13 ms·

Millennials' ideals don't originate from their lack of exposure to the failings of the baby boomers, their ideals originate from their actual lived experience.

Millennials' ideals don't originate from their lack of exposure to the failings of the baby boomers, their ideals originate from their actual lived experience. To believe otherwise would be to dismiss the relevance of the things that have actually happened in their lifetimes and the economic situation they currently face. They saw their future prospects destroyed by a deregulated financial market, and now they're seeing the economic restoration that follows skipping them entirely and consolidating global wealth in the hands of a few while they struggle with basic necessities. All the while they're being perpetually maligned because prior generations lack the ability to relate to their day-to-day reality on a basic level and the fear of something different is a great driver of ad revenue. Millennials are moving away from techno-libertarian ideals because laissez faire attitudes towards the application of technology have placed fundamental aspects of their lives in the iron grasp of private corporations who regularly harvest their data for the explicit purpose of manipulating their behavior without their knowledge. http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/ http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni... EDIT: As an aside, I find it kind of amazing that the myth of personal responsibility for outcomes is so prevalent among the very people who take the mass-scale manipulation of user behavior for granted. How can these people who spend massive amounts of money and resources studying how to best psychologically exploit their users and who can see directly how the most minute aspects of outside influence can reliably change behavior find it so easy to then turn around and claim that people are fundamentally responsible for their own situation? Do tech libertarians really believe that they're immune to the forces they use to manipulate others on a daily basis?

