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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/stop-blaming-millennials-killi... The American system has thrown them into debt, depressed their wages, kept them from buying homes—and then blamed them for everything. No, idiots. The American system didn't do that last bit. The media did. And you're part of the media. The entire concept of demographic "generations" annoys the shit out of me. And it only gets worse as time goes on and I read more crap like this. Just think about it for a couple of minutes. You have someone born in, say, 1986, supposedly an early year of the "Millennial" generation. And then you have someone born in 1983, supposedly a late Gen-X. You're telling me there is, somewhere in '84 or '85, a hard cut-off, where someone born one day is Gen-X and someone born the next day is a Millennial? Hell, you can even imagine identical twins, one born during the last seconds of Gen-X, and the other born in the first second of Millennial. On top of which, you'd have to convince me that our 1983-born X-er has more in common with someone born in 1966 than with someone born in 1986. It's fucking astrology, is what it is, and without the interesting math involving apparent planetary motion. I look at it this way: There has always been, and always will be (at least until the inevitable apocalypse), a continuum of ages. In any given year, a wide variety of people were / will be born. A sharecropper's kid has very little in common with a trust fund baby. Two people in the same socioeconomic stratum can also be as different as heads and tails on a coin. There is as much variation within a group of people born in a given year than there is between groups of people born 25, 50, or even 75 years apart. Also, some things suck and other things get better. This is due not to a single "generation" or cadre of ages, but every single person doing his or her own thing. And attitudes change over time. There's nothing new about this observation. But people pick up different attitudes depending on their upbringing and the stories to which they're exposed. And who does the upbringing, and the story-telling? Older people, subject to their own biases. Yes, ideas evolve. No, you don't get to blame an entire cohort for that. I'm pretty sure the whole "generations" thing is just another way to divide us, like politics or countries. It distracts us from the real issues, which we can either work to solve, or ignore, depending on one's individual preference. Sure, there are going to be differences between someone like me who remembers (barely) the first moon landing, and someone who grew up sucking on an iPad (which, incidentally, has exponentially more processing power than the Saturn V did). But let's not fool ourselves: for as long as there has been civilization, old people and young people have complained about each other, and yet people continue to produce young people like there's no tomorrow (in fairness, there might not be). So you know what I want to see Millennials finally kill? Generations. Fly, my pretties! |
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