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“I think millennials need to get past this narrative they’ve made it on their own and ‘I pulled myself up by my boot straps,’” Mr. Isaacs said. “It hides all th

by dvtrn 8y ago

“I think millennials need to get past this narrative they’ve made it on their own and ‘I pulled myself up by my boot straps,’” Mr. Isaacs said. “It hides all the kinds of ways they have been privileged by their race or parental help.” I started to fire a snarky comment about how nice it must be to fit into the category of millennial who have enjoyed the listed privileges, but instead I'll just adopt the position that I am not the "target demographic" here, and maybe that's why after reading that entire article, finding this remark as the closing statement caused me to involuntarily furrow a brow.

warent 8y ago
It's also a weirdly broad generalization that I think shows an overly-simplified, almost naive way of seeing the world. As with any "X group with tens of millions of people," there are going to be people who actually do fit those criteria. e.g. How many ethnic or black millennials without parental help started from nothing and are now successful? I personally know of a couple at least. For some reason, so many people seem to see "Millennials" as one gigantic person. It's similar to the odd occurrence of someone accusing HN of having conflicting opinions, ignoring the fact that HN is full of different people.
- aurailious 8y ago
  Sites that have voting, like HN and Reddit, will get judgement that because of what is up voted. There is of course lots of different people, but clear trends do start to appear and that is what people view and assign to be the overall opinion.
- dtech 8y ago
  > For some reason, so many people seem to see "Millennials" as one gigantic person. This happens everywhere, all the time. "Baby Boomers" are as often talked about as a group: "Muslims", "Hipsters", "Hacker News", "Liberals", "Conservatives".
  - retsibsi 8y ago
    Yeah but it makes a lot more sense in some contexts than others. Like, if you're talking about a religion or a political affiliation, membership in that group is defined by some common beliefs or values. (Obviously people routinely generalise too far and end up using lazy stereotypes, I'm not denying that.) It's a bit more obviously arbitrary to generalise about a generation, unless you're talking pretty narrowly about e.g. shared experiences they had by virtue of growing up at the same time.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  It's almost like declaring everyone born roughly at the same time to be identical, is a desperate attempt to impose conceptual order on an illegible and chaotic universe! Or sumt'n!
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Well SOMEBODY had a big bowl of Sartre Flakes™ this morning :P No, jokes aside-I think that's just as valid and interesting of a response to that sort of a take as any. My generation is pretty vocal about the inherent value of the 'individual'; "we aren't a monolith" etc. Maybe my knee jerk reaction to the quote above is just a manifestation of that, I'll own it for whatever it is.
    - rdiddly 8y ago
      Heh - first time I read that, I thought it was Satire Flakes... which also would've worked...
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  It's tiring how much the media and casual discourse treats "millennials" as one gigantic person, but then again generational cohorts are a planning tool because large numbers of them engage in similar activities around the same time. This greatly impacts markets, culture, and circles back around to influence lots of other aspects of life. It also leads to more pressure and (generally) fewer opportunities on those who have fallen behind. As much as we deride or wish to discourage people from comparing themselves to others, falling behind (in terms of timing or attainment) compared to the median member of a cohort confers a disadvantage towards further progress that would follow the same formula. This is particularly and literally applicable to millennials: after all, the entire generation was told to follow a formula, where getting to college was the first step, and any further clarification of one's ambitions would be expected to materialize once that baseline was cleared. Now that they're all firmly of working age, it's clear that following that formula blindly -- as if it were just one of those "this is how the world works" societal norms that everyone does, like brushing teeth or obeying stoplights -- was a mistake. But the message was fed by their elders, the same people who are now helping them out if they're able. And if one had poor parents or hardly a shot at getting to college, what were they supposed to do? They came of age at a time when blue-collar work was precipitously falling, all the well-paying high-demand careers demanded years of education, and years of coddling and lack of substantive discourse about the middle class's economic realities have resulted in a generic, aspirational message like "follow your dreams". Higher education was positioned by public policy and combined wisdom as a tool of opportunity, how was one to know that predatory-sounding trade schools may have been a better bet? And if public policy drove young people towards those schools instead, would we now have tens of thousands of HVAC technicians and automotive mechanics and cybersecurity professionals working in food and retail?
