Millennials need help, not scorn
Many young people do fit the ‘snowflake’ stereotype, but the majority are better behaved than we ever were
Afriend was recently asked for advice by a young graduate about a job for which she had applied. Instead of asking how she might impress her interviewers, she seemed to think it was her prospective employers who were being tested. How ethical was the company? What was its attitude towards climate change? Why was its board not more diverse? Did it suffer from a stale, white male culture?
It did not occur to this precocious young talent that she should be trying to impress the company she was investigating. Nor did she ask herself whether she should, in the phrase made famous by her generation, “check her privilege”. She was, after all, only able to seek my friend’s advice through her social networks.
It was yet another anecdote that seemed to confirm the received wisdom about the millennial, “snowflake”, generation. Their fragility has become an established narrative, and a stick with which older people beat the young. Millennials just need to get on with life and stop moaning, they say, forgetting their own youthful egotism and tendency – which lasts well into old age – to complain.
Examples of the snowflake mentality do abound, especially at universities. Campaigners have been barred – or “no-platformed” – from student union events because their views are deemed unacceptable by activists. “Safe spaces” – where students are “free from harassment and fear”, but where they rarely encounter views with which they disagree – are now commonplace.
According to the Free Speech University Rankings, 21 universities have banned speakers, 20 have banned newspapers, 17 have banned advertisements and 16 have suspended student societies. These bans do not apply just to proscribed organisations, racists and Islamists: the student union at City University in London, which has one of the country’s most respected journalism departments, has banned the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Express from shops on its grounds.
This is clearly absurd, but is it enough to write off a whole generation as snowflakes? Each of these incidents occurred at universities. However, even today, most young people do not go to university. Of those who do, the majority do not attend the elite institutions where snowflake behaviour is most prominent: research shows Russell Group universities are the most censorious, and Oxford is among the worst.
Even at these universities, most students are not involved in campaigns to no-platform speakers and create safe spaces. These are orchestrated by a minority of foolish, politically motivated and seemingly hypocritical student activists best personified by Malia Bouattia, the Corbynite former president of the National Union of Students. Bouattia, who was ousted from her position earlier this year, had championed these policies while facing accusations of “outright racism” after she called Birmingham University a “Zionist outpost” and criticised “Zionist-led media outlets”. For Bouattia, it seems, safe spaces exist for some but not all.
Most young people have little time for these campaigns. But even if they did, would it be their fault or that of the generation that brought them up in sanitised environments, protected from unsavoury opinions and exposed only to a culture of political correctness? Young people were mocked when Cambridge published “trigger warnings”, advising English literature students that
Titus Andronicus “could be deemed upsetting”. But the students did not issue the warning: their professors did.
Yet the charge persists that millennials are unusually self-centred. Psychologists at the University of Illinois found that young people are indeed more likely to be narcissistic than older generations. But the research shows that this is true of every generation of young people: we grow out of it as we get older, forget we were ever like that, and criticise the young for exhibiting exactly the kind of behaviour we once did.
But if this generation of young people is different to my generation and the babyboomers before us, in many ways it is better. Research shows that millennials are more likely to work harder than their older colleagues, take fewer days off, and deal with more calls and emails out of hours. They are more public-spirited than previous generations: just look at the thousands enlisting to work in public services through schemes such as Teach First, Police Now, Think Ahead (mental health), Frontline (social care) and Unlocked (prisons). Millennials are also better behaved: drug use, drinking and smoking by young people are all in decline.
Yet millennials are routinely chastised, even though they are the unluckiest generation since the Second World War: they are condemned to be the ones who meet the fiscal costs of our ageing society, while working in a rapidly changing world with precious little security.
Those who go to university will have eye-watering student debts and, often, degrees of dubious quality. For those who do not make it to higher education, there is hopelessly inadequate technical education. For graduates and non-graduates alike, young people’s job prospects are uncertain: almost half of existing jobs are believed to be vulnerable to new technology. Meanwhile, the number of younger homeowners has been falling sharply and consistently since the Nineties. Unless ministers take brave policy decisions, young people will have to pay for rising health, care and pension costs through higher taxes or cuts in the services they rely upon.
Of course it is not the fault of individual babyboomers that the young face such a precarious future. But an older generation that is better off than any before needs to play its part in helping a younger generation that may end up worse off than their parents. Houses need to be built, society’s costs need to be shared fairly and opportunity needs to be spread widely.
It is easy to sit in the comfort of your own home (a luxury many millennials will never enjoy) with the rewards of a stable career and income behind you (a prospect not many millennials can expect) and say young people just need to work harder. They already do work hard: we need to give them a break and a little more help.