A house is something that as we are younger we dream about having. Owning a home is an ultimate goal, on arguably the same tier as getting married and starting a family. Usually, the latter comes first. It has been in the media recently that millennials are spending too much money on coffee and avocado toast, and are subsequently failing the housing industry. More of us are renting apartments and smaller housing, and are not investing our money in brick and mortar. Millennials spend a lot, yes, but it's definitely not just on coffee.
As someone who is on the bridge of two generations (born in 1996), I can attest to the fact that, yes, I do not have a lot of money. It will probably take me a while to save up, get loans, and eventually, purchase a home. In my generation though, homes are not a top priority. I try to support small businesses instead of large corporations because "millennials are killing it", I try to eat out because "Millennials are killing Applebees" (Which is so false, have you ever seen an Applebees in a college town during Half Off Apps?). But for some reason, no matter what we do, we are always under fire for killing some industry.
Raised by baby boomers, we were sheltered more than the generations before us. Parents would be cruel to others in how they raised their children if it was in a way that someone else deemed "not protected". I stood out on my fourth-grade Safety/Service corner by myself, before adult chaperones were required, and I'm fine. It is simple Nature vs Nurture. It is not natural for us to "expect everything", it is not nature for us to collectively kill the housing industry, it is not nature for us to play video games more than we played outside. Think about that for a second. If you grew up not being given luxuries, do you think you would be consumed by the desire of not having them, or would you be affected more by your environment?
Being someone who will soon graduate from college, it is hard being told that it will be difficult for me to get a job. Let me elaborate. Obviously, it will be tough for me to get a job, getting a job right out of college is never easy. The other day I saw a "meme" that said something along the lines of "My job is to teach someone who makes 7x more money than me how to work Excel to do their job". Which is increasingly truer. As millennials, we grew up in a riding technological age. I have had many different cell phones ranging in size, shape, and user operating systems. I have had an iPhone, and an android. I tell things that I think are very simple, to those in an older generation.
That, is what I think is the issue. It isn't that I spend too much money on toast or coffee. Millennials will never get anything right because we are dominated by a generation that blames us for how we are rather than blaming themselves. It isn't our fault that the world got more technologically advanced as we were kids. It is not our fault that we tend to be more liberal and open-minded when many of us were raised in a closed-minded environment.
Millennials can't do anything right because everything we do is expected to be wrong. If some 25-year-old starts a multi-million dollar company, they are seen as an innovator, but also a killer of small businesses. If a 25-year-old decides they want to live free and backpack in the mountains of South Dakota, they are seen as lazy and living an unfulfilling life. If I work really hard throughout college, build a resume, join clubs, put money into the economy, I can still be seen as a young woman with too much on her hands that should take time to myself, and not be too hopeful about getting a job.
We were raised by the elder generations to believe we could be, we could do anything we wanted to be. It's a hard realization when you get to the age that you can, and are constantly shut down by the same people who built us up.
I am so grateful that I had supporting, lenient, and hilarious parents that worked hard to make me the woman that I am today. As a millennial, and a millennial woman at that, I think we can't so anything else to "redeem" our generation, because we don't need to do anything right. We don't owe anyone anything. We don't owe the bigots who run this country and satisfaction in their big business, we don't owe big box corporations anything if we prefer small cafes over a Tim Hortons. We don't owe anyone an explaination in the ways we want to live our lives.
We will know how to treat the next huge generation.
