Flashy and vain? We’re just following our elders

‘Why is it,’’ said a friend in her 50s, ‘‘that all you young people think your house has to have a pool, your holiday has to be in Bali and your car has to be a Lexus? You all have these unrealistic expectations that my generation didn’t have growing up.’’

It’s sometimes hard to keep up with all the casual millennial bashing we get as the spoilt brat of the large, bitchy, intergenerational family.

We’re spoiled, lazy, feckless, vain, fragile, brittle and unnervingly obsessed with monogramming things. I lose count of the things I single-handedly ruined for everyone, things like marriage, divorce, relationships in general, sex, dating, house ownership, Forever 21, Star Wars, mayonnaise. (I’d be quite happy if I did ruin mayonnaise; it’s the poor man’s aioli and trailer trash of condiments.)

Most of the millennial trashing just slides off me, but every so often I catch something interesting in the slurry of criticism that’s worth addressing. And this is one of them. Namely the idea that young people are now all consumeristic, luxury-obsessed and feel entitled to tonnes of cash from an early age.

This friend is not the first person who has bitched about how flashy we young ’uns are recently. Earlier this week, John Winning, fourthgeneration boss of Australian appliance maker Winning Group, made headlines by saying that millennials are lazy but expect huge pay. By the time we’ve finished our two-month induction training we’re supposedly ‘‘looking for the next thing or asking for a promotion or more money’’.

From what I can tell, he and many others are basing this off Instagram, where they see us posing with shiny SUVs and hashtagging every hashbrown with #brunchgoals. Some blame lifestyle influencers for young people’s consumerism crisis, saying they lead us into the temptation of Teslas and Bali breaks. Some just think we’re products of late-stage capitalism. Some think we’re inherently evil.

However we got there, the consensus is that we’re obsessed about deserving the good life. We’ll do anything to live it – or convince everyone else that we’re living it. And yet that portrait of millennial materialism is deeply flawed. First, because it doesn’t apply to ‘‘all young people’’. And second, it’s more a reflection of you than us.

Let’s start with the massive assumption behind this characterisation of millennials: namely, that they’re all middle-class. It’s a very common assumption to make. When someone says, ‘‘picture a millennial/Gen Z’’, we instantly think of someone who debates nail art over an overpriced brunch in their yoga pants/mom jeans.

But let’s back up for a moment. That’s just not the majority. This year I’ve been going around interviewing young people for a photo series on being young in New Zealand. And the most striking thing is how much financial responsibility many are laden with.

Many young people are paying the household bills, working several lousy jobs while studying to support their families, paying off family debts and helping to feed siblings. Research released this week shows more than 500,000 Kiwis are struggling with food stability. And these young people are at the forefront of this, too busy making rent to worry about the en suite in their future McMansion.

So when we bang on about millennial materialism, we’re actually talking about middleclass millennial materialism. The ‘Gram gals who’ve become the loudest and most visible (if not representative) spokespeople for our generation. These are the people who want red-bottom heels and Jeeps, whereas back in your day they wanted a steady job and a small house in the ’burbs.

So why do middle-class young people have such big flashy desires? Sure, social media encourages it. But mainly because we’re looking around at people 10 or 20 years older than us who are leading big flashy lives. The truth is that big and flashy is the current middle-class mantra. This isn’t a millennial thing. It’s the middle-class thing. Millennials are growing up and looking around at older people going to Bali, getting spa pools and buying Range Rovers.

Of course that makes us feel we should be able to do that too. (Not least because SUVs are everywhere, breeding all over our motorways like aggressively shiny rabbits.) We can’t buy them yet, but we can aspire to these standards set by older generations of what ‘‘successful people do’’.

And of course no-one tells us that it’s all bought on credit, and household debt is at an all-time high in NZ at 163.9 per cent of gross income. So naturally we think these are achievable goals.

So yeah, middle-class millennials have big flashy expectations, but that’s not because they’re millennials. It’s because the middle classes have never been more ruthlessly aspirational, even at a time when it’s getting less and less attainable.

The truth is that big and flashy ... isn’t a millennial thing. It’s the middleclass thing.