Poking fun at Millennials has become a popular sport even for some Millennials.
Every generation since the Boomers has been called puerile and lazy by its elders however, the “slacker” GenXers have ended up founding the most start-ups per capita than any other, so it’s likely that Millennials will eventually pull through (we hope). The comparatively small cohort of GenXers, formerly known as “Latch-Key Kids” are largely the children of The Silent Generation, who themselves were born during the Great Depression, largely as the children of The Lost Generation.
The Silent Generation was the first generation in American history to be smaller than the generation that preceded them and they’ve been called “The Lucky Few” because they came into adulthood during the relatively prosperous 1950s and early 1960s. Although they also came of age under McCarthyism and are considered to be conformist, they did initiate the mass wave of divorce, which continues to this day.
Millennials are for the most part the children of the Boomers and have recently overtaken them as the largest generation. As the Boomers’ children, Millennials share with them descriptors like “narcissistic” and “entitled”. Contrary to what the PBSIdeaChannel’s Mike Rugnetta states here, the Millennials’ grandparents are largely of The Great Generation, so this figures.
Of course, boiling down an entire generation of people into a neat set of descriptors is ridiculous but it’s driven by marketing and has therefore also resulted in the pinning of blame on Millennials for the collapse of entire industries, like automobiles and fast food items, like the Chicken McWrap (!)
This would be predictable in our current “clickbait dystopia” as Rugnetta calls it. His riff here is very amusing and the piece is pretty hilarious.