spamizbad 9y ago
I agree completely. And what's sad is that, for many millennials, they're stuck in a financial tar pit in large part by following the advice of their elders. As an older millennial, my generation had two pieces of advice drilled into our skulls by boomers: * What degree you get in college isn't that important, a B.A. will let an employer know your teachable * Student loan debt is the best debt you can have: better than mortgage debt even * (post dot-com crash) Don't bother trying to come a professional software developer -- it's the new textile industry: it's going overseas. This created a generation that didn't factor in their professional or economic trajectory when choosing schools, deciding loans, etc. I had peers that walked away from free rides to college to go to their school of choice because student loans were "no big deal" -- and their parents encouraged this! Boomers should have looked at their own jobs and paid attention how their own companies were hiring in the new economy: that new junior analyst? Makes less than the median income, despite an econ degree from top-tier school. Why did they think their kids, with a middling academics, could land the same job with a degree in english lit? The writing was on the wall even in the 90s that this wasn't a good idea: The world was more globalized and competitive. Labor's power was greatly diminished.
- jordanb 9y ago
  > * What degree you get in college isn't that important, a B.A. will let an employer know your teachable And the lies we're telling the next generation are * Get a STEM degree, they're always in demand * Become a programmer, there will never be enough programmers.
  - Apocryphon 9y ago
    Generals always fight the last war.
malvosenior 9y ago
If their concerns are economic, then it makes even less sense to attack the tech industry. That's the one place where you can still achieve a middle to upper middle class lifestyle based on hard work. Going back to my comment about baby boomers, it seems to me that the 20th century idealized lifestyle was very much backed by the technology available at the time. Mainly mass media. Bandwidth was great enough to broadcast media to a massive amount of people, but not so great as to individualize content delivery. This limited "shelf space" for content lead to a market for high end content creators. The internet exponentially increased bandwidth and democratized (and devalued) content creation. It also created channels for publishing new types of content that require tech skills (apps, web...). You would think that millennials would embrace the 21st century technology driven reality, but instead it seems way too many people ended up chasing high value content roles via expensive liberal arts degrees. Or at least that anti-technology combative mindset that was foreshadowed in this piece.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  The notion that millennials' woes are the result of getting a liberal arts degree in women's studies or something is a baseless claim that has been perpetuated specifically because it's an emotionally resonant myth. The millennials that are suffering the hardest right now are the ones who couldn't even afford to go to college (because college tuition is priced ridiculously). The vast majority of millennials that did go to college got a degree in a traditionally "useful" field. The only place where you see a preponderance of liberal arts degrees that aren't specifically career-focused are rich kids who got to go to Ivy Leagues; these people are nothing like your average millennial. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/students-at-most-colleges-dont-pick-useless-majors/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/students-at-most-colleg... https://www.npr.org/2014/11/18/354196302/amid-the-stereotypes-some-facts-about-millennials https://www.npr.org/2014/11/18/354196302/amid-the-stereotype... And the notion that they should've all just got a job in tech is equally ridiculous. The frameworks and techniques I'm using right now didn't even exist when I went to college. And I'm someone who specifically approached my degree with the anticipation of future technology!
  - malvosenior 9y ago
joejerryronnie 9y ago
Hey Millennials, welcome to adulthood. Every generation has its hardships and every generation complains that they have it worse than everyone before them. Sure, you have a lot of self imposed student loan debt and you can't afford to buy a house in the most desirable locations in the world. But imagine being forced into actually shooting people for a cause you viscerally disagree with? Here's a news flash - big business, big government, and big money have always ruled the world and always will because of greedy human nature. Should you continue to rally against inequities and fight for what you believe is right? Absolutely, just try not to be so damn whiny and self righteous about it.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  What is this? What are you doing here? Millennials got "whiny" and "self-righteous" because we're actively under attack. The problem we have is not that we have struggles, every generation has had struggles; the problem is that the response to our attempts to rectify this situation is exactly the kind of derision you're showing here. You're essentially doing the same thing as calling a 1960s civil rights activist "uppity". You're even agreeing with the existence of the issues I'm raising and the need to speak out but feel some emotional need to respond to my perceived tone with an attack on a baseless stereotype. Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly angry and defensive?
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    > Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly angry and defensive? I can’t speak for the person you’re asking, but I think the answer to this question is that the proposed answer to “millennials have problems” is often: more regulation and government involvement. Some people feel very strongly that this is the wrong move and it will directly impact them.
    - aalleavitch 9y ago
      Many of millennials' problems specifically stem from a lack of government regulation. They're locked into temp jobs and self-employment because they reached adulthood in a recession driven by financial deregulation. They face massive invasions of privacy and personal autonomy as a result of lacking sufficient regulations on the usage of their personal data. They face brutally unfair treatment at the hands of tech companies giving them temp work (like Uber and Instacart) without regulations on their treatment of workers (which, by the way, artificially inflate the jobs numbers: no one thinks uber driver is a career, it is a way to be able to eat). And now we face an end to an open internet (one of the few ways to reliably start a small business) because of a lack of FCC regulation. Libertarians need to wrap their heads around the fact that sometimes regulations are deeply necessary.
stickfigure 9y ago
Millennials are moving away from techno-libertarian ideals because laissez faire attitudes towards the application of technology have placed fundamental aspects of their lives in the iron grasp of private corporations who regularly harvest their data for the explicit purpose of manipulating their behavior without their knowledge. This contradicts my observation, which is that "concern over privacy" correlates with age. I see older folks ragequitting social media; the kids are sexting and snapchatting.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  The "kids" have a life that has been deeply intertwined with their own personal internet ecosystems almost since the day they were born. It's a lot more colossal of a proposal on someone's life to quit facebook when they literally grew up on it. There are social and economic forces in my life that straight-up require me to be a part of social media. Acting like separation from facebook is trivially easy is completely ignoring the reality of modern life. And I couldn't even separate myself from google if I tried, I can't do my job without it. Not to mention that all that data they've collected on me so far? That belongs to them forever. It's also completely ridiculous to go about blaming actual children for becoming ensnared by systems that were designed from the ground up by the greatest minds of our generation in order to capture their attention.
