Here is an excellent explanation of millennials by an individual of that generation. The writer, Mac McCann, is clearly the antithesis of that common belief held by so many. A belief that definitely needs to be revised.
We’re millennials, and we’re not very popular.
We’re a “generation of idle trophy kids.”
We’re far too lazy to care about careers. (Nevermind that many of us are working around the clock, often as unpaid interns, hoping to get a decent job during a struggling economy.)
And even if we did care about careers, we aren’t ready for them.
Basically, as millennial Stephen Parkhurst’s brilliantly hilarious viral video put it, “We suck and we’re sorry.”
Obviously, these stereotypes can be false, if not flat-out ridiculous, but who can pass up on a good chance to mock America’s youth?
Bashing younger generations is nothing new, having occurred throughout history. In a few decades, I’m sure we, the millennials, will be participating in civilization’s timeless tradition of criticizing society’s young people. I’m not the first 20-something to realize this: A 23-year-old Alexander Pope wrote in “An Essay on Criticism” centuries ago, “We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.”
With that said, let me clarify some things. Despite the allegations, we are grateful, and we understand our debts and obligations to others. In fact, it’s easy to argue that millennials are actually the most socially conscious generation ever.
And despite the seemingly infinite denunciations of technology by most other age groups, our generation recognizes its enormous overall benefits.
We’re grateful that information is more accessible and cheaper and quicker and constantly updated and international and interactive and diverse and seemingly infinite, all at our finger tips. We’re grateful that information that took centuries to compile and figure out is available within seconds to anyone with Internet access.
Don’t think that because we don’t watch the evening news or read a printed newspaper every day that we don’t crave information. However, having been the victims of standardized testing, we don’t want it watered down and chopped up into bite-size pieces. Nor do we want our news given to us by an objective suit-and-tie-wearing robot for exactly 30 minutes at the same time every night.
We want our news when it’s new, and we want our journalists to be as transparent as we want our politicians to be.
We do, indeed, want our news mixed in with cat pictures.
I won’t deny that, as Time magazine has boldly stated, millennials are “The Me Me Me Generation.”
But I would recast that to say that we’re the most individualistic generation since the 19th-century American transcendentalists. Like American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau — see, people, we actually do respect our past — we value individualism as a means to virtues like tolerance, creativity and freedom.
And we hate when people speak on our behalf.
Does that make it absurd for me to act like I have the authority to speak for my generation? Yes, it does. But is it not just as absurd to dismiss my entire generation as if we are all the same?
If anything, millennials realize that it’s impossible to define an entire generation, knowing, as Oscar Wilde knew, to define is to limit. When millennials are put in a box, it does nothing but limit us.
Denouncing the entire “Me Me Me Generation” as if they’re all the same is lazy and stupid. Only millennials are lazy and stupid, right?
Mac McCann is a graduate of Lake Highlands High School and a student at UT-Austin. He can be contacted through macmccanntx.com.