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    They came of age at a time when blue-collar work was precipitously falling Tangent: I wonder what we'll read in the history books 30 years from now about the shift in labor to becoming a globalized commodity in the era of the Internet, and how it affected economic groups poised best to take advantage of the changing era--compared to how the group equivalent of today's millennials fared during, say, the Industrial revolution as economies swiftly mechanized and labor responded by becoming more-increasingly specialized. (Edit: and then I wonder, would the people writing such history in 30 years have been millennials today?)
komali2 8y ago
I've met a member of every class that's lied about "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" (by the way, isn't that meant to be an ironic paradox?). From the rich white male Boomer to an immigrant Chinese business owner, everyone seems to feel the need to make more of their struggle than it was. Like, it was already a struggle, why lie and make it seem more so? You started your business by working 12 hour days funded by the pennies in your pocket... And the 300k business loan someone was willing to give you on the basis of your bachelor's in business, which meant a hell of a lot in 1957. Or the classic "came into America on a boat with seven dollars in my pocket," not mentioning the family safety net back home or the fact that the 7$ was more like 7,000 and this was 1965. But it's obvious why people do that, because people have been doing it for ten thousand years and it's nothing new. We like to feel important, and if our truth doesn't make us feel important we'll lie a bit until we feel important again. So I'm tired of old people making flippant statements like above about millennials that are either completely off base or simply applicable to every human on the planet, for as long as we've been able to talk. Allow me to engage in my own psychological fallacy - I feel like with enough years under your belt, you should just know that's how we work.
- beefield 8y ago
  There is funny (or would be funny if it was not so serious in the societal concequences) research by Paul Piff on this phenomenom: https://planetsave.com/2013/12/23/a-rigged-game-of-monopoly-reveals-how-feeling-wealthy-changes-our-behavior-ted-video/ https://planetsave.com/2013/12/23/a-rigged-game-of-monopoly-...
- screye 8y ago
  > "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" (by the way, isn't that meant to be an ironic paradox?). Cracks me up every time. It most certainly is. The few people who I know have "pulled themselves up by the bootstraps" in the proverbial sense, almost never use such dismissive terminology.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  I concur. What irks me the most is when the backstory contains unmentioned unethical elements. I come across several people in business who all gave the "oh it was so hard in the beginning" while not mentioning their dark pattern websites (people unwittingly buying subscription), wolf-of-wall-street v1 of their broking business, or outright money laundering. There needs to be a catchy phrase for the "I had it so hard" story.
ddeokbokki 8y ago
Are you saying you disagree with the statement?
- dvtrn 8y ago
  In some ways, for some reasons, yes. For other reasons, and for some reasons, no.
- Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  I wanna know where this narrative that “[millenbnials] made it on their own and blah blah bootstraps.” The narrative I heard is “the boomers fcked the economy and left us with nothing but the remnants of their eventual estates.”
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Millebnials? I presume that's a typo, but... I kinda like it. It's got a bit of a ring to it. I tell ya, those millebnials...
ryanmarsh 8y ago
privileged by their race The only people I know who own homes, in the markets mentioned, wouldn't consider themselves white so I can't figure out what they're trying to say here.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  I believe in the parlance of the youths today, it is a "weird flex". - Read in the voice of Lt. Commander Data
chasd00 8y ago
i've only heard millennials whine about how they're the victim of every injustice ever committed. I don't think i've ever heard one say the pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
- jboles 8y ago
  The achievers are likely the quiet ones, precisely because they're a bit tired of articles like these telling them that they can't be proud of their success.
acconrad 8y ago
I haven't received a dime from my parents since I was 16 (when I got my first job). Paid for college myself, paid off my debt myself, bought my first house myself, and have essentially done everything without their help since I was legally allowed to. And the people that do need help (like my younger brother), what irks me is that he certainly does not think he pulled himself up from his bootstraps. He knows that he was dealt a bad hand and painfully acknowledges the help he's getting. This comment from the article is incredibly myopic because either you did in fact bootstrap against harsh circumstances or you know you didn't because the recession has dealt you a tough hand. I think the outlier is the individual who think they did it themselves and really believes that (when they didn't).

