These days, the so-called millennial generation is receiving a lot of flak, just as nearly every generation has received from the ones before it. It is as unsupported and useless as it has always been.
This year, Adam Conover gave a speech at Deep Shift titled “Millennials don’t exist!” in which he not only discussed how the concept of generations is unscientific and how “Generational thinking has always been reductive and condescending” but also debunked some of the most significant stereotypes about millennials, such as their narcissism, laziness, and obsession with technology.*
I would like to add to this discussion and explain why I believe it is important for everyone, including millennials themselves, to recognize that the stereotypical "millennials" are gone—or more accurately, that they never existed.
To expand on some of Conover’s main points, if there are any millennials who fit every stereotype about them, they are extremely few. The poor characteristics being attributed to millennials were not actually transferred from the 1980-1995 atmosphere into their brains when they were born. Instead, the way they were raised and the characteristics of their parents and surrounding communities are much more influential, for example. In fact, many of the complaints older generations have about millennials today are replicas of the complaints that even older generations had about them when they were our age.
One of the most important reasons these stereotypes should be considered worthless is that they are practically useless for anything but looking down on people. This is part of how bad stereotypes like these work—people decide that a certain group generally has various poor characteristics and therefore all deserve to be treated as if they do, regardless of how many exceptions to the rule may exist.
I would also like to mention that those complaining about the millennial generation are often rather hypocritical because they are often either the generation that raised millennials, or millennials themselves. The former is obviously greatly responsible for many of the stereotypes they see in their children, especially for things like technology-obsession and entitlement. As for the latter, in my experience they tend to have few of the characteristics attributed to their fellow millennials and resent having to be treated like one of them anyway. There are so very many millennials with this issue. So, perhaps some of them join in the degrading language in an attempt to show they are not on the same level as the one they’ve been convinced most other millennials share.
I can attest to the resentment of being considered a narcissistic, lazy cell-phone sticker by people I’ve just met. I recently discovered that depending on the last birth year you use to define the millennial generation, I may technically be too young to be a millennial, but I am still targeted with the stereotypes. I just wonder how the older generations do this to us, and how this has gone on for so many more generations before that, when they all apparently went through similar criticisms when they were our age. Hopefully I will not participate in the denigration of the next generation.
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