  - perl4ever 9y ago
    I regularly read claims on the Internet that young people don't use Facebook...
  - cgmg 9y ago
    I'm curious. What are these forces that require you to be a part of social media? And why are you using Google rather than alternatives like DuckDuckGo?
    - 1337biz 9y ago
      Social peer pressure. Most kids want to have the respect/admiration of their peers.
mbrumlow 9y ago
I feel like you missed malvosenior's point. Its not about never failing, it's about not having the opportunity to fail in safe spaces before they entered the real world. And by safe spaces I don't mean what is going on at today's universities. Growing up I remember finding it weird that every kid won a trophy --- just for showing up to the swim meet. I also remember how it seemed to wash the meaning of my second place trophy away. I was lucky enough to experience failure often at a young age but I had many and by many I mean almost all of my friends never seamed to have hardships or experience failure. And I remember very very vividly when my best friend at the time was rejected and failed for the first time in his life by getting denied to the school of his choice. He was devastated. And not in a normal way. But that only lasted shortly as his mother was able to pull some strings and some connections and got him in the backdoor -- failure adverted. Had many friend like that, and the majority of the kids who biggest disappointments as a child were stupid things like their favorite pizza store closed down, or it rained on their birthday. In any case I think and malvosenior can correct me if I am wrong. That the point is that we have a generation of kids now adults that have not been giving the tools to properly deal with failure -- and this affects there life in a very adverse way. That all being said please read the above with the notion that I don't really like to judge groups of people, and that individuals should be looked at as just that -- an in individual. But what I am saying is that if I were to make a classification that did fit this "never learned how to fail" notion I am sure I could find more than a hand full of people who I would classify with said trait. Now clearly aallevich is talking of his/her experiences and they are most certainly valid. But what I think would be more healthy is to unyoke your life experiences from that of a "Millennial" and own it for who you are and how you became to be. From there you can then actually start to address the issues that you feel are holding you back and likely come out on top. As long as you look at it as a "us" problem it will always be too big of an issue for you to overcome by your self. Don't let a calcification dictate who you are.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  You realize that your perception of what your friends went through is driven by your own personal situation, and not that of millennials at-large, right? Your friends, I assume, were rich kids, or at least comfortably middle-class. The problems my friends dealt with in high school weren't trivial. They dealt with divorce, drug addiction, alcoholic parents, unwanted pregnancies, struggles with poverty, bullying... To me the notion that they never had to learn how to deal with failure is ridiculous. The class gap is enormous, and I've lived a life where I've been intimately acquainted with both sides of it. Besides, it's not me I'm worried about here. I'm worried about the people around me. I'm one of the lucky millennials who has a tech job. It's my friends who are struggling to eat.
garmaine 9y ago
Data point of one: I’m a millennial that suffered through the financial collapse, having graduated with massive student debt from a private school while basically being unemployable in the market due to lack of experience, and even once I got a job watching housing prices rise faster than my savings for a down payment. But this didn’t drive me to be anti-free market. Far from it. The financial collapse was due to the power of the banks which existed as a government authorized oligarchy. Allowing banks monopoly over the mechanisms of monetary policy is the source of the problem. 2007 was NOT an unregulated market by any reasonable measure. Don’t let your partisanship blind you to be grievances of those who align with neither yours nor the opposing party platforms.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  You have a weird assumption here that somehow if there were less regulations the banks would somehow have less of a monopoly on the mechanisms of monetary policy. That's not how it works, not in theory or practice.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    If there were less regulations you wouldn’t need to be a bank to do what a bank does. That was my point. Why so t we see the level of innovation we have in web in the financial sector? Operating a fintech company requires as much legal compliance as it does code and this protects incumbents and lets them extract rent from our society. The GP seems to be saying “let’s regulate these rent seekers.” I’m saying “let’s stop paying rents in the first place.”
  - roenxi 9y ago
    It is a weird, but entirely correct, assumption that all markets operate in a legal framework and are thus regulated. What does 'more banking regulation' or 'less banking regulation' even mean? If the government enacts 'more' legislation that ossifies the practices from before financial crisis, that clearly cannot be an improvement. Talking about more or less regulation is just setting the government up to be manipulated by the highest bidder, who can specify what changes in a way that looks like 'more' or 'less' of something. The rules need to be changed to promote honesty and not create perverse incentives. This requires /different/ regulation, and to demand specific changes. Nobody agrees on what those changes should be afaik.
alexasmyths 9y ago
"They saw their future prospects destroyed by a deregulated financial market, and now they're seeing the economic restoration that follows skipping them entirely and consolidating global wealth in the hands of a few while they struggle with basic necessities."" I don't agree at all. Millennial have more opportunity than any generation in history, by far. They can chose what they want to do. They can stay single, get married, be gay, be bi, whatever. They are the first generation for whom international travel is accssible. They are the first gen. where females can generally choose whatever career and it's not a big deal. They are the first gen. to grow up with all the world's information at their fingertips. They are the first gen. to not know full-scale war, mass poverty. The 'financial system' was not 'destroyed' by anything - this is laughable. It was an accounting correction. The 1930's - this was an economic catastrophe. People were literally dying. The 2008 meltdown ... millenials were too young to be participants, it may have only affected a few jobs - and and it kept their housing costs down. Aside from University costs (should we all be going to college?), and possibly housing bubble, they have it better materially than any generation - ever - and there's nothing to compain about. "I find it kind of amazing that the myth of personal responsibility" There is no 'myth' to personal responsibility, it's a core tenet of civilization. If you finish school, learn a trade or get a relevant education, you'll get a job and live an ok life. You are not entitled to a massive house, vacays all over the world and full on job security.
- lifeisawesme 9y ago
  I 100% agree with you! I'm 23. I worked full time while getting my BS in computer science and worked 80+ hours for 2 years and completely paid off my student loan debt. I currently am blessed to have $400/mo rent and only spend $10,000 annually in living costs. My generation is beyond blessed!

