not written nor enforced for your benefit, then maybe libertarianism isn't the worst thing. And that's all I was driving at.

What the fuck are you talking about? Have you looked at the markets recently? What recession?

I’m a millennial and i don’t feel like I was affected by the recession in the slightest. No millennial is locked into self employment, unemployment is at like 4.5%, the job market is doing fantastic. All this doom and gloom and “poor me” is fucking ridiculous.

94% of the net job growth in the last decade has been "alternative" work (temp jobs, contractors, self-employed).

https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...

Wages are stagnant, so even with a booming stock market your average worker is seeing none of it:

https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america

Just because you're doing well does not mean anyone else is doing well. You are a sample size of one.

From this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993012, and many other uncivil/unsubstantive comments, it seems clear that you don't want to use the site as intended, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly angry and defensive?

Because many millennials want to have their cake and eat it too. You can't have it both ways:

- You can't choose to attend an $80,000 per year private liberal arts school and then complain you have too much student debt

- You can't move to the most expensive place in the country with no money and a low paying job and then complain it's too expensive

- You can't regularly use convenient and artificially cheap gig-economy services (like Uber and Instacart) and then complain when their business model doesn't support giving you a $150,000 a year job

- You can't demand free speech protection and then violently oppress viewpoints you disagree with (for the record, I am a political moderate)

The Millennial hypocrisy is astounding, but I'm sure every generation goes through this to some extent. The real generational moment of revelation is when you realize that every choice you make has consequences - and not just the choices/consequences you choose to believe. If I buy a cheap toy at Walmart, I know that some labor exploitation was involved. If I buy fruit at Costco, I know that burning of fossil fuels is involved. If I choose to use Google services, my data will be exploited for profit.

What everyone is asking Millennials to do is take some responsibility, acknowledge that your actions are part of the problem, and that you have some power to drive solutions. It's fine to lament about some level of inequity handed down from previous generations, we have all done it. What everyone is getting a little tired of is the classic Millennial argument that paints an entire generation as helpless victims and essentially says "You did this to us and now we want you to make the bad man go away!" Kind of like an entire generation of Robin Arryns for all you Game of Thrones fans.

> You can't choose to attend an $80,000 per year private liberal arts school and then complain you have too much student debt

1. This assumes that everyone went to a private liberal arts college, which isn't true. 2. Historically a degree wasn't as necessary because employers actually provided growth potential and entry-level positions to people. Those aren't options for millennials. That kind of forces people to get degrees to have any chance of economic growth.

> You can't move to the most expensive place in the country with no money and a low paying job and then complain it's too expensive

If those are the only regions of the country experiencing economic growth, then what else are they supposed to do? Work in Dollar General in a city of 12,000 people their whole life?

> You can't regularly use convenient and artificially cheap gig-economy services (like Uber and Instacart) and then complain when their business model doesn't support giving you a $150,000 a year job

People will always use the cheapest or most efficient option when it comes to purchasing services or items. It's not their fault that such services are legal, it's the government's.

> You can't demand free speech protection and then violently oppress viewpoints you disagree with.

I agree with you here. The internet has made it so that those who complain the most are perceived to be the majority when they're not.

> what else are they supposed to do? Work in Dollar General in a city of 12,000 people their whole life?

And here we go... it did not take long. Why on Earth would living in a 12000 inhabitant city be infamous, be a failure, be a shame? Not fancy and shiny enough for you, eh?

The problem here is that you are applying all the worst examples of a group to the majority of the group. None of these things are widely representative of the actual population of people we're talking about. They're just the things that make you angriest.

The other problem is that plenty of people (millennial or otherwise) are trying to fix the systemic problems, and others are actively moving to oppose us. It's like there's a house on fire, and I run to the neighbors and am like "help! this house is on fire!" and the neighbors respond with "stop crying and put it out yourself you hippie". It's not even my house! And the neighbors are too busy getting angry at the gall of me for asking for help putting out this house to realize that the fire's starting to spread to their house too.

