You've probably come across this thing making the social media rounds, describing how people of 'generation y/why,' the millennial generation, are unhappy: because we were told from a young age that we're special, unique snowflakes, and we can be anything we want to be, and then we stumbled into the harsh, cruel world and found a massive disparity between the fairytale we've been fed by our baby boomer parents and the cold, unyielding truth: shit is a struggle.
This is an old, tired argument that's been around for a while before some clever person made stick figure cartoons and colored graphs about it, turning it into an internet phenomenon (apparently this is all it takes to transform a mundane, establishment idea into an internet phenomenon, but that's for another article).
I'm here to tell you today why this argument is bullshit. But before I do, I'll show you my hand. I'm an early gen-y/millennial who is sympathetic to the struggles of my generation. But I'm also a professor who teaches students who are of the same generation, just the latter half of the range that those who study gen-y typically use. So you can say that my defense of gen-y is just another instance of typical gen-y entitlement; but then you should keep in mind that, unlike most of you, I have to put up with this generation's shit all the time--the young ones, and especially the rich ones, who maybe need an extension on the assignment this week because the NGO they founded in Mali during the summer after they graduated from high school is having a really important board meeting.
Further, I'm not a sociologist or demographer of any kind, and I'm skeptical from the outset of the value of making claims about generational characteristics. What I am more accustomed to studying, though, is the way cultural and historical circumstances shape the way we perceive what's going on in the world. In light of this I have a few things to say about this grand theory of the coddled gen-y yuppie.
The first is that just about anything that's said about the 'gen-y yuppie' can also be said of yuppie subculture more generally, leading me to believe that feeling entitled, feeling empty, and chasing never ending dreams as a consequence of these is more a facet of yuppie subculture and other cultures of privilege than a generational particular. Young, privileged, educated professionals of any generation are in a striving phase of life. When the country used to fight global wars in which not just the poorest and most disenfranchised people were part of the war effort, but everyone went to war in a way, there were obviously fewer yuppies; the would-be yuppies of 'the greatest generation' were at war. Why don't yuppies go to war today? It would be easy to throw this question on the bonfire of vanity we project onto gen-y yuppies: we're too entitled and precious to fight in a war. But there's something else we're forgetting: war today isn't something we do as a last resort to a problem; war today is an industry. We don't fight wars we believe in; we assign people who have few other options to fight wars that special business and political interests want to fight. The point here is that, whereas in times past young people could find fulfillment in military or civil rights causes larger than themselves, young people of gen-y have had to look outside of military engagement to find our defining generational causes. This is partly why among gen-y people, issues like gay marriage, the environment, and international development are popular causes; and this is why the privileged, educated, cause-oriented gen-y person is probably a yuppie rather than a soldier: the jobs that allegedly transform the world these days are all yuppie jobs.
Of course, this isn't necessarily a good thing. Because these yuppie jobs are also part of a dramatic historical change in the way people are employed, and what employers expect of their employees. Which brings me to my second point: everything is corporatized.
A gen-y person grew up in a world in which the concepts of civil society, civic responsibility, public education, privacy, and family cohesion are mostly things of the past. Everything is corporatized, from education and non-profit work to media and politics. Gen-y lives in a world in which even currencies (Bitcoin, Amazon dollars, etc.) are privatized. Employers pay investigative firms to stalk employees on social media; employers administer drug tests for employees with no criminal record or evidence of illegal drug use; employers give employees smartphones, and pay the bills, so that they can call on employees for work at any time, and expect a prompt response; employers have created the unpaid internship while simultaneously requiring the prestige of a college degree for employment. Think about this for a second. Employers today say you need a college degree for a job, but reject the idea that a college degree prepares you for one; so you must work unpaid labor to get 'experience.' Meanwhile, amid this deliberate shift to reallocate prestige in opportunities for unpaid labor rather than opportunities for education and intellectual, civic, and humanistic development, wages have remained stagnant for decades while cost of living and GDP have risen, putting gen-y people and in many cases our parents in the position of having to maintain our standards of living through debt rather than real earnings. This is not just a gen-y thing. The entire US economy runs on debt, not on real production of value, goods, and services. Further, as economies became increasingly globalized, corporatized, and debt-driven all at the same time, while socioeconomic inequality hit record highs by multiples, the prospect of job security, let alone career security, began to diminish. This is the case not just for millennials, but for anyone of any generation seeking employment today.
So where does gen-y fit into all this. It's a lot simpler than the grand psychoanalytic theory of inflated self worth. Gen-y is simply the most vulnerable generation in a time of political, economic, and environmental failure. The people running these failure ships into the giant iceberg of fucked are not gen-y people. The people expecting their young employees to be peachy about all this, to tolerate low wages despite high qualifications, are not gen-y people. The people complaining about gen-y people are people with lots of experience--most of it experience fucking something up royally--who can't answer the demands of a generation who simply want better for the world, not just themselves. One acquires such an idealistic outlook when raised during a time in which prosperity and hope turns to shit, all before your eyes in the years in which you're barely old enough to drive a car, let alone do something about the fall of Rome. And you know what? For a generation that supposedly has had everything handed to it, why aren't we talking about everything this generation has had handed to it? Dysfunctional politics, crushing debt, deregulation and game-fixing for the greatest rent-seekers in the world, perpetual warfare feeding a gluttonous military-industrial complex, the abandonment of public education, the rotting scraps of what was a civil society, utter abandonment of both personal responsibility for elites and the public obligation to care for those less fortunate, personal data mining and the mass violation of basic privacy rights, off-shore accounts and off-shore torture cells in which due process doesn't apply, and countless other fundamental failures. These are the things we've been handed. This is not the first time things have gone to shit just in time for a generation to come of age; which is why gen-y is not unique in its demands for a better world, and why prior generations are not unique in calling younger generations a bunch of entitled pansies. There's simply no reason to reify some notion of the particular specialness of gen-y as a generation of the particularly special.
Lest you read this as a complaint, let me remind you that it's a defense. But it's only a defense. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes for the ability of my generation to turn things around. This brings me to my closing point: when systemic dysfunction reaches a certain degree of entrenchment, it's like a cancer in metastasis. Good people can fight the good fight (and we're definitely not all good), but it won't help much. To fix these problems we need a transgenerational effort. We need even more idealistic gen-y millennials to reject the worst of yuppie and corporate cultures along with whatever prefab notions of 'happiness' that allegedly come with (puts on gruff voice) building a stable career, buying a home, etc. There's no rational reason why gen-y should settle for the hand it's been dealt, as though we haven't inherited a world on fire.
