UGH, MILLENNIALS
Why it’s time to stop hating on Generation Y.
Iwent out for breakfast with a friend the other day and watched, transfixed, as the girl at the table next to us spent a solid 10 minutes posing with her avocado toast, trying to get the perfect ‘unposed’ shot. And it didn’t end there. She then proceeded to narrate her way through lunch for her Insta stories, completely ignoring her poor friend who, admittedly, was also on her phone – and didn’t seem to care. Ugh, millennials. And I can say that, because
I am one. (Actually, looking back on this now, I was so engrossed in watching this girl that I was probably ignoring my own friend. Well, this is awkward.)
Before we get into this, I want to clarify something. The general assumption seems to be that anyone under the age of 30 is a millennial – that’s not true. We’re not feckless teenagers any more: the oldest millennials are closing in on 40. They have kids, jobs, responsibilities – probably not houses, but more on that later. According to whoever makes these decisions, the generation everyone loves to hate is currently between 23 and 38 years old. So if you were born between 1981 and 1996, I have news for you: you are, technically speaking, a millennial. (Oh, the horror.)
Here’s a little cheat sheet, courtesy of the Pew Research Center, which has been studying millennials for more than a decade:
Post-millennials are also referred to as Generation Z (Gen Z), the iGeneration, or simply, iGen. ‘Social media, constant connectivity and on-demand entertainment and communication are innovations millennials adapted to as they came of age,’ says the centre’s president Michael Dimock. ‘For those born after 1996, these are largely assumed.’
But there is a potential get-outof-jail-free card. (If you don’t get that board game reference, I’m probably not referring to you.) There’s an argument to be made for the existence of a micro-generation made up of those born between 1977 and 1985. The Guardian defines it as everyone ‘old enough to have lived a childhood free of the internet but young enough to have spent their working lives online’. This group recognises the phrase ‘be kind, rewind’, used pencils to fix their mixed tapes and recalls going to the video store on a Friday night to rent a VHS. But along with your analogue childhood, you also grew up with digital technology: you got your first cellphone in your teens or early 20s (can we hear it for the 3310?); you used a dial-up modem to research school and uni projects (remember that dial tone?); and you saved them onto a floppy disk – and later, a stiffie drive (it didn’t sound dirty at the time, okay?).
Millennials have been groomed since birth to work towards employability. Your school years weren’t for having a carefree childhood…
CEREAL KILLERS
The world, of course, loves to hate millennials; we have been blamed for everything under the sun: we’re ‘lazy’, ‘entitled’, ‘snowflakes’. We pat ourselves on the back for ‘adulting’ – performing everyday grown-up tasks like buying healthy food and actually cooking it ourselves. We’re responsible for the popularity of social media and the resultant rise in narcissism.
And beyond all that, we’ve also massacred many a flourishing industry. Just Google the words ‘millennials have killed’ and you will discover a world of think pieces on all the products, services and habits millennials have eradicated. Napkins, wine corks, dress codes, cereals, mayonnaise and canned tuna are all endangered now, because of our selfish ways.
In 2016, Business Insider reported that ‘millennials are killing the golf industry’. (Boomers are ageing out of the game, and we’re not picking it up.) Also in 2016, The Wall Street Journal wrote a story about the decline of fabric softener sales; Procter & Gamble’s head of global fabric care claimed that millennials ‘don’t even know what the product is for’. In 2017, Fortune reported that millennials were killing lunch. (We like to eat on the go.) And in 2018, Buzzfeed just cut to the chase and did a roundup called ‘18 Things Millennials are responsible for killing this year’. It included porn, credit cards, American cheese, exorcisms (young priests find them ‘too scary’), driving under the influence (thanks, Uber), middle children, stoves and (wait for it) sex – because we’d rather be watching Netflix.
Basically, it’s an ongoing bloodbath, and we’re the ones wielding the candlestick in the conservatory. (If you’re counting, that was board game reference number two.) Oh, and as a side note, we also killed the economy, the housing market and car ownership.
Some of these are true, of course. Why should we eat sugarencrusted cereal for breakfast? We know better now. Straws are bad
for the planet, and paper towels work just as well as napkins. Also, golf is boring. And elitist.
The rest is just victim blaming. It’s not that we don’t want to own houses and diamonds and cars; we can’t afford them. An article by Michael Hobbs is titled ‘Millennials are screwed: Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression’. It paints a pretty bleak picture.
‘I am 35 years old,’ he writes. ‘The oldest millennial, the first millennial – and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.’
We are ‘the first generation in recent history who are likely to be worse off than [our] parents. We have less money, more anxiety and murkier futures’. The stats he cites are all American, but I think we can fairly assume that millennials the world over are more or less in the same (leaky) boat – if not worse off in a developing country. To give you an idea, here are some of the figures he lists:
Most millennials entered the workforce (or were supposed to) at the height of the recession. Yes, the recession affected everyone. But for millennials it set the tone for our working lives; just as we set out to get our first jobs, bright-eyed and hopeful, the newly laid-off, more experienced applicants snapped up all the entry-level jobs recent graduates would usually get. Plus, boomers are hanging on to their jobs long past retirement age.
