A valid criticism of millennials: you guys tend to take the top answer on the page and fail to do any deeper research. You stitch together impressions, regardless of where they come from, and call it a day. So here you’re looking at a generational parade and figuring that everyone who came before you must have contributed pretty well to the mess you’ve got. Well, try again.

Here’s how X started adult life. 75M Boomers; 0-55M Xers in the workforce, depending on year. No internet to speak of. Also no knowledge that global warming would be a thing; no knowledge that inequality would be societywide, and not just generational.

If we had actually had the power — the numbers, the money, or the organizational wherewithal — to fight Boomer selfishness, make a more equitable world, would we have done it? Uh…yeah. So that we could do exciting things like eat, pay rent, establish careers. Everything attitudinal you’re pissed about up there was a result of the fact that we actually did not have the power to do these things; Boomers wouldn’t let go of anything. We had no money, no jobs, no political power; we didn’t have parents who assumed we’d be living at home a while, either, which left a lot of us homeless. We had no way of taking off cross-country to try somewhere else: pre-internet you probably didn’t know anyone far away unless you had family there, you couldn’t see anything about job markets, and you’d have trouble find out where to live. You couldn’t organize on the internet without an internet, either. We had to build that fucker first, and if that wasn’t an act of optimism, I don’t know what is. And it was, in the end, Gen X who gave you President Obama. There weren’t enough Millennial voters in 2008 for you guys to do that on your own.

Millennials really worry me. You worry me because although you have both an internet and the numbers to change things tremendously, you don’t. Your frustration tolerance is incredibly low, you’re shallow in your research, and you seem to believe, genuinely, that if you just get pissy enough things will go your way. We now have a nightmare president because so many Millennials weren’t in love *enough* with Hillary, she didn’t *move* you enough, and you weren’t interested in anything resembling practical politics or even learning what those entail. (Who’ll pay? Gen Z girls, for one.)

I’ve been teaching Millennials now for a few years, and all the disturbing tendencies come to the fore when you start trying to write cover letters. Here’s a Millennial cover letter:

Dear X,

I am a great candidate for the job you’re offering, which I don’t know anything about. I could find out pretty easily, but I can’t be bothered and besides nobody has written an email for me to ask you about the job or called you on my behalf or told me exactly what to do. Honestly I didn’t even think of these things because I’m just a really excellent candidate.

I think there are endless ways your job would be good for me. I’m not too interested in whatever it is you need and I haven’t thought about that either. I am super excellent though, many people have said so. Here are some irrelevant examples of my excellence. This is why I deserve the job and I expect to hear from you soon, otherwise I’ll be pissed. All the contact info my friends and I care about is somewhere on this letter.

Best regards, whatever that means,

Millennial

Many of us wonder how you’re going to cope with your parents’ impending and very expensive old age. We also wonder how you’re going to run institutions well when you take criticism so spectacularly poorly. Our main fear is that you’ll simply go lie down and refuse to deal at all, expecting that someone else will just magically handle things.

Eventually, the ones who’ll handle things are Gen Z — our kids. There are more of them than there are of you, and on the whole they’re extremely practical, hardheaded, resourceful, sociable, swift to action, and…well, they don’t suffer fools readily. They grew up watching us hang onto homes for them during the ’08 recession, and they don’t understand why you’ve needed so much handholding or why you’ve been so impractical. If they’re an echo of any generation, it’s the Greatest, the generation that was just quietly optimistic and got shit done, right through the Depression and war and whatever came their way. I have a lot of confidence in them. I just hope there’s still a reasonable society for them to work with when they get old enough to start participating.

And, as you can tell by my piece, when a criticism is aimed at you, it’s easy to take it personally and get riled up. I’m not sure how I would feel if I were the target of so many cruel pieces and write-ups. This one was enough to make me take things a little personally. It’s been a while 🙂

But like I said above, my intention was–and is–not to insult Millennials. I know I take a condescending tone in the piece, but that is really 95% aimed at the author and 5% admittedly being a quarrelsome old man irritated by the youngsters thinking they’re the first generation to deal with a hard world.

Thanks for commenting!

I also can’t agree with your point that Gen X bares no responsibility at all; and that the blame is solely with our parents. For the most part you can’t get from point A to point C without going through point B. While I wouldn’t lay the blame only on Gen X; you also can’t wash your hands of all responsibility. If society is the Titanic heading toward the iceberg then we are all damn well going to be rearranging deck chairs together; and 99% of us are not going to make it on the lifeboats. So Gen X bears some responsibility, if on no other basis than being complacent. Sure our parents are maybe primarily responsible for our temperaments, but we are currently dealing with large scale systemic problems like the economy, and long standing political and social theories. The point is this: we all bear some blame in that department and for better or worse we all have to admit it and accept the blame together for the way things are right now, whether its jobs, politics or basic human rights.

Which brings me to my final point. Overall, generational criticism is actually an expression of a really positive thing: large scale societal change; societal Darwinism. History has shown us time and again that societies that do not change die out, but the ones that do live on. So if overall our criticism of younger generations is actually based in our desire to inspire change; then why is it couched in anger and vitriol? And personally this is why I keep reading about this topic even though it often times angers me. Because I want to cultivate a much more positive attitude for when the young people now are 25 or 26 and they inevitably say the same things Millenials do; and probably inevitably blame us. If they come to me and want to lay blame or whine about the things we didn’t do I’ll accept that and even admit to my part in it all. But most of all, and I have no better way to say this, I want to tell them to go ahead and: FUCK SHIT UP! More importantly, to fuck it up in a completely different way than we did, or their parents did, or their grandparents did. Because most of all I want them to disregard all the stuff we kept doing wrong. Doing the same thing generation after generation and expecting a different result is the definition of collective insanity. So I guess, what this article and your response is about to me is: How do we change the way in which we criticise younger generations? And when in recent history did this type of criticism stop being productive and turn into simple mud slinging?