Another meme popped up last night about millenniasl that made them sound like overgrown teenagers. Can we please recognize that, while the generation has its faults, it is also not 20 years old anymore?
I am forty years old, and depending on the article, I am either a Millennial, or Generation X. My peers and I from the class of 1999 ride the border between the generations, and at least some of what is true of both generations applies to us. We identify mostly with Generation X, and that is especially true for many of us if we were raised in rural areas or were youngest children.
My mother was born in the first wave of Baby Boomers. She remembers the Detroit riots in the '60s because she was there. She remembers where she was when Kennedy was shot. She remembers watching the moon landing as an adult. One of my friends jokes that she is old enough to be my mother. I remind her that she is old enough to have birthed me, but she is totally not old enough to be my mother. I'm a youngest child in a family with four children, and we were all spaced out so that the older kid was at least a bit independent before the new baby arrived. I grew up surrounded by the last decade of Gen X.
My older siblings are all firmly in Generation X. One of my sisters had a crush on both Scotts Bakula and Baio, and would refer to the afternoon reruns of Quantum Leap and Charles in Charge as the "Double Scott Double Power Hour." Our (metal!) disc sled is still spray painted green from that time my brother was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle for Halloween, back when they were only comic book characters. Both of my sisters have high school pictures that feature gloriously fluffy hair, and my mother had a constant vigilance for curling irons that had been left plugged in (no automatic shutoff for a few more years, and you know that shutoff function is shifty). I tagged along, and absorbed what I could, envying one sister's glorious Strawberry Shortcake figurine collection (If you can smell this sentence, you react with glee when they card you.), and hoping along with the other that the next leap would, in fact, be the leap home. I somehow managed to not actually watch any of the Star Wars movies all the way through, but, through incidental contact, knew enough to laugh at the jokes in Spaceballs. We had walking newspaper routes and sold Girl Scout cookies door to door, and nobody thought we were ever going to be abducted as we meandered around the city, only returning home when the street lights came on.
Yes, I did own a cell phone before I owned a car. To be fair, though, I had a BA before I had either of them. Hell, I had a MFA before I owned a car. I just lived within walking distance of school, embraced the city bus system as a dear friend, and (in grad school) mooched rides off Fuzzy, who didn't seem to mind a bit. My first laptop came into my life in the middle of college, and my first iPod showed up under the Christmas tree in 2007.
When I was a kid, cable TV had about thirty or so channels, not that it mattered much when Dad was the master of the remote and mostly tuned into classic movies and sportsball games. I had Home Ec and Shop classes in school, though the discussions to end them were already happening, and I have the world's saddest apron (Did you know that if you press quilter's cotton too much, it eventually scorches yellow, and that backstitching really matters, because your ties will fall off at some point? I do! I did!) to prove it. Those classes were in a quarterly rotation with Typing, which was taught on both electric typewriters and computers that had black screens with green writing by a man who wore red plaid polyester pants with absolutely no irony. We were told that we would need to be able to type in the real world, and that ended up being totally true. We were told that we needed to be able to type with 100% accuracy. That was only true that summer that I worked as a secretary for the fire department and had to type out tickets on carbon triplicate forms (I twitch at the memory still). The computer in the back of our other classrooms was for trying out BASIC programs from our math textbooks and for playing Oregon Trail every chance we got. We died of dysentery a lot, though no one explained what it was. I still idly wonder if my grocery order is going to get me over the mountains.
I didn't meet up with the internet until I was a sophomore in high school, and it was different then. You didn't have to know what you were looking for, because Yahoo! had a list of topics that you could start with and narrow down from there. It meant that there was a lot more incidental exposure to new things than nowadays. I cried real tears when they got rid of the Broadway section, and I had to figure out a new way to find out about new shows. I got over it--hooray for Playbill.com!
All this to say that so many of the things that are defining characteristics of the Millennials just didn't seem to apply to me, even though I was technically in the generation. I watched the planes hit the Twin Towers from a dorm room on a TV that I owned (a hand-me-down from my sister, who had bought it from a hotel that was upgrading. She got it for a bargain, due to it having no remote, so I was also offered the yardstick with a pencil eraser attached to it that she used to change the channel. You whippersnappers have no idea how awesome buttons on the front of TVs were.), and when the economy crashed in 2008, I had a house and a mortgage and the world's smallest retirement account to worry about.
That was around the time that I started to see a lot of discussion about how different the Millennial generation was in the workplace and in the classroom. There was usually a pretty strong sense of condescension in these discussions. Apparently, if you were born in 1979, you could be counted on to be able to learn something from a written description, to stay in an unfulfilling job for more time, and to be well behaved. A year later? All bets were off. It sounded like malarkey to me, because it was. I've only interacted with a few egregious examples, and they were all born late enough to be possibly influenced by what people who needed a topic for their tenure papers said about them a few years earlier.
Most Millennials I have met are hard working and respectful, though I'll never forget the day I worked one room over from a young woman who sniffed that she supposed that the employer-provided health plan was somewhat acceptable (I was paying for my own and my family's, and would have taken it in a second), and then proceeded to make a phone call to HR to explain that no one has paper checks any more, and HR was just going to have to catch up with the world and figure out how to make the direct deposit work without one (If she had removed her head from her ass, she could have contacted her bank to request a few checks printed in-house, or just spent the ten dollars for a few books). This, my friends, is what the world thinks Millennials look like. This kind of attitude is actually pretty rare in my industry, and it's the best way to tell the difference between the adults who were on their own when the economy fell apart and the adults who were still having all their bills paid for them. If you have ever seen a date on a calendar after which you cannot figure out how you will house and feed your family unless something changes, you interact with the world differently. A pretty big amount of smugness disappears, and hustling is not just a hashtag, but a way of life. Fuzzy and I hustled hard for almost a decade, sometimes surrounded by people who assumed his parents paid our bills (nope). It has fundamentally changed how we view work and our finances.
I really don't feel like a Millennial, and the media description of a Millennial has not been updated to reflect the growing up that most of the generation has done. Can we break the description down into categories instead? Can we admit that the description of a Millennial is really the description of a kid fresh out of school who has been told that they should be at the front of the line for merely existing, not of a growing, changing group of people?
For now, you kids get off my lawn. Little punks.
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