We’re narcissists, entitled and spoilt. We’re special snowflakes, who want medals just for taking part in a competition. We’re shallow, unwilling to work and easily distracted. We are Millennials.
Or that’s what newspaper columnists would have you believe, using the term to denote anyone younger than them who exhibits a mildly annoying trait. TIME magazine argues that we’re the ‘Me Me Me’ generation. The Telegraph questions whether this generation is the most narcissistic there’s ever been. Forbes goes further, calling us the Selfie generation – Millennials on steroids.
Well hold on just a moment as I leave my Chai Tea Latte, close my Tumblr tab and move my MacBook. This article is an open letter to people who moan about Millennials. It’s a moan about other people moaning. A moan-ifesto, if you will.
Firstly, where does this rubbish about being uniquely shallow come from? According to some conservative columnists, we’re all guilty of judging someone by looks alone. We’re addicted to swiping right on Tinder, instead of properly courting people. But what’s new about that? Henry VIII once married someone based on a single portrait. At least we ask for a few more pictures. And we’d definitely leave marriage until after the first date too.
We apparently can’t handle the real world either. Resident windbag at the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips, laments the supposed culture of ‘all must have awards’. According to Phillips, we’re the products of an education system that doesn’t allow failure and has too many soft subjects. We’re damned if we succeed, and damned if we don’t. If you manage to achieve good grades it’s because of grade inflation. If you don’t manage to get good grades you’re feckless and lazy. And what’s a ‘soft’ subject supposed to mean? A social science? A humanities subject? Anything that doesn’t leave you covered in chalk dust while rote-reciting Latin phrases?
Our softness even extends to the workplace. Ours is the entitled generation, who thinks they’re going to walk into a well-paying job with cushy benefits claimed a Guardian article in 2008 – hilariously attributing this to the “lack of a significant economic downturn”. Never mind that we’re graduating with more debt than our parents, into uncertain graduate prospects and unstable careers – we’re accused of having a poor work ethic. Self-styled truth teller and blogger Matt Walsh said precisely that in a 2014 article for the Huffington Post. In his appeal to the ‘yoof of today’, he argued that no matter what the job market is like, there’s always vacancies at fast-food places. This is what others have called the McDonald’s theory of social mobility. Can’t get a job? Work at McDonald’s. Your degree is going to waste because graduate employers aren’t hiring? Work at McDonald’s. Our parents’ generation made it impossible to ever own a home, oversaw the Great Recession and wrecked the economy? Don’t worry son there’s work at McDonald’s.
Sometimes when crusty old journos tire of bashing our education and our work ethic, they attack our leisure habits instead. We over-use Facebook, or Twitter or Snapchat, and miss out on the value of face-to-face interaction. But there’s a reason social media is called social: because it allows you to connect to people you would never be able to otherwise. And we don’t over-use social media, we use it properly. Unlike many people of a certain age, we understand that a comment on a Facebook status isn’t the appropriate way to send greetings to the entire extended family. God bless middle aged commentators: they hate us twenty-somethings when we’re on the internet, but they love us when we fix the internet.
No moan-ifesto would be complete without an irritated call to arms, and here’s mine. Millennials of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but… Well, you have nothing to lose at all really.