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:
I agree. Also there are new dubious tags describing the Generation Z[1]. "Most of Generation Z have used the Internet since a young age, and they are generally comfortable with technology and with interacting on social media."
Considering Boomers have actual power right now and plenty of time for their influence to spread; it's rational to blame them for a huge range of issues.
> it's rational to blame them for a huge range of issues
No, it's not. It's making broad generalizations on a huge group of people. It's like blaming all white people for discrimination or all black people for crime. It's wrong and discriminatory, and makes the assumption that everyone in that group is equally bad.
Instead of focusing on a certain age group, focus on the economic forces that gave boomers more opportunity than the younger generations. It's not the age group that's caused the issues, it's those forces.
Economics are not separated from politics. The poor diet of most Americans is a direct result of various subsidies given to the farming lobby. Individual choices allow an individual to be fat, but at a national level it takes vast tracts of land.
The growth of Chinese manufacturing is in large part a result of trade policies and our vast growing national debt's impact on currency's. Want long term growth? End deficit spending.
Our poor heath care system is again based on political choices.
The current drug policy and prison system is again an outgrowth of political choices.
Right. I'm not arguing this. What I'm arguing is that blaming all Boomers for these issues is silly. Not all Boomers are in control of the government. Not all Boomers pushed for farming subsidies or pushed manufacturing to China. Not all boomers were white or lived a solidly middle-class life.
A specific subgroup of Boomers are still Boomers. So, yea it might not be every single Boomers fault equally, but that does not change anything it's still the Boomers fault.
That argument can be extended to black people. Blacks statistically commit more crime than whites in America. It's still bad to say that black people are violent, because it's a broad, presumptuous generalization that ignores the forces causing that trend. Along the same vein, it's bad to assume that an entire age group is bad just because some currently run the country.
It's important to consider reality even if it seems unpopular. Blacks are convicted of more crimes in the US, that does not mean they commit more crimes.
Just look at all the collage students not busted for drugs. We have a long history of intentionally creating systemic issues.
I'm not saying that black people commit more crime because they're black. In fact, that's exactly the point I was trying to make: blaming black crime on their skin color is bad because it ignores the socioeconomic forces causing them to commit more crimes than other races with lower poverty levels. Just like how blaming boomers ignores the geopolitical and economic forces that gave them an advantage at the time. Not all black people commit crime, and not all boomers were privileged or lucky in life.
I'd be careful with those statistics - they are post-systemic-bias i.e. those were the stats on people accused of committing crime. Because {profiling, racism, bias} we'll never know exactly how many murders were committed by whomever.
As long as we are discussing systemic issues I think we need to go deeper. The article lists someone being killed, yet the death is not part of the murder statistic. If you had said Blacks committed statistically more murders based on the current legal definition that's more defensible than crimes because total crime is a very different beast. We don't really keep track of the total number of crimes in any real way. But, that number is competently separate issue from various sub types of criminal acts.
If you look annually their are ~17,000 reported murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases in the U.S. However, that excludes for example a significant subset of the ~32,000 traffic facilitates in the US that could be classified as Murder with slightly different laws. (Call it 1/4 from thin air and those murder statistics look different.) Importantly, they are generally both crimes, but while someone still ends up dead legally they are very different.
Another issue is if a factory kills thousands from pollution is that one crime, thousands of murders, or millions of assaults based on different interpretations of the law.
PS: Why are most serial killers in the US white? Is it because they actually kill more people, or because gang violence is not counted.
PPS: I am not sure why so many people are down voting you, it's reasoned argument even if I don't exactly agree.
...and the systemic bias that when poor people (often Black) are the demographic involved, its a crime. But rich people (often not Black) running factories, not a crime. Agreed.
Right. We're a species of clannish behavior. Whoever fills a niche first, favors (consciously or unconsciously) those in their clan. Niches include law, government, medicine, entertainment, engineering.
This is at root of most discussions about problems in these areas. And never gets mentioned, instead lots of intellectualizing about what should and shouldn't be.
Like most things it's not purely one thing or another. It has propped up the communist party by reducing the suffering of the Chinese population. I have a hard time calling that a bad thing, but it did create many problems.
There is exactly one "millennial" in Congress, and you've probably never heard of her. I think it's fair to say "millennials" aren't voting on legislation, at least.
> There is exactly one "millennial" in Congress... I think it's fair to say "millennials" aren't voting on legislation, at least.
No, this makes the assumption that all millennials would only vote for a millennial. That doesn't make sense. Millennials typically don't have as much political experience. Why would we vote for them?
Millennials don't need to be voted into office for their voice to be heard. That's the point of a republic, to elect representatives that reflect your _viewpoints_, not age.
Requires someone to be in Congress, not be a normal person on election day. Regular voters have very limited direct impact on specific pieces of legislation.
You're not up to date on the current rhetoric, it's been decided that all white people are in fact to blame. That's probably why you're getting downvoted to hell.
