I need a rant about millennials

[HanG77]

Okay, I may offend millennials but hear me out (and please, millennials, offer me an explanation as to why your generation do this)...I've just had a discussion with a millennial on a thread for a social media post showing the Tartan Army having a blast in Boston, her comment was about how it was "healing the millennials". I replied saying it's lovely for all generations to watch given how divisive the world is, and she said due to 9/11 millennials crave the world healing more. I get this a lot with millennials - like they think every cultural experience is about them or for them - even taking things that are from other generations and claiming it as their era - and they act like no other generation has had any big events to deal with. I argued the Lost Generation (world war) and Gen Z (being children/early adults when the whole world stopped) have had it worse out of all the living generations (in my opinion).

For context, I'm a British Gen X, also I have a lot of close millennial friends so it's not personal, it's about them as a collective. Also, this person was American - I think maybe the American nationalism adds to it (more so than with Brits of this generation).

I don't know the psychology behind it but people always do stuff like this. Some examples I've seen online recently;

But then I am Welsh and we love our mum's here
I always cry at the news but that might just be because I'm a Libra though
I don't mind bus journeys because I'm from Manchester

I've also seen general things people love all across the world eg drinking tea, squid game, binge watching, toast, eating out, watching friends, grinding coffee beans for your morning coffee being attributed to being a particular race, from a particular place, particular generation, a particular sex.

People love to divide themselves off for some reason.

I totally get this, and I get the anger towards (some) Boomers when they fail to understand how impossible it is for younger generations to get the basics like housing (as they did so easily). I think maybe that's some of the confusion for me, I am 49, from a working class family, and I have only just bought my own place for the above reasons and its been / still is (due to cost of living crisis) a struggle. As a late Gen X there's a lot of cross over with the generations dealing with the same issues.

Ha! fair point.

I feel so lucky to be a millennial! Slightly envious of GEN X because that seemed like the sweet spot to me! All the freedoms but none of the tech yet, social media, cctv capturing your every movement. I’d like to of lived in the ‘tax disc in the post’ era 🤣 Plus obviously, house prices. But go back to any generation before that and the quality of life was definitely worse! We’re so lucky! Yes we had covid, brexit etc but absolutely every generation has its woes.

Yes there definitely is, as an older millennial I often feel affinity with gen xers! My mum is a boomer and luckily she does understand that the world is a vastly different place to the one she prepared me for.

I think a lot of the anti-millennial stuff comes from people who genuinely don't understand how it IS harder for us to have what they had, hence why we get called lazy or bad with money so often. Too busy eating avocado on toast to buy a house - man, I can't always afford avocados haha.

As for your original post I do wonder if it was more an american/uk thing rather than generational. Unless it's from a position of 'something traumatic happened in my formative years and actually, things haven't been great since' view point.

I was 15 when 9/11 happened and then it was only a short jump to the 2008 crash, so you could argue that those events kind of bookending my late teens/early adulthood was a big deal. Of course not as big as living through something like WW1 or WW2 those experiences are disappearing from living memory.

I haven't read the thread, just snippets but I have to agree with the pps who point out it's rather divisive for not much of a reason.

I'm not ok with division, we all share the this one world, I think it's best to try to see where each individual is personally coming from before deciding they represent an entire group (even if they say they are, if they look, they will usually find they are mistaken and most others of that group do not always agree with them)

Exactly, this generation thing is just mumbo jumbo - In terms of 9/11, I remember watching it for an hour on the TV, feeling very sad for those involved - then cracking on with my day in rural Herefordshire - it didn't impact me personally at all, any more than Grenfell did or the Israel/palestine war, or the war in Ukraine, its just stuff on TV happening elsewhere, sad yes, but not personally involving me.

My mum is a boomer who was out living her best life in the 80s and she always says how grateful she is that her parents couldn't track her every move haha! No having to text when you got in, no tracking apps, if she didn't answer her house phone that was the end of that!

I’m a millennial and a younger one as well (1993). I don’t feel this way at all. 9/11 legit triggered my issues with anxiety. We got sky TV around that sort of period and my mum was obsessed with sky news so it always seemed to be on. 9/11 was terrifying and I was pretty certain the terrorists were coming for us next for a long time… Also Holly and Jessica stands out and Millie Dowler, then 7/7 obviously.

