User:Ikanreed/Millennials

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. Millennials is a common term for the group of people goddamn kids these days born between 1980 and 2000. An endless sea of internet think pieces are devoted to how Millennials are lazy slackers/oversexxed miscreants/too politically correct/the saviors of the future/underpaid/overpaid/whine too much/deserve better -- all depending on the age and agenda of the writer.

In general, most thoughts about Millennials seem to be lazy generalizations, and if the reader is lucky, at least over-extrapolating on a real study.

A breakdown of the most common claims

 * As alluded to above, there a million and a half think pieces, it shouldn't be hard to take a slice of a half-dozen or so and refute their central point as an overgeneralization


 * Millennial are the satire generation says Mercury News. No one before or after has or will ever use satire and/or humor to mock their opponents' positions.
 * Here we have an anecdote of a couple minimum wage employees taking a break at work, and that being indicative of an entire generation being entitled and lazy.
 * And here's an article citing the plethora of articles whining about Millennials as evidence that, yes, Millennials are whiners.

It's always been like this
(Note: this is also a theme of bullshitty think pieces: don't go too far up our own ass here)
 * Find, at nice 20-25 year intervals, historic pieces making almost exactly the same claims about gen X, boomers, greatest generation, silent generation, throw in a couple ancient examples to complete the circle.
 * A famous 1993 article directed at Generation X was titled THE BORING TWENTIES; Grow Up, Crybabies, You're America's Luckiest Generation was later matched with the inevitable counter-claim from time magazine titled Slackers? Hardly. The so-called Generation X turns out to be full of go-getters who are just doing it—but their way. Nearly blow for blow identical to the back-and-forth about Millennials.
 * And when the (early) Baby Boomers were in high school, a nice New York Times published an Op-Ed called STUDENTS HELD LAZY; 'I Don't Care' Attitude Is Seen Prevailing in High Schools
 * And lest we think The Greatest Generation was spared the condescension, College Students, It Is Declared, Have Yet Much to Learn; They Could Join in Trying to Save Fundamentals of Better Life but Have Held Themselves Aloof From Consideration of Real Facts, or perhaps just how they were too coddled making them all communists.

What's actually different
List the following evidence supported differences from previous generations:
 * Poorer
 * Better educated
 * Less sexually promiscuous
 * Less religious