Are the Millennials really the Me generation?

I had been lurking around the internet for articles and I am kind of shocked to see myself in those categories. My parents always told me that the "Real" world was tough and challenging place, I am beginning to realize that they might be right. While not everyone in our generation behaves this way, it seems as though I do often feel a sense of entitlement concerning my jobs,I can be lazy and I have no idea how hard work actually is. It seems as though that I am among those Generation Me people but it seems as though that most of the complains come from the last generation. they are not entirely wrong but is our generation really the Me generation?

No we are not the ME generation. Quite frankly its just more of the same crap. One generation things the one coming up sucks.

The "ME generation" thing has been bandied about since at least the seventies.

Most young adults don't know how to be adults because they are new at it. It's like anything else, there's a learning curve. It's hard to make the transition. Most of the things people say about young people now a days could have been said about me when I was that age. Could've been hell, should've been. I cringe when I remember some of my expectations of life back then.

The biggest thing to understand is that some mistakes can have long lasting and painful repercussions that no one can soften for you.

Our culture's overall narcissism gets a boost from the technology to give everyone a megaphone. Young people are technological early adopters and have more time to use them because they don't have families to raise or homes to maintain, and are probably only working part time.

And young adults' ability to launch properly is not helped by graduating into a limp economy.

Really? I thought millenials were the social justice generation.

I think this phenomenon works both ways. Every generation thinks the one before it are prudes and the one after it are crude. It's simply because Society Marches On and discards old prejudices and obsolete customs, and upsetting those who still cling to them.

It makes me wonder what prejudices our own generation unquestioningly holds that future generations will call us barbaric for.

Everything I can think of is either alarmist or something somebody's already campaigning for.

They'll probably say you were disgustingly permissive and thus to blame for everything. Like the hippies, but worse.

The way it works is actually quite simple: Millennials grew up in the homes of Generation X parents, who grew up in the homes of Baby Boomer parents. Baby Boomer parents taught their kids that hard work and perseverance and loyalty were rewarded, and unfortunately, Generation X is where college degrees started becoming more important and employers themselves were starting to be disloyal to their employees.

As a consequence to this, Generation X parents taught their kids that education was more important, as they witnessed their own chances for promotion being snatched away by the kids whose parents could afford to send their kids to good schools. Combine that with the Millennial generation's perceptions of company disloyalty, and yeah, Millennials have been taught that companies will screw you over if doing so will help their bottom line and that having a college education will pretty much guarantee you a job. Obviously, this is not necessarily true.

I remember hearing most of my life that engineers make good money and are always in demand on the market. But by the time I graduated, $80K in debt, the engineering market was over-saturated with people who'd been told the exact same thing.

We're not so much the "entitled" generation as we are the "paranoid" generation, because all the things we've been told and taught and have observed have instilled in us this immediate distrust of all things corporate. We're also the most socially active and connected generation, which opens us up to hearing the stories of other people who also were taught like we were.

(For reference, my mother took a course on how to be an effective manager to others outside your generation band, and since my immediate family actually manages to cross all generation boundaries currently in the workplace, we all had a pretty cool discussion on how each generation thinks)

edited 9th Jul '14 7:53:50 AM by Frishman

I'm inclined to agree with that, for the most part.

They don't seem any more egotistical as a whole than any generation before. Fact is every generation thinks the one that came after sucks. Everything people are saying about Milennials now people said about the Baby Boomers 50 years ago and Baby Boomers were saying about Gen-Xers 30 years ago. It's that old saw about how "Back in my day we had to walk 20 miles to get to school, barefoot in the snow! Uphill both ways!" Hell I'm sure if you went back in time you'd hear some old caveman complaining about how kids these days are egotistical because they got fire and wheels now.

Bump.

I read a book called 'Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever' by Jean M. Twenge and it is very interesting read at first. After reading it I feel as though that while it may have good points, it sometimes feel as though that I should feel guilt about being born into this generation and it seems no different than blaming the new generation for having so 'easy'. I looked around for reviews for this book and as reviewers pointed out, the author seems to possess the same narcissism as the very people she is observing and it seems to be a little biased towards Middle Class Americans anyway. It does have some good points but as most people on this thread have said, it just another case of the new generation inheriting the old problems of the last one and the older generation berating the newer one for having so 'easy' compared to them.

A related thread worth reading. Pay special note to Radical Taoist's comments. He hits the nail on the head.

It's very tempting to argue that the world has gone to hell or that we've all gone soft because of social justice discussions and backlash against the War on Terror. Social media has had more of an impact on awareness of hot button topics, and it has a particularly powerful influence on political polarization in the US (I can't speak for other countries).

It's not that the world has gotten worse, that it's gone soft or that millennials are causing most of the damage. Rapidly evolving information technology just makes it easier to notice daily activities throughout the world. Combine this wildfire rumor mill in social media with the major news outlets' tendency to profit by overstating negative current events, and you have a perception that our generation is somehow spearheading a global downturn.

edited 27th Jan '15 5:53:00 PM by Aprilla

Yeah I think I'll agree with Frishman on that assessment. We are indeed more the paranoid generation then anything else only I'd argue it extends to a lot of the more questionable authority figures or big names in general.