spamizbad 9y ago

I agree completely. And what's sad is that, for many millennials, they're stuck in a financial tar pit in large part by following the advice of their elders. As an older millennial, my generation had two pieces of advice drilled into our skulls by boomers: * What degree you get in college isn't that important, a B.A. will let an employer know your teachable * Student loan debt is the best debt you can have: better than mortgage debt even * (post dot-com crash) Don't bother trying to come a professional software developer -- it's the new textile industry: it's going overseas. This created a generation that didn't factor in their professional or economic trajectory when choosing schools, deciding loans, etc. I had peers that walked away from free rides to college to go to their school of choice because student loans were "no big deal" -- and their parents encouraged this! Boomers should have looked at their own jobs and paid attention how their own companies were hiring in the new economy: that new junior analyst? Makes less than the median income, despite an econ degree from top-tier school. Why did they think their kids, with a middling academics, could land the same job with a degree in english lit? The writing was on the wall even in the 90s that this wasn't a good idea: The world was more globalized and competitive. Labor's power was greatly diminished.

jordanb 9y ago
> * What degree you get in college isn't that important, a B.A. will let an employer know your teachable And the lies we're telling the next generation are * Get a STEM degree, they're always in demand * Become a programmer, there will never be enough programmers.
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  Generals always fight the last war.

malvosenior 9y ago

If their concerns are economic, then it makes even less sense to attack the tech industry. That's the one place where you can still achieve a middle to upper middle class lifestyle based on hard work. Going back to my comment about baby boomers, it seems to me that the 20th century idealized lifestyle was very much backed by the technology available at the time. Mainly mass media. Bandwidth was great enough to broadcast media to a massive amount of people, but not so great as to individualize content delivery. This limited "shelf space" for content lead to a market for high end content creators. The internet exponentially increased bandwidth and democratized (and devalued) content creation. It also created channels for publishing new types of content that require tech skills (apps, web...). You would think that millennials would embrace the 21st century technology driven reality, but instead it seems way too many people ended up chasing high value content roles via expensive liberal arts degrees. Or at least that anti-technology combative mindset that was foreshadowed in this piece.

aalleavitch 9y ago
The notion that millennials' woes are the result of getting a liberal arts degree in women's studies or something is a baseless claim that has been perpetuated specifically because it's an emotionally resonant myth. The millennials that are suffering the hardest right now are the ones who couldn't even afford to go to college (because college tuition is priced ridiculously). The vast majority of millennials that did go to college got a degree in a traditionally "useful" field. The only place where you see a preponderance of liberal arts degrees that aren't specifically career-focused are rich kids who got to go to Ivy Leagues; these people are nothing like your average millennial. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/students-at-most-colleges-dont-pick-useless-majors/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/students-at-most-colleg... https://www.npr.org/2014/11/18/354196302/amid-the-stereotypes-some-facts-about-millennials https://www.npr.org/2014/11/18/354196302/amid-the-stereotype... And the notion that they should've all just got a job in tech is equally ridiculous. The frameworks and techniques I'm using right now didn't even exist when I went to college. And I'm someone who specifically approached my degree with the anticipation of future technology!
- malvosenior 9y ago

joejerryronnie 9y ago

Hey Millennials, welcome to adulthood. Every generation has its hardships and every generation complains that they have it worse than everyone before them. Sure, you have a lot of self imposed student loan debt and you can't afford to buy a house in the most desirable locations in the world. But imagine being forced into actually shooting people for a cause you viscerally disagree with? Here's a news flash - big business, big government, and big money have always ruled the world and always will because of greedy human nature. Should you continue to rally against inequities and fight for what you believe is right? Absolutely, just try not to be so damn whiny and self righteous about it.