by dvtrn 8y ago

warent 8y ago

It's also a weirdly broad generalization that I think shows an overly-simplified, almost naive way of seeing the world. As with any "X group with tens of millions of people," there are going to be people who actually do fit those criteria. e.g. How many ethnic or black millennials without parental help started from nothing and are now successful? I personally know of a couple at least. For some reason, so many people seem to see "Millennials" as one gigantic person. It's similar to the odd occurrence of someone accusing HN of having conflicting opinions, ignoring the fact that HN is full of different people.

aurailious 8y ago
Sites that have voting, like HN and Reddit, will get judgement that because of what is up voted. There is of course lots of different people, but clear trends do start to appear and that is what people view and assign to be the overall opinion.
dtech 8y ago
> For some reason, so many people seem to see "Millennials" as one gigantic person. This happens everywhere, all the time. "Baby Boomers" are as often talked about as a group: "Muslims", "Hipsters", "Hacker News", "Liberals", "Conservatives".
- retsibsi 8y ago
  Yeah but it makes a lot more sense in some contexts than others. Like, if you're talking about a religion or a political affiliation, membership in that group is defined by some common beliefs or values. (Obviously people routinely generalise too far and end up using lazy stereotypes, I'm not denying that.) It's a bit more obviously arbitrary to generalise about a generation, unless you're talking pretty narrowly about e.g. shared experiences they had by virtue of growing up at the same time.
rdiddly 8y ago
It's almost like declaring everyone born roughly at the same time to be identical, is a desperate attempt to impose conceptual order on an illegible and chaotic universe! Or sumt'n!
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Well SOMEBODY had a big bowl of Sartre Flakes™ this morning :P No, jokes aside-I think that's just as valid and interesting of a response to that sort of a take as any. My generation is pretty vocal about the inherent value of the 'individual'; "we aren't a monolith" etc. Maybe my knee jerk reaction to the quote above is just a manifestation of that, I'll own it for whatever it is.
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    Heh - first time I read that, I thought it was Satire Flakes... which also would've worked...
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
It's tiring how much the media and casual discourse treats "millennials" as one gigantic person, but then again generational cohorts are a planning tool because large numbers of them engage in similar activities around the same time. This greatly impacts markets, culture, and circles back around to influence lots of other aspects of life. It also leads to more pressure and (generally) fewer opportunities on those who have fallen behind. As much as we deride or wish to discourage people from comparing themselves to others, falling behind (in terms of timing or attainment) compared to the median member of a cohort confers a disadvantage towards further progress that would follow the same formula. This is particularly and literally applicable to millennials: after all, the entire generation was told to follow a formula, where getting to college was the first step, and any further clarification of one's ambitions would be expected to materialize once that baseline was cleared. Now that they're all firmly of working age, it's clear that following that formula blindly -- as if it were just one of those "this is how the world works" societal norms that everyone does, like brushing teeth or obeying stoplights -- was a mistake. But the message was fed by their elders, the same people who are now helping them out if they're able. And if one had poor parents or hardly a shot at getting to college, what were they supposed to do? They came of age at a time when blue-collar work was precipitously falling, all the well-paying high-demand careers demanded years of education, and years of coddling and lack of substantive discourse about the middle class's economic realities have resulted in a generic, aspirational message like "follow your dreams". Higher education was positioned by public policy and combined wisdom as a tool of opportunity, how was one to know that predatory-sounding trade schools may have been a better bet? And if public policy drove young people towards those schools instead, would we now have tens of thousands of HVAC technicians and automotive mechanics and cybersecurity professionals working in food and retail?
- dvtrn 8y ago
  They came of age at a time when blue-collar work was precipitously falling Tangent: I wonder what we'll read in the history books 30 years from now about the shift in labor to becoming a globalized commodity in the era of the Internet, and how it affected economic groups poised best to take advantage of the changing era--compared to how the group equivalent of today's millennials fared during, say, the Industrial revolution as economies swiftly mechanized and labor responded by becoming more-increasingly specialized. (Edit: and then I wonder, would the people writing such history in 30 years have been millennials today?)

komali2 8y ago

I've met a member of every class that's lied about "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" (by the way, isn't that meant to be an ironic paradox?). From the rich white male Boomer to an immigrant Chinese business owner, everyone seems to feel the need to make more of their struggle than it was. Like, it was already a struggle, why lie and make it seem more so? You started your business by working 12 hour days funded by the pennies in your pocket... And the 300k business loan someone was willing to give you on the basis of your bachelor's in business, which meant a hell of a lot in 1957. Or the classic "came into America on a boat with seven dollars in my pocket," not mentioning the family safety net back home or the fact that the 7$ was more like 7,000 and this was 1965. But it's obvious why people do that, because people have been doing it for ten thousand years and it's nothing new. We like to feel important, and if our truth doesn't make us feel important we'll lie a bit until we feel important again. So I'm tired of old people making flippant statements like above about millennials that are either completely off base or simply applicable to every human on the planet, for as long as we've been able to talk. Allow me to engage in my own psychological fallacy - I feel like with enough years under your belt, you should just know that's how we work.

beefield 8y ago
There is funny (or would be funny if it was not so serious in the societal concequences) research by Paul Piff on this phenomenom: https://planetsave.com/2013/12/23/a-rigged-game-of-monopoly-reveals-how-feeling-wealthy-changes-our-behavior-ted-video/ https://planetsave.com/2013/12/23/a-rigged-game-of-monopoly-...
screye 8y ago
> "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" (by the way, isn't that meant to be an ironic paradox?). Cracks me up every time. It most certainly is. The few people who I know have "pulled themselves up by the bootstraps" in the proverbial sense, almost never use such dismissive terminology.
lordnacho 8y ago
I concur. What irks me the most is when the backstory contains unmentioned unethical elements. I come across several people in business who all gave the "oh it was so hard in the beginning" while not mentioning their dark pattern websites (people unwittingly buying subscription), wolf-of-wall-street v1 of their broking business, or outright money laundering. There needs to be a catchy phrase for the "I had it so hard" story.

ddeokbokki 8y ago

Are you saying you disagree with the statement?

dvtrn 8y ago
In some ways, for some reasons, yes. For other reasons, and for some reasons, no.
Eric_WVGG 8y ago
I wanna know where this narrative that “[millenbnials] made it on their own and blah blah bootstraps.” The narrative I heard is “the boomers fcked the economy and left us with nothing but the remnants of their eventual estates.”
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Millebnials? I presume that's a typo, but... I kinda like it. It's got a bit of a ring to it. I tell ya, those millebnials...

ryanmarsh 8y ago

privileged by their race The only people I know who own homes, in the markets mentioned, wouldn't consider themselves white so I can't figure out what they're trying to say here.

dvtrn 8y ago
I believe in the parlance of the youths today, it is a "weird flex". - Read in the voice of Lt. Commander Data

chasd00 8y ago

i've only heard millennials whine about how they're the victim of every injustice ever committed. I don't think i've ever heard one say the pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

jboles 8y ago
The achievers are likely the quiet ones, precisely because they're a bit tired of articles like these telling them that they can't be proud of their success.

acconrad 8y ago

I haven't received a dime from my parents since I was 16 (when I got my first job). Paid for college myself, paid off my debt myself, bought my first house myself, and have essentially done everything without their help since I was legally allowed to. And the people that do need help (like my younger brother), what irks me is that he certainly does not think he pulled himself up from his bootstraps. He knows that he was dealt a bad hand and painfully acknowledges the help he's getting. This comment from the article is incredibly myopic because either you did in fact bootstrap against harsh circumstances or you know you didn't because the recession has dealt you a tough hand. I think the outlier is the individual who think they did it themselves and really believes that (when they didn't).