MILLENNIAL WHOOP

Iheaved a sigh of relief a few weeks ago when Huffington Post finally pinpointed which generation I belong to. I always knew I wasn’t fitting into the right one. Case in point: One of my favourite films of all time (check out the soundtrack, too) is ’90s classic Reality Bites. It’s got Winona, Ethan, Ben Stiller, flannel shirts and Gen-X apathy. I love it, but I also knew right away that I didn’t quite fit into the dispassionate Generation X it portrayed, although I did fit into their Doc Martens. I was just a few years too young. But no-one called my generation Generation Y, or anything else, for that matter. We didn’t get a collective noun; we just watched Sabrina The Teenage Witch, My So-Called Life and Ricki Lake and drank a lot of Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes. I did occasionally wonder about it, in the same daydreaming way that you wonder why McDonalds didn’t sell milkshakes in the UAE until this week (what on earth did people dip their French fries in before?). Then, along came Millennials, who we all know are demanding and want things right away, among other fairly insulting stereotypes. They got a name – and with it, quite the backlash. Well, I’m an Xennial, not that it matters too much because as a microgeneration, we are a blip on the news cycle compared to the behemoth of pink-wearing Snapchatting Millennials ready to take over the world that those already in gainful employment love to complain about. But... what if you could learn something from them? On page 20, Mike Peake rounds up people from both sides of the generation gap to discuss what Gen Y (as they are also known) can bring to the conference table. (There’s also a side note on how crusty elders can teach something, too.) It wasn’t just so we can cover four pages in Millennial pink. Elsewhere in this weekend’s issue, we take a look at the issue of animal testing in the beauty industry, which decades after it was first brought to the public’s attention, is sadly still taking place – totally unnecessarily. One way to solve it is to use cruelty-free products – we show you how to make the change.