aalleavitch 9y ago
What is this? What are you doing here? Millennials got "whiny" and "self-righteous" because we're actively under attack. The problem we have is not that we have struggles, every generation has had struggles; the problem is that the response to our attempts to rectify this situation is exactly the kind of derision you're showing here. You're essentially doing the same thing as calling a 1960s civil rights activist "uppity". You're even agreeing with the existence of the issues I'm raising and the need to speak out but feel some emotional need to respond to my perceived tone with an attack on a baseless stereotype. Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly angry and defensive?
- malvosenior 9y ago
  > Why is the response to the statement "millennials have problems" so commonly angry and defensive? I can’t speak for the person you’re asking, but I think the answer to this question is that the proposed answer to “millennials have problems” is often: more regulation and government involvement. Some people feel very strongly that this is the wrong move and it will directly impact them.
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    Many of millennials' problems specifically stem from a lack of government regulation. They're locked into temp jobs and self-employment because they reached adulthood in a recession driven by financial deregulation. They face massive invasions of privacy and personal autonomy as a result of lacking sufficient regulations on the usage of their personal data. They face brutally unfair treatment at the hands of tech companies giving them temp work (like Uber and Instacart) without regulations on their treatment of workers (which, by the way, artificially inflate the jobs numbers: no one thinks uber driver is a career, it is a way to be able to eat). And now we face an end to an open internet (one of the few ways to reliably start a small business) because of a lack of FCC regulation. Libertarians need to wrap their heads around the fact that sometimes regulations are deeply necessary.

stickfigure 9y ago

Millennials are moving away from techno-libertarian ideals because laissez faire attitudes towards the application of technology have placed fundamental aspects of their lives in the iron grasp of private corporations who regularly harvest their data for the explicit purpose of manipulating their behavior without their knowledge. This contradicts my observation, which is that "concern over privacy" correlates with age. I see older folks ragequitting social media; the kids are sexting and snapchatting.

aalleavitch 9y ago
The "kids" have a life that has been deeply intertwined with their own personal internet ecosystems almost since the day they were born. It's a lot more colossal of a proposal on someone's life to quit facebook when they literally grew up on it. There are social and economic forces in my life that straight-up require me to be a part of social media. Acting like separation from facebook is trivially easy is completely ignoring the reality of modern life. And I couldn't even separate myself from google if I tried, I can't do my job without it. Not to mention that all that data they've collected on me so far? That belongs to them forever. It's also completely ridiculous to go about blaming actual children for becoming ensnared by systems that were designed from the ground up by the greatest minds of our generation in order to capture their attention.
- perl4ever 9y ago
  I regularly read claims on the Internet that young people don't use Facebook...
- cgmg 9y ago
  I'm curious. What are these forces that require you to be a part of social media? And why are you using Google rather than alternatives like DuckDuckGo?
  - 1337biz 9y ago
    Social peer pressure. Most kids want to have the respect/admiration of their peers.

mbrumlow 9y ago

I feel like you missed malvosenior's point. Its not about never failing, it's about not having the opportunity to fail in safe spaces before they entered the real world. And by safe spaces I don't mean what is going on at today's universities. Growing up I remember finding it weird that every kid won a trophy --- just for showing up to the swim meet. I also remember how it seemed to wash the meaning of my second place trophy away. I was lucky enough to experience failure often at a young age but I had many and by many I mean almost all of my friends never seamed to have hardships or experience failure. And I remember very very vividly when my best friend at the time was rejected and failed for the first time in his life by getting denied to the school of his choice. He was devastated. And not in a normal way. But that only lasted shortly as his mother was able to pull some strings and some connections and got him in the backdoor -- failure adverted. Had many friend like that, and the majority of the kids who biggest disappointments as a child were stupid things like their favorite pizza store closed down, or it rained on their birthday. In any case I think and malvosenior can correct me if I am wrong. That the point is that we have a generation of kids now adults that have not been giving the tools to properly deal with failure -- and this affects there life in a very adverse way. That all being said please read the above with the notion that I don't really like to judge groups of people, and that individuals should be looked at as just that -- an in individual. But what I am saying is that if I were to make a classification that did fit this "never learned how to fail" notion I am sure I could find more than a hand full of people who I would classify with said trait. Now clearly aallevich is talking of his/her experiences and they are most certainly valid. But what I think would be more healthy is to unyoke your life experiences from that of a "Millennial" and own it for who you are and how you became to be. From there you can then actually start to address the issues that you feel are holding you back and likely come out on top. As long as you look at it as a "us" problem it will always be too big of an issue for you to overcome by your self. Don't let a calcification dictate who you are.