Economic forces are due to governmental decisions (baby boomers are the largest generational bloc in congress, and the president is a baby boomer; millenials, however, are the largest living generation) and consumer behavior (baby boomers are set to control 70% of disposable income within 4 years, https://impactbp.com/baby-boomers, and hold 50% of total wealth currently https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/industry/investment-m...).
Hah, well boomers do take money out of the stock market, while it's millennials putting money in (401K). Boomers take out social security, while it's millennials are paying for it.
Personally, it seems like it's the millennials keeping the whole system afloat!
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.
It's easy to feel contempt for a generation who's response to a generation-defining economic collapse was as toothless and misguided as Occupy Wall Street.
It's absurd to draw that equivalency, but good, bad, or indifferent, that is what society at large sees as the Millennial generation's only foray into public life.
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.
> marketing fundamentally exists outside morality.
> It's not a moral indictment, it's just a bald statement of fact
Marketing exists to sell stuff. Facts are only relevant to marketing in-so-far as the facts sells the product. More often than not, marketing is bullshit and completely devoid of facts because facts are boring and products need to be exciting.
"Millenials are killing X" is exactly the sort of marketing statement that is completely devoid of facts.
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.
If you were to suggest that there is an agenda amongst the moneyed classes to keep corporate tax take low and restrictive regulation low then I would most heartily agree. There is overwhelming evidence that that is the case.
That there is a high level conspiracy to pit parent against child so everyone's too busy infighting? Extraordinary claims etc.
There doesn't need to be a conspiracy for GP to be basically correct. If you're a true believer in the free market, the market can never fail, it can only be failed.
Bad economy? It's the millennials. Not enough jobs? It's the foreign imports. Stagnant real wages? Blame illegal immigration.
Daring to question the efficiency of nearly unregulated capitalism is basically taboo in America.
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.
It's not. It's a made-up quotation from 100+ years ago, attributed to the Greek dude.
That said, the Greek dude had made some very astute observations of his own, that hold very well today. So it's not like "23 centuries" ago necessarily means an idea is stale or anything.
There was a book I read about "are parents coddling their kids too much" and whatno, I forget the title...
They spoke about all the concepts of "hellicopter parenting", "kids being spoiled nowadays" etc. Then they go on to mention that literally every. single. generation that ever was written about since as far back as our records hold, was written about in the same way!
Yes, that's right, EVERY SINGLE GENERATION, since as far back as we have reporting, has been spoiled rotten, has no respect for elders, is entitled, and so on.
Came here to post this. Gamergate is more than three years old now and yet people still try to dredge it up and smear it as a "misogynist hate campaign" when even a cursory amount of research proves otherwise (not if you only look at headlines of course).
Once again a writer decides to try and project their personal opinions on to a subject they're* interviewing.
It's about as accurate as saying "all Muslims are terrorists" and I'm saying this as someone who sees that movement as a laughingstock since it has failed to reach any of it's goals and is full of internal conflicts that only divide it even further.
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'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...
Well, to take the bait, considering that according to Wikipedia the range starts from early 1980s with some even considering the beginning at late 1970s, i'd say 1981/1982 is firmly Millenial material.
Although that is probably closer to the Oregon Trail Generation :-)
The inconvenience of this argument will do worse than earn you downvotes if you're not careful. It might earn you no votes at all, because there's things far more inflammatory and black and white to take sides on, and that's what's fashionable in the human world
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.
The biggest sin of the Boomers is, they grew up in a world that was carefully curated by their parents, and became convinced that this was the natural state of things.
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 the only thing that makes reading stuff about us snake people bearable. And based on another thread here, I see they've already put something in that changes Generation Zed/Z into "Zolom's Children", which is also excellent.
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ
https://gizmodo.com/5851062/generation-x-is-sick-of-your-bul...
;)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z
I'm serious. The Gen-Xers and Boomers didn't do it.
No, it's not. It's making broad generalizations on a huge group of people. It's like blaming all white people for discrimination or all black people for crime. It's wrong and discriminatory, and makes the assumption that everyone in that group is equally bad.
Instead of focusing on a certain age group, focus on the economic forces that gave boomers more opportunity than the younger generations. It's not the age group that's caused the issues, it's those forces.
The growth of Chinese manufacturing is in large part a result of trade policies and our vast growing national debt's impact on currency's. Want long term growth? End deficit spending.
Our poor heath care system is again based on political choices.
The current drug policy and prison system is again an outgrowth of political choices.
Just look at all the collage students not busted for drugs. We have a long history of intentionally creating systemic issues.
I'm not saying that black people commit more crime because they're black. In fact, that's exactly the point I was trying to make: blaming black crime on their skin color is bad because it ignores the socioeconomic forces causing them to commit more crimes than other races with lower poverty levels. Just like how blaming boomers ignores the geopolitical and economic forces that gave them an advantage at the time. Not all black people commit crime, and not all boomers were privileged or lucky in life.