Here is the perception of non-millennials:

It's like you running to the neighbors and saying "Help, this house in on fire! And you started it by having that bbq two weeks ago. I'm sure the natural gas you used, in addition to ravaging the environment, was somehow at fault. By the way, you really should be eating this new meatless meat that's all the rage. Oh yeah, and while you're busy putting out that fire, I'm gonna hang out with my buddies drinking kale shakes and eating avo toast. Let me know when everything is all good again and I'll slip into that newly remodeled loft."

Clearly (and supported by the comment threads here) there is a wide gap between millennial and non-millennial perception of the existing problems and the proper solutions. You should do what us Gen-Xers did, figure out how to play the game to get what you want and work on solutions to the most important issues. Pick your battles - raging about every single issue and injustice desensitizes the rest of us to the real troubles you are having.

Somehow you have confused an entire generation with the conservative stereotype of latte-sipping limousine liberals.

And therein lies the problem. The entire premise is based on a politicized stereotype that has been forced down the public's throats specifically because it's emotionally resonant regardless of accuracy. It's literally just a list of "things I use to differentiate myself from another group of people that makes me feel insecure".

Millenials aren't whiny, they are angry. They have been screwed and want revenge. They correctly asses that boomers climbed up the ladder then burned it to the ground. They took cheap publicly subsidized education then massively defunded it. They benefited from regulated financial markets then gifted them to oligarchs. They took pensions then ensured no one would ever get one again. They destroyed unions and therefore the middle class. They destroyed the environment for their own personal profit. They took all the benefits of the new deal, and the moment it looked like those benefits would start helping the new generation they stripped them away. The boomers will go down as the most selfish and short sighted generation in US history.

And millenials are very tired of these people who have had it so easy and worked to make it so much worse for their children, talking about "personal responsibility" and "participation trophies".

No one had it easy. Millennials have a much better life all things considered. You can’t get drafted to go die in a war, you brush off 70s stagflation like it was a non-event. Rascism is much less prevalent.

It’s precisely this ease of living that is part of the problem. Why not rack up tens of thousands of college debt to get a useless degree when you’re historically more privileged than 99% of people that have ever lived?

Reality is harsh and that seems to have escaped many millennials.

> Reality is harsh and that seems to have escaped many millennials.

I think part of the disillusionment was having grown up in the prosperous, peaceful '90s, that Boomers hyped up as the End of History. And then the western world became immersed in a seeming unending war, with the security state overreach accordingly, and then the bottom fell out of the economy after. Can you blame them for being pissed off that the promises of their childhood were a lie? At least previous generations that dealt with hardships were not lied to first.

I agree with your analysis and think we're very close to talking about the same thing. The difference between gen-x and millennials is that boomers told both groups the same lies, it's just that gen-x didn't believe them. Gen-x cynicism is a real thing.

We're back to my original point of millennials not being close enough to boomers to know that they were lying (or ill informed).

Gen X grew up during the Cold War, Reaganism, Thatcherism, Wall Street malfeasance, AIDS, the crack epidemic. This is a little biased generalization of the '80s, but I think overall you could say the '90s were much more hopeful and sunnier in comparison. It was easier to believe in lies back then. Could you blame them for believing in their helicopter parents with their self-esteem culture and dot-com money?

I blame them for not realizing their error and instead calling for state regulation and intervention. They'd probably get more support from gen x if they were listening to them instead of attacking their ideals (speaking in very broad generalities at this point).

Are Gen X's really a bunch of Yuppies who are against regulation? Even after everything that Reagan, Thatcher, and the Chicago Boys have done?

I like how you simultaneously blame them for spending too much money and for using cheap services too. And also blame them for relocating to place where the jobs are supposed to be.

I also like how everyone blames Millennials for lack of responsibility and then complains about them doing responsible choices - be it living cheap, postponing having children, having sex later and not dating enough, going less to restaurants, being overly focused on grades ... all real complains I have seen last weeks.

There is nothing hypocritical about demanding low wage workers protections, higher taxes for richer segments population, healthcare reform and the same social services other western countries have. You may disagree with those policies, but buying cheap toys at Walmart is in no way opposition to them.

Uber being artificially cheap is not Millenials doing.

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