Stop stereotyping millennials
This generation isn’t any more insufferable than we were when we were young
At a recent backyard party for two newly minted engineers — fine young men grinning around the fire pit — I was reminded of a long ago party where a little girl in a pink party dress conked out before midnight with a ‘Happy 2000!’ paper tiara askew on her head. She’s an adult now too, recently trading in sneakers and a server’s apron for penny loafers and a big girl job.
They are millennials: part of the 27 per cent of Canada’s population that was born in the decades on either side of that New Year’s Eve party. Their childhood was a more innocent time. Now, you can’t toss a Lion King VHS without hitting someone disparaging millennials for wasting their money on expensive avocado toast and wasting their lives on Instagram. Millennials, nearly 10 million Canadians, are quite routinely called lazy, entitled and/or easily bored.
I am here to call bull on that notion.
Granted, I am lucky enough to hang out with a lot of pretty great people who were born between the 1980s and 2000s: my two kids (they are great, if I do say so myself ), the young men showing off their iron rings around that fire and a steady procession of other friends becoming artists, nurses and geologists. I also talk to a lot of young people I haven’t fed breakfast after a sleepover. I do a lot of work for the University of Calgary and call up students regularly to find out how they’re changing the world one stem cell or sonnet at a time.
So, yes, I scoff at the stereotypes. But, it’s not just me. The people who work at something called the IBM Institute for Business Value seem to be doing a massive eye roll too. “The notion that millennials expect to have every opportunity handed to them on a silver platter and endless praise for their achievements is palpably false,” the research group reports.
It surveyed 1,784 employees in six industries across a dozen countries to compare “preferences and behavioural patterns” of millennials with those of the older crowds, generation X and the baby boomers. “While there are some distinctions among the generations, millennials’ attitudes are not poles apart from other employees,” it reports in Myths, exaggerations and uncomfortable truths: The real story behind Millennials in the workplace. Other big studies back that up. Millennials aren’t all lazy and entitled any more than every boomer has a swimming pool full of money and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.
“It’s imperative that you get to know the person in front of you and you don’t assign all these stereotypes to them because of this 20-year-wide age bracket that they happen to fall within,” writes Jessica Kriegel, author of Unfairly Labeled: How Your Workplace Can Benefit From Ditching Generational Stereotypes.
Lumping an entire generation of people together and ascribing them with broad personality traits doesn’t really make a lot of sense, Kriegel writes, issuing a caution about the “generational snake oil” you find in every other magazine and on a growing number of shelves in the business book section.
“What determines the way you are is not your age bracket; it’s, ‘How many siblings did you have? Did your parents beat you? Did you go to church? Did you have an aunt who spoiled you?’” Kriegel told Forbes. “All those types of experiences mesh into one and determine who you are and what your personality is.”
Can we please stop complaining about millennials? At the very least, could we admit that they are no more or less insufferable than we were when we were young?
And here’s a thought, if we stop complaining about them, perhaps they’ll stop complaining about us. Or maybe that’s just what every generation has to do.
“A young man ain’t got nothing in the world these days,” wrote Mose Alison ( b. 1927) in 1957. “In the old days when a young man was a strong man all the people they’d step back when a young man walked by,” sang The Who’s Roger Daltrey ( b. 1944) in 1970. “Nowadays it’s the old man who’s got all the money,” added the Foo Fighter’s Dave Grohl ( b. 1969) in 2011. And BTW, every single one of us hopes we die before we get old. It’s just that our definition of “old” changes every year.
Speaking of which, there’s another reason you may want to stop ragging on millennials, now the largest living generation. Sure, some of them may live in the basement longer than we’d like, but as we get older and broker, we may find the need to move into a millennial’s basement. And if the batteries in our hearing aids hold, we may well get to hear them complain about the younger generation.