aalleavitch 9y ago
You realize that your perception of what your friends went through is driven by your own personal situation, and not that of millennials at-large, right? Your friends, I assume, were rich kids, or at least comfortably middle-class. The problems my friends dealt with in high school weren't trivial. They dealt with divorce, drug addiction, alcoholic parents, unwanted pregnancies, struggles with poverty, bullying... To me the notion that they never had to learn how to deal with failure is ridiculous. The class gap is enormous, and I've lived a life where I've been intimately acquainted with both sides of it. Besides, it's not me I'm worried about here. I'm worried about the people around me. I'm one of the lucky millennials who has a tech job. It's my friends who are struggling to eat.

garmaine 9y ago

Data point of one: I’m a millennial that suffered through the financial collapse, having graduated with massive student debt from a private school while basically being unemployable in the market due to lack of experience, and even once I got a job watching housing prices rise faster than my savings for a down payment. But this didn’t drive me to be anti-free market. Far from it. The financial collapse was due to the power of the banks which existed as a government authorized oligarchy. Allowing banks monopoly over the mechanisms of monetary policy is the source of the problem. 2007 was NOT an unregulated market by any reasonable measure. Don’t let your partisanship blind you to be grievances of those who align with neither yours nor the opposing party platforms.

aalleavitch 9y ago
You have a weird assumption here that somehow if there were less regulations the banks would somehow have less of a monopoly on the mechanisms of monetary policy. That's not how it works, not in theory or practice.
- garmaine 9y ago
  If there were less regulations you wouldn’t need to be a bank to do what a bank does. That was my point. Why so t we see the level of innovation we have in web in the financial sector? Operating a fintech company requires as much legal compliance as it does code and this protects incumbents and lets them extract rent from our society. The GP seems to be saying “let’s regulate these rent seekers.” I’m saying “let’s stop paying rents in the first place.”
- roenxi 9y ago
  It is a weird, but entirely correct, assumption that all markets operate in a legal framework and are thus regulated. What does 'more banking regulation' or 'less banking regulation' even mean? If the government enacts 'more' legislation that ossifies the practices from before financial crisis, that clearly cannot be an improvement. Talking about more or less regulation is just setting the government up to be manipulated by the highest bidder, who can specify what changes in a way that looks like 'more' or 'less' of something. The rules need to be changed to promote honesty and not create perverse incentives. This requires /different/ regulation, and to demand specific changes. Nobody agrees on what those changes should be afaik.

alexasmyths 9y ago

"They saw their future prospects destroyed by a deregulated financial market, and now they're seeing the economic restoration that follows skipping them entirely and consolidating global wealth in the hands of a few while they struggle with basic necessities."" I don't agree at all. Millennial have more opportunity than any generation in history, by far. They can chose what they want to do. They can stay single, get married, be gay, be bi, whatever. They are the first generation for whom international travel is accssible. They are the first gen. where females can generally choose whatever career and it's not a big deal. They are the first gen. to grow up with all the world's information at their fingertips. They are the first gen. to not know full-scale war, mass poverty. The 'financial system' was not 'destroyed' by anything - this is laughable. It was an accounting correction. The 1930's - this was an economic catastrophe. People were literally dying. The 2008 meltdown ... millenials were too young to be participants, it may have only affected a few jobs - and and it kept their housing costs down. Aside from University costs (should we all be going to college?), and possibly housing bubble, they have it better materially than any generation - ever - and there's nothing to compain about. "I find it kind of amazing that the myth of personal responsibility" There is no 'myth' to personal responsibility, it's a core tenet of civilization. If you finish school, learn a trade or get a relevant education, you'll get a job and live an ok life. You are not entitled to a massive house, vacays all over the world and full on job security.

lifeisawesme 9y ago
I 100% agree with you! I'm 23. I worked full time while getting my BS in computer science and worked 80+ hours for 2 years and completely paid off my student loan debt. I currently am blessed to have $400/mo rent and only spend $10,000 annually in living costs. My generation is beyond blessed!