Every generation has egotistical people though....

I suppose with the internet making things easier for people to notice thngs that weren't there before, it is no wonder why this genration is more paranoid however the same can be said about any generation with new technology and resources.

That pretty much is exactly what it is. The problems are more prominent and thus the teens and young adults nowadays see a lot of information being sent through social media and the internet about said problems. Thus most of us are adapting via either being more cautious or paranoid about issues in the hopes that we don't suffer under said issues.

Sadly that doesn't seem to be working and the depression, bitterness, mistrust, and very many other issues of that nature are sky-rocketing amongst us.

Also, something a bit worth pointing out is that it's very likely that a lot of the reason why the egotistical teens or young adults are thriving (other then the fact that social media makes it more easy to cultivate those attitudes so it's more prominient) is the simple fact that our generation has next to no privacy due to the helicopter parent stuff and a lot of the other parenting fumbles over the years before. And that's not even getting into the government or corporations using social media to monitor people.

Don't jump the gun on that: just because more people are being diagnosed with or acknowledged as having various conditions doesn't necessarily mean there's an actual rise in people having them.

Children and teens still have to battle with the "kids don't really get depressed" idea, but... it's not as entrenched as it used to be. Not that long ago, it was a blanket "kids are only sick if they get a temperature; if they say otherwise, they're lying" thing. -_-

And, as far as being monitored goes: the means vary, but that doesn't necessarily make it more, either. :/

edited 10th Aug '15 10:50:15 PM by Euodiachloris

Well it's possible that it's just more people being diagnosed with it or the statistics behind it are much more easy to get now. Either which way it's a issue worth addressing though

I will admit I was speaking from my own experiences and observations there (so anecdotal evidence that likely shouldn't be applied to the group as a whole).

edited 11th Aug '15 1:05:43 AM by Bleddyn

I guess you are right about that.

You know I had been reading about all this SJW and anti-SJW stuff but I really want to stay neutral on those topics. I really don't want to get involved but at the same time, I feel that the reason for all this stuff happening is because we are noticing stuff more. I dislike both camps not because I don't want to but into political rhetoric but then again I feel like I am lying to myself when I do.

I'm 27. I was a teenager during much of George W. Bush's administration. I had to come of age with perpetual wars and constant fearmongering, with the economy almost imploding during my college years.

I have been baffled by why anybody would attack Millennials/Gen Y-ers. The only possible reason seems to be... projection. Trying to stick the worst sins on those least deserving it.

From Fark, here's something one user (a tail-end Boomer) wrote:

"[T]he issue here is not that these millennials want it now, it's that they don't see a way of ever getting it later. Their grandparents got college virtually free through the GI bill, and even if they didn't go there were a gajillion unionized blue collar jobs which paid enough to support a family on one income, with a house, two cars, vacations, and college for their kids...

The Boomers. They got college through the GI bill almost free as well, and for those who didn't serve it was still cheap enough to be paid for with a summer job. In some places like California, community college was tuition-free. Unions were strong, and they still provided plenty of good manual labor positions with great benefits and pay.

Now I get that there were still rough patches, but overall these two generations had it farking awesome after WWII. There was an actual, definable path from point A to point B. You graduated from high school, you got a job that might not pay well at first but you knew that you could make a living at it while you were still in your twenties, or you went to college and knew there were jobs available for you when you were done. You also weren't in debt in an amount equal to the price of a late model Lamborghini, which put you well ahead of the game.

The issue here is that after these generations got what they got, especially the boomers, they tweaked and changed the system and the world they were now in control of so that later generations would have a more difficult time.

Tuition increases, the demise of unions, wage stagnation, automation, outsourcing, the assholes on Wall Street that changed how the economy works, and the overall "race to the bottom" paradigm they adopted for just about everything.

I won't even get into the politics of all this. Lets just say that they [sic] stuff the Boomers fought for when they were young are now the things they fight against now that their children and grandchildren need them.

tl;dr - Millennials don't need to have 'it' now, they just get pissed that the path to 'it' has been erased by prior generations."

I agree mostly I keep hearing how our generation has it well despite some evidence to the contrary. That is not to say that is all bad but it seems that almost everywhere I go I keep hearing how we all gone soft or even that our generation has it easy but we still have to deal with the stuff of the previous generation. The strange thing about is that one day when our generation becomes old, we are gonna say the exact same thing and act in the same way to our children.

If I have kids, I wouldn't do that to them. Isn't making life a little easier for your kids one aspect of a successful life?

Greed makes people stupid.

I am in an odd spot in the generational lists as is my wife. I was born at the very start of the 80's am just old enough to have experienced the tail end of the cold war including being from a military family. Notably my father was a B-52G/H pilot before the collapse of the Soviet Union, my uncle was a Navy man, and my Grandfather was Army during the end of the Korea and got out before Vietnam became a thing. My goofy ass joined the Marines