I need a rant about millennials

Ah well. Makes a welcome change from boomer bashing I supose

I can't stand the way everyone is talked about with these daft age categories now. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.

No, you don't get to push this on Americans now that people have disagreed with your take on millennials. American millennials aren't all like this either.

Must be an American thing rather than millennials, as I also have never heard this.

I’m a millennial and I don’t recognise myself in this at all. There are, however neurotic, self-centred people in every generation.

You don’t have to go around giving them silly names.
If you want to talk about a decade and what happened in it , to the people in it you talk about it by saying ‘ the 30’s. The 60’s, The 90’s. And so on. You don’t give a bunch of people a silly label in order to do so.

It’s not their fault in many ways.

Also I don’t even think it’s a majority of them that are like that.

We keep telling entire generations that they are victims because they can’t afford to buy a house or they missed some school in lockdown etc and then wonder why they have little resilience.

I wouldn’t recommend the 70s/80s childhood in many ways but by the time we went to work, we were ready to navigate the bad things in life a lot better. We didn’t wang on about ‘healing’.

The silent generation lived in a time of world wars, genuine deprivation etc, as did the baby boomers.

GenX grew up genuinely convinced that they wouldn’t survive their teens due to either HIV or nuclear attack. Oh and neurodivergence not being recognised or supported.

So not being able to buy a house or whatever is fairly mild in comparison.

First 3 posts nail it 😆

Perhaps take a break from social media.

Your “stance” is no different than what is said about others moaning about a specific generation on social media.

There are plenty of millennials that do not feel the same way as the person you decided to use as a generalisations for all millennials.

This is not much different from some men who spout out women only want men that are 6ft tall, make six figures because they heard it on social media instead of actually considering their own reality and even factual data outside of social media.

Not even most Americans millennials are like what you’ve chosen to choose as an example. Most are more concentrated like many generations and people (of other countries and cultures) on their own sh-t going on than who has it worse.

I'm a millennial and I'm just terribly glad I wasn't born 15 years later (Gen Z?).

I'm glad I had my analogue childhood and teen years without social media.

I think kids now have a much more stressful and anxious life with much less freedom than we had.

And I feel all the convenience stuff which makes us more efficient so we can work more has led to an erosion of childhood and family. Just little things like using a map to navigate back from a family camping trip. All sitting down to watch TV together on a Saturday night because there was only one TV. Children looked and acted like children for longer in the 80s, I feel anyway.

But I imagine there are people in the preceeding generation who feel that way too, it's not unique to millennials. And maybe we all just miss our childhood and feel it was a simpler time, whenever that childhood was.

Yes, imagine all the complaints about ageism if it was the other way round!

You aren’t. It is stuff and nonsense. And easier to describe generations by the years they lived.

Indeed.

Exactly this. Like a few others, I HATE ageist threads, (whether it's about older people or younger people.) They are always full of ridiculous sweeping generalisations.

@HanG77 I do not recognise what you're going on about at ALL! You are definitely not describing any millennials I know.

I think both of you are being silly in making this about the range of years somebody happened to be born in.

I’m a millennial (right in the middle) and never come across this attitude.

when I hear anyone of any age talk crap, I roll my eyes and move on.

Millennial here, what a load of crap

They certainly are but it only truly informs the experience when they consider it in context.

Agree with this to an extent. As a millennial it feels like we were the last generation to believe in hard work paying off except due to circumstances beyond our control it didn’t. I did the “education, education, education” thing and have grafted but it hasn’t paid off financially or lifestyle wise and I’m no better off than previous generations were leaving school at 16 and working their way up. It does feel you were sold a lie. I’ve noticed online that Gen Z seem to have had a pessimism about their futures from the start which is its own problem of course for which I really do sympathise but slightly different to that mourning and betrayal you’re talking about.

Although I don’t really get what 9/11 and Scottish football fans has to do with us.

I can never remember who is which generation - I feel this helps to not lump groups of people into having the same opinion.
I don't know which generation I am so I can have my own thoughts.

I think it is a bit arbitrary dividing people into these age brackets, and I have not heard of exactly what you have mentioned OP. There will always be luck and circumstance feeding differently into lives of people of the same generation.

What I would say is I do feel the lower end of that age group tend to feel "empowered" by their opinions in a way that other generations have tended to rein in a bit and leave some space and respect for wisdom and life experience. It's as if ideas and values that aren't trending on SM really should be shelved as out of date. I was at a lunch the other day with a lady in her early 30s who was the DD of my DM's friend, plus a few of my DM's friends, and was really appalled by the disrespect for their views - out of date, hilarious, eye-roll inducing, as though they were all half-witted when in fact there are some very accomplished and intelligent ladies amongst them, and their views were better-reasoned than hers. All she could say to defend hers was "well that's just not how people think now." It wasn't a love of debate: it was simply a shutting-down and parking of alternative viewpoints. I really don't recall my friends (now mid-late 40s) being so totally dismissive of previous generations. Even if you did things differently, there wasn't this need to tell them how wrong and laughable they were. There was a base level of respect.

To be fair, this will always be partly down to personality of the individual, but I do feel as though there is a lot more of the attitude that being disrespectful is somehow clever. To the extent that you can attribute attitudes and behaviours to certain age brackets, I feel SM has played quite a part. People take it as a substitute for proper education and upbringing, and all the respect seems to have to flow in certain directions only.

What do all gen Xers take the views and actions of one person and attribute it to a whole generation of people?!

Again a US touchstone not a UK one - UK didn't fight in the Vietnam war 55-75 with us getting there 65.

We did fight in Korea war 1950-53 - and that included British National Service conscripts.

Within any generation there are lossers and winners.

The economic and demographic head winds were with the boomer generation - which our parenst fit into but they didn't have it easy in UK - 50 working class poor childhoods starting work at 15 and half to 16.