Still, I don’t walk around with a victim complex or whatever it is you’re claiming. I’d say I’m pretty hardy. I teach Gen Z and can see some minor differences in their approach to the world. I hate voice notes and short form content for example.

Millenials are by far the whiniest bunch. Can’t wait for Gen Alpha do bad mouth them like they’ve been doing to the Boomers all this time

I think what you need to take away from this is: spend less time arguing/discussing things with strangers on the internet. You had a "discussion" with a stranger who didn't see your point of view on one site, so you come to a different site to start a thread to complain about it. Bizarre.

Yes, of course I am generalising. That's what people do when they're talking about a wide group or cultural phenomenon. It goes without saying I don't think every single Millennial on the planet is like this.

🙄

US boomers were drafted and Australian boomers were conscripted. Many didn't make it home, and those that did were often left with severe PTSD and no thanks for their sacrifice, as it was an unpopular war. If people are going to make generalisations about an entire generation, they ought to take into account what that generation went through outside their own little lens.

That's very noble of you.

No idea what you're talking about. I'm a millennial and love my life. Sure, there are worse years and better ones - that's normal, but on the whole, I'm perfectly happy.

9/11 didn't affect me in any way whatsoever. I grew up in an Eastern European country, was 13 when it happened. Didn't pay much attention to it; it was a blip in history like any other. Obviously, it was a very tragic event, don't get me wrong. But for me, it was one of the many; it's not like it's a unique single tragedy that happened during my lifetime.

As for the internet and social media, loss of a 'simpler' life, I disagree completely, again. I absolutely LOVE it. The world is on my fingertips now. I travel a lot, go to gigs, museums, ballet, etc - the world is your oyster, just open google and you can find and book anything, in any corner of the world, any time of day. Internet shopping, banking, social media - love it all. And don't feel 'depressed and bombarded with negative news' every day, if I don't like something, I just tune it out. I would absolutely HATE to go back to the pre-internet and pre-mobile phones stone ages.

Covid lockdowns were fine for my teen, who is now almost 14, and fine for me. We just sat at home for a bit. What's the big deal? Sure, a little boring, but it passed, and we went back to normal life straight away. We facetimed (thanks again, internet!) with family and friends, and still managed to travel. No fuss, no 'terrible trauma', no whinging.

I think it's normal for every generation of young people to think the world is about them and for them. I was like that. Can't say I've noticed anything specific about millennials.

I'm a millennial and have no idea what that person is on about, nor do I have a particular desire to heal. If anything i think millennials as a generation went through a significant amount of change in a short space so are generally resilliant. She sounds nuts tbh, I also don't comment on posts like that on social media as I feel they attract odd people...

Millennial here - and pretty stereotypically so given the amount of social media memes I relate to on the topic.

I have no need for healing, and whether the world is healed or not has little to no bearing on my day to day life. I’ve literally never described an event as healing, and can’t imagine I ever would.

You have a point OP. Growing up in the 80s under thatcher and Reagan wasn’t a picnic. Or maybe it made us tougher?

Surely 9/11 impacted Gen X the most and Boomers, in terms of literal impact. Obviously, the consequences of 9/11 would have been just as a great on millennials.

Also not as big as an entire generation believing that they would die by the time they were 20 from AIDS or nuclear war.

You don’t hear as much about it because we don’t generally whinge about it. So people dismiss the experiences of my and previous generations because we tend to avoid the navel gazing

I think this is it in a nutshell. Every other generation has had busts/crises preceded by or followed by booms in a pretty cyclical way. Millennials have not had that. It has just been crisis after a crisis after crisis with no opportunity to bounce back or recover. It’s not great for the soul.

I can't make head nor tail of your post.

Perhaps it's my millennial stupidity?

Well if it was so easy to do it years ago why did you not buy then? I am your age and bought my house in 2003. It was not 'easy' I still had to work to get a mortgage and was on much lower wages than I am now and it irritates me when people comment on how 'lucky' I was to have bought when I did when it was sheer hard bloody work and nothing to do with luck.