I need a rant about millennials

It could be your algorithm considering it is social media you keep saying you mainly see this on.

9/11 may have been "the event" for a small group of horribly privileged and probably American or British millennials. For millions of others born in the same 20 or so years, it is just another thing, and a less immediate thing at that.

Then please enlighten me. I find this post so insanely pointless it’s mind dumbing.

You cannot be blind to the irony of getting annoyed by millennials reductively and exclusively labelling "everything" as millennial, while doing just that yourself. Surely not. And yet, I think you might be.

Sure…but what is their appalling dress sense?

If people would say 'everyone in their 20s' or 'people between 20 and 50' or whatever I'd have some idea what they were on about with their generalisations. I've just about sorted who boomers are, everything else - no, have to look them up, and it's pointless and boring. Every generation faces challenges.

I feel like it’s maybe more of a social media thing. I think it seems to really drive people to label themselves to the nth degree. Defining yourself by your ‘generation’ seems pretty pointless in real life, but it’s really useful for the algorithms that track and sell us shit constantly. Then it becomes a trend and more people post about it, before you know it, we’re all doing it and pretending it’s totally normal to generalise 20-30% of the population based on something we read/watched online.

Gen X were at school - watching news footage and surrounded by scared adults - when Chernobyl blew up. And the AIDS crisis. And Mad Cow disease. And it wasn't just news - it was embedded in entertainment as well. Threads, When the Wind Blows and Red Dawn all reinforced the fear instilled by the Protect and Survive leaflets. Three Mile Island and Windscale being a little earlier perhaps didn't get the same visual coverage. IRA bombs did, though. And Lockerbie, which changed travel rules in a similar way to 9/11.

Those a little older had Vietnam - have you seen the photo of the young girl covered in napalm? Can you imagine seeing that when you're around the same age as she was? Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis. Plenty of opportunities for the world to combust far more dramatically than ISIS could ever manage.

9/11 may be 'the' event for Millennials, but it's one of many for older people. And for everyone, one thing on that list will be 'the' event that changed things forever. And whatever 'the one' was it probably didn't have an objectively more significant effect than many others at a global, long-term scale - but it happened when you were at just the right age for it to shift your personal perspective.

Totes cray-cray 🙂

I mean, I get that you don't like it, but there's nothing intrinsically silly about names like Millennials, Gen X etc for a rough categorisation of a generation. I don't know why you seem offended by that bit. You might not like it, but it's not intrinsically silly.

And generally, these categorisations aren't proxies for the happenings of a single decade, that's the point. Talking about Millennials doesn't mean you're talking about the 80s - it allows you to talk about the life experience (at any point in their lives) of people who were born roughly between 1981 and 1996, whether that experience happened in the 80s, 90s, 00s or whenever.

What's frustrating are the sweeping generalisations taken as gospel, with no room for nuance or for different lived experience.

Same. She’s a bit odd isnt she. It’s like me saying I hate all gen x people for thinking everything revolves around them being.

Have you talked about those UK boomers whose lives were dominated by bombings and murders for nearly 30 years, who couldn't go into a city centre shop without being scanned, who never sat beside a window in a cafe or pub, who always had a contingency plan for meeting if they were separated while out and about?

Or what about those UK boomers who saw the entire economic and social underpinning of their society destroyed as the key industry was closed, leaving a million people unemployed?

Not really relevant to the discussion. The point is that you can’t generalise to a entire generation based on a few people you know.

You have somehow managed to misunderstand the entire post.

What appalling dress sense? Why?

That person is not some kind of a spokesperson for all millennials in this country. Tbh that sounded more like a Gen Z whinge 😂 I certainly don’t feel that way

Hmmm… bit of an odd post.

I’ve met a lot of Gen Xers who have appallingly dress sense. Does this make it a characteristic of their generation?

Millennials cover a huge cohort or people born with a timespan of an about 20 years - they aren’t all the same. Can’t say I recognise your description at all.

I don’t think it didn’t affect other generations - it absolutely did. But I think as millenials many of us saw people throwing themselves out of flaming buildings on TVs at school. Hits different when you’re 7 years old and your parents are scared. It wasn’t the only experience of 9/11 but it was an event that was during lots of millenials early years so it may have been different - not more just different - to the experience of adults.

I see Gen X people in the comments on YouTube saying ‘Gen X ignored once again’ all the time

Are her characters millenial aged? I think you’re the one wanting everything to be about you rather than understanding that saying a millenial writing about characters who are millennials could be described as writing the voice of millenials.

Even if my heartbreak is a universal experience it’s still a millenial one because I AM a millenial.