Millenials (people born after 1980 and before 2000) are defined as :

  • lazy
  • entitled
  • unattached
  • not motivated by money
  • want more holidays
  • more horseshit

The point of this post is to share a truth more and more commonly agreed upon: Millenials are not real.

“Millennials” as a concept is mainly a huge pile of crap.

And I just stumbled upon wonderful talk by Adam Conover, and I think he made the point pretty brilliantly so please what the talk down there.

But I have also tried to extract some of his point in this article because that’s really the essence of the 20 min.

TL;DR : People bash young generations. Every time. For centuries. Period.

 

 

 

The reality is that Millennials (people born from 1980-2000) are not more nor less lazy than the generation before them.

However, what seems to be true is the obsession older generations have over the youth and how permanently disappointed they seems to be.

Hesiod, a a greek poet, contemporary of Homer (the guy who wrote of the Iliad and the Odyssey – if this ring a bell) wrote a few centuries ago about its younger contemporaries:

 

 

It is a pattern.

People are trying hard to bash the young generations.

Either because they do not understand them, or because it helps people feel more confident about their own dominance and social status.

(I tend to think the power struggle is real: and comforting a position for which people have worked hard for years is a vital need for every generation. And therefore, as people get older it is easier to go down the narrative that will try to single out the young generation and just complain about them…)

1968 – LIFE magazine is publishing an article to documenting the conclusion of conversations between Ernest Fladell and his nephew, in an attempt to bridge the generation gap. Fladell POV: **the young people do not understand the meaning of earning a living… **

Then again, in the 1976, it seems like everyone is turning again into an entitled generation:

Let’s do that again in 1990 – post-boomer generation – soon to be called the “millenials” are tagged “Lazy” (I am sure Hesiod would have agreed…)

 

By now, you got the point.

Millenials are just people and that what the whole talk of of Adam Conover : “Millenials don’t exist” is about – but really worth a watch… he is really funny and provide much more details that I did here.

If you still have some energy, I’d suggest you check this interesting analysis published on the Irish Time “Young people have been letting us down since time immemorial”

 

The funny part: putting generations in a box never seems to stop.

Brace yourself, the new wave of horsecrap is coming – like this article of Business Insider : “Millenials are old news – everything you need to know about Gen-Z”

So I guess, we will soon have more article about Gen-Z being narcissistic and self-centered, lazy, and arrogants and what not.

Whatever…

 

_ * Edit * _

From feedback I got (mainly from marketing folks) – I realised maybe there was room for confusion in the core message of the article. See, I am not saying segmentation is not a thing – nor am I saying cultural patterns of consumption do not exist – and yes, you can find a correlation between age and adoption of these patterns of consumption.

But the hype of Millennials – as if they were people completely foreign to human race – a lazy egocentric P.O.S equipped with a smartphone – is total BS – and what I see from board meetings to casual client reactions – is that when people talk about Millennials they usually refer prejudiced stereotype and not to the nuanced and carefully crafted marketing persona..