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Comment by ohduran | Hacker News Reader

I'm not Chinese, and this article seems too...broad? I guess you can say anything about Millenials from anywhere, with condescending tone, and get pageviews.

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I concur. The writing also somehow lacks much depth, at the start it addresses how they crazily follow the son of a rich and his lavish style then jumps out and turns back on money and work ethics without much thoughts on this. He seems just casually drifts around in any issue he can pen on.

A side note, Pornhub also is often praised on reddit for less toxic comments than like youtube

The weird thing to me is that it's not like the term "Millennial" was self-adopted by the generation it describes. It was pretty much involuntarily assigned to them. And the word alone just has such a lightning rod quality to it.

"Millennial" is a dress-up word for "kids today". The connotation is much clearer under that substitution.

"Kids" at ages 25-35...

Author defines it to be 18-35.

There's a browser extension that replaces every occurrence of the word 'millennial' with 'pesky whipper-snapper'.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-begone...

There's also a browser extension that replaces the word with 'snake people':

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...

Where do you see a condescending tone? I didn’t feel that way when reading the article.

Just an overall impression, in the idea that "Millenials are this", "Millenials are that". Most of the times when someone frames a group of people into common characteristics, it sounds condescending to me.

It's a term to refer to "the current crop of young adults".

I so rarely see the anti-"Millennial" crowd complain about the term "Baby Boomer"; usually it's the opposite, in fact.

But that was a real cohort with an actual cause (soldiers returning home from WWII and starting families, leading to a large increase in births in the decade following 1945). Later generations called Generation X and Millennials are much more arbitrary because there isn't really a defined cause for their existence.

If the complaint is the name, as you seem to be suggesting, then pick whatever name you wish. If the complaint is that not everybody of a given age should be lumped together as one, then that's as true of any generation than any other.

Either way, Millennials are not being singled out.

Signed, a reluctant member of GenX.

While I don't think people born in the same time are all the same, the fact is a lot of Baby Boomers had at least a shared experience in having a father who came back from the war. I don't think there is anything comparable for us GenXers (who were basically defined as "not Baby Boomers") and the Millennials when the marketers realized the GenX term was going on for too long.

If I'm getting my dates right, "Baby Boomers" includes both the hippies who were shot at Kent State and the law-and-order types doing the shooting, so to speak. I still think that your objection applies as much to other generations as to Millennials, and that in all cases, the labels are shorthand for a very rough approximation of shared experience.

As for Gen X, the X is lazy, for sure. What we have in common are Baby Boomer parents.

Oh not even that. The older GenXers like myself (born 1970) have "Silent Generation" (1925-1944) parents that were born before or during the war (a rather small generation as the Depression and war weren't great times to have kids in). My parents were never hippies nor did my father face the risk of being sent to Vietnam -- they were too old for either.

The issue is that the boom went on for 30 years, so it's even more problematic to lump them in the same generation as the current 18-40 year old millennials.

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