Best Article I’ve Ever Read on Millennials, That Mythical Group
“Millennials” have become both a media scapegoat for, and a distraction from, widespread economic suffering. Having experienced no economy other than the recession’s false recovery, young Americans have arguably suffered the most. The remedy lies not in judging their lifestyle choices-or worse yet, perpetuating the illusion that they have money to burn-but by acknowledging the new economy for what it is: a structural crisis, one that future generations will share. Millennials keep getting older, but their problems stay the same age.”
“When TIME’s cover story was published, millennials were in the fourth year of the “jobless recovery,” facing high unemployment, mounting debt, and an eroded social safety net. And yet, with breathtaking cluelessness, TIME framed the millennials’ desperate search for stable work as a privileged character flaw-look at the kids too flaky to handle “choosing from a huge array of career options.”
Fast forward to 2016, and millennials are now valued as an electoral prize and a revenue source. Media coverage has adjusted accordingly. But the idea that today’s young people are narcissistic and lazy lingers just beneath the surface. Browsing through news articles, two parallel worlds of millennials emerge. The first is inhabited by overtly political youth advocating for controversial initiatives like campus safe spaces. The second is filled with young consumers who are happy and prosperous yet prefer style over stuff-which, upon closer examination, is a euphemistic way of saying they cannot afford to buy much stuff anyway.
These narratives are more nuanced than TIME’s ridiculous 2013 attempt to capture millennials, but they still fail to accurately portray the reality of young people’s lives. For one thing, most depictions fail to define the age bracket of the cohort and relate it to historical context. In this way, critics often end up repackaging millennials’ economic desperation as lifestyle choices, leading to a sort of generational gaslighting over what life in the new economy is really like.”
- Sarah Kendzior, “The myth of millennial entitlement was created to hide their parents’ mistakes”
Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.