The New York Post reports that half of all millennials have side hustles. Which makes us sound like cool, entrepreneurial go-getters, but for the most part, the motivation is financial. Companies prefer to employ contractors and freelancers over full-timers so they don’t have to give them benefits.
US skit show Saturday Night Live illustrated this trend in a sketch that aired in January this year. In a game-show setup, the skit depicted millennials going up against baby boomers to compete for benefits like health insurance and debt relief. The female contestant introduces herself with the following: ‘Hey Dave, I’m 26 years old, and I’d love to get that health insurance because my company uses a lot of freelancers, and we don’t get any benefits.’
‘Well, it’s tough to work at a startup,’ responds the host. ‘What’s the name of your company?’ ‘Google,’ she deadpans. Hence the side hustles. Now that having a stable, well-paying, permanent job with full benefits has become a somewhat outdated concept, we can’t afford to rely on just one stream of income. We need that second income to make ends meet. ‘As Uber and its “gig economy” ilk perfect their algorithms, we’ll be increasingly at the mercy of companies that only want to pay us for the time we’re generating revenue and not a second more,’ writes Hobbs.
As a result we just can’t afford the trappings of adulthood: we had to move back home to our parents’ houses, find roommates to share the load with or go back to uni to get a postgrad, in the hope that it would set us apart in the wildly competitive job market. These steps backward also had a ripple effect: we delayed marriage, parenthood and home ownership, because who can afford to do any of those things?
Consider the findings of a 2010 study cited in Hobbs’s piece: if the unemployment rate rises by just 1% in the year you graduate, your starting salary will drop by 6-8% – ‘a disadvantage that can linger for decades. The same study
found that workers who graduated during the 1981 recession were still making less than their counterparts who graduated 10 years later’. Considering South Africa’s staggering unemployment rate, that doesn’t bode well for the next generation either.
According to Stats SA, the unemployment rate among graduates aged between 15 and 24 was 31% during the first quarter of 2019, ‘compared to 19,5% in the fourth quarter of 2018
– an increase of 11,4% quarter on quarter’. And ‘the graduate unemployment rate is still lower than the rate among those with other educational levels’. Depressed yet?
EMPLOYABLE
Millennials have been groomed since birth to work towards employability. In the 1990s and early 2000s, time spent on homework and extracurriculars tripled in the US. Your school years were not for having a carefree childhood; you had to have a full schedule of extracurriculars alongside your schoolwork to seal the deal when it came to applying to university one day. Some volunteer work also looks good on there, so cancel your holiday plans with your friends. If you can’t sit still in class you are medicated, lest it interfere with your marks. If you struggle with numbers, you don’t drop maths as a subject; you double down and go for coaching after school to ‘keep your options open’ – tertiary institutions aren’t interested in someone who only excelled in the ‘soft options’.
According to Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, [millennials] ‘are taught that the main objective while they’re young is to become the best job applicants they can be’. Which is also why unpaid internships have become a thing; we’ll do anything that looks good on our CV in the vague hope that it will someday lead to a job.
Technology has also made us available 24/7; instead of clocking out of our jobs at 5pm, we can now work remotely; we can answer emails in bed. So we do it, hoping it will make us indispensable.
Even social media has become work. You can’t just post some vaycay pics on Instagram and call it a day; your social media presence is now part of your personal branding and can influence your job prospects. Being adept at social media is a marketable skill; businesses are routinely judged by their social media pages and behind the scenes, you’re likely to find a millennial taking strategically lit pictures, trying to decide whether Mayfair or Valencia is more on brand.
‘We are encouraged to strategise and scheme to find places, times and roles where we can be effectively put to work,’ writes Harris. ‘Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.’
Yet, despite workplace productivity having tripled since the 1970s, wages have plateaued and, in some cases, plummeted. This ‘disjuncture’, says Harris, ‘is perhaps the single phenomenon that defines millennials’.
This financial instability also takes a mental toll. A 2013 study published in Science found that financial insecurity imposes a ‘massive cognitive load’. Living in poverty causes such stress that it is equal to a 13-point drop in IQ.
Add to this the fact that we’re all striving for perfection, and you have a recipe for burnout. According to a 2017 study by researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew P Hill, millennials display higher rates of perfectionism than previous generations, partly due to the fact that we’ve been raised to believe that our future success relies on our being exceptional.
In her article ‘How millennials became the Burnout Generation’, Anne Helen Petersen writes: ‘We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we work harder, meritocracy will prevail and we’ll begin thriving.’
After all this I feel kind of bad about side-eyeing Miss Avo Toast. Odds are she’s just another millennial hustling to make ends meet. She probably has a side business as a vegan foodie influencer because her day job underpays her.
Then again, she was pretty rude to the wait staff. So I’m not that sorry.
Consider this: if the unemployment rate rises by just 1% in the year you graduate, your starting salary will drop by 6-8% – ‘a disadvantage that can linger for decades’.