Kids these days. Lazy, entitled, selfish. Back in my day we didn’t get participation trophies. You kids have it so easy.

I’ve heard these all before. But are millennials really everything people make them out to be?

Generations

First lets define millennials. Millennials are now the largest generation in the world, overtaking their parents generation, the baby boomers. Pew defines millennials as those born between 1971 to 1997 but sources vary. Some range as far as the mid 70s to the mid 2000s.

The united states census only acknowledges one generation, the baby boomers, those born after WWII. But what is a generation?

Generational labels make human history look ordered and less messy. Of course humans don’t have children at a set time every few years so we tend to lump groups of people born around the same time and who share similar traits.

George Orwell said, “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

Myths

Are “kids these days” really as bad as we say they are? Are they really choosing the wrong paths? Here are some facts.

High school seniors are drinking and smoking less,

Exercising more,

and are the most educated generation in history.

So why do older generations worry so much about “kids these days”?

Juvenoia

I think one of the reasons older generations are so dismissive or afraid of millennials is a feeling of misplaced nostalgia and juvenoia.

Juvenoia is an exaggerated fear of the effects of social change on youth.

Of course worrying about ones kids is a healthy reaction. After all there are lots of dangers out there, and it makes sense to care for your kids well being, but what some people fail to understand is that this fear of what kids are getting into is not a new phenomenon.

The first “Me” generation was actually the baby boomers. The 1970s were dubbed the “Me” decade by writer Tom Wolfe. He characterized the generation as, “a culture of narcissism,” and, “self-realization”.

This is the same sentiment a critic said of todays media,

“We do not turn over the pages in search of thought, delicate psychological observation, grace of style, charm of composition, but we enjoy them like children at play laughing and crying at the images before us.”

Wait…sorry, that’s something literary critic G. H. Lewes wrote about Charles Dickens in 1872.

But it goes back even farther than that. Here’s an engraving from 1627 admonishing the ‘now,’ compared to the ways of ‘old’.

The point is this is not a new phenomenon, but why do we still pine over the past and hold it in such high esteem? The answer might lie in the way we remember.

We tend to remember exciting things as lasting longer than they really did, but rarely remember times of boredom in detail. Since most people assume they’re good people, they correlate their upbringing as the “right way” kids should be raised.

Meaning we hold good memories of our past in a place of importance,

but tend to forget the hard to face realities of our past.

It’s not the world thats changed, It’s you.

A case for Millennials

Today’s kids are in a tough spot. They are the first generation projected to die earlier than their parents, there are forty-four million borrowers with $1.3 trillion in student loan debt in the U.S. alone, and they live in the midst of a new housing crisis. Despite this, kids these days are more driven, focused, and determined to change the world than ever before.