Not saying the stats are worthless; just biased.
If you look annually their are ~17,000 reported murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases in the U.S. However, that excludes for example a significant subset of the ~32,000 traffic facilitates in the US that could be classified as Murder with slightly different laws. (Call it 1/4 from thin air and those murder statistics look different.) Importantly, they are generally both crimes, but while someone still ends up dead legally they are very different.
Another issue is if a factory kills thousands from pollution is that one crime, thousands of murders, or millions of assaults based on different interpretations of the law.
PS: Why are most serial killers in the US white? Is it because they actually kill more people, or because gang violence is not counted.
PPS: I am not sure why so many people are down voting you, it's reasoned argument even if I don't exactly agree.
This is at root of most discussions about problems in these areas. And never gets mentioned, instead lots of intellectualizing about what should and shouldn't be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elise_Stefanik
No, this makes the assumption that all millennials would only vote for a millennial. That doesn't make sense. Millennials typically don't have as much political experience. Why would we vote for them?
Millennials don't need to be voted into office for their voice to be heard. That's the point of a republic, to elect representatives that reflect your _viewpoints_, not age.
Requires someone to be in Congress, not be a normal person on election day. Regular voters have very limited direct impact on specific pieces of legislation.
Personally, it seems like it's the millennials keeping the whole system afloat!
It's absurd to draw that equivalency, but good, bad, or indifferent, that is what society at large sees as the Millennial generation's only foray into public life.
Disclaimer: I have not read everything that's ever been written about millennials.
Marketing exists to sell stuff. Facts are only relevant to marketing in-so-far as the facts sells the product. More often than not, marketing is bullshit and completely devoid of facts because facts are boring and products need to be exciting.
"Millenials are killing X" is exactly the sort of marketing statement that is completely devoid of facts.
It works pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15844087
If that doesn't work, they can always blame immigrants, Islam or blacks.
Or it could be too many column inches to fill and not enough time to fill them with something insightful.
Yeah, probably conspiracy.
The notion that there's an agenda behind any media beyond selling eyeballs is, of course, a harebrained conspiracy theory.
If you were to suggest that there is an agenda amongst the moneyed classes to keep corporate tax take low and restrictive regulation low then I would most heartily agree. There is overwhelming evidence that that is the case.
That there is a high level conspiracy to pit parent against child so everyone's too busy infighting? Extraordinary claims etc.
There doesn't need to be a conspiracy for GP to be basically correct. If you're a true believer in the free market, the market can never fail, it can only be failed.
Bad economy? It's the millennials. Not enough jobs? It's the foreign imports. Stagnant real wages? Blame illegal immigration.
Daring to question the efficiency of nearly unregulated capitalism is basically taboo in America.
Perhaps the greatest unexpected result of the internet is how we dont need papers. Choice in what i read is mine.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-childre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing
That said, the Greek dude had made some very astute observations of his own, that hold very well today. So it's not like "23 centuries" ago necessarily means an idea is stale or anything.
Except the quote does not originate from the ancient Greeks that is.
I read a lot of Plato in school, and even learned to read in Ancient Greek. It’s often funnier in Greek than in most translations.
It is true it does not follow. What the quote implies it is a very old issue.
They spoke about all the concepts of "hellicopter parenting", "kids being spoiled nowadays" etc. Then they go on to mention that literally every. single. generation that ever was written about since as far back as our records hold, was written about in the same way!
Yes, that's right, EVERY SINGLE GENERATION, since as far back as we have reporting, has been spoiled rotten, has no respect for elders, is entitled, and so on.
Once again a writer decides to try and project their personal opinions on to a subject they're* interviewing.
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.
CSGO finals had about 3m https://www.dexerto.com/news/e-league-csgo-major-breaks-view...
The 2017 Superbowl as one example, had 114M. http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/06/media/super-bowl-ratings-pat...
The UEFA Champions League final in 2016 attracted 350 million global viewers.[1] I am supposing the 2017 event wasn't too much less than this.
The 2017 Indian Premier League (IPL) final had 324 million viewers according to one source.
[1] http://www.pennlive.com/sports/index.ssf/2017/02/super_bowl_...
[2] http://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/19660717/billion-peop...
It seems the stats for CS:GO (Concurrent viewers at least) is even lower - https://esc.watch/tournaments/csgo/eleague-major-2017
Beating the Olympics but likely not our national soccer team which I haven’t been able to find numbers on.
It had more than 90.000 viewers, or between 14 and 15% of the age group with 19% of the males in the age group watching.
Or maybe I'm being too pessimistic? Perhaps a little adversity will make them turn out better...
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
Although that is probably closer to the Oregon Trail Generation :-)
https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/oregon-trail-genera...
This article is dripping with bias.
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.
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.
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.