5 ms·

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 millio

by 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?)

by warent 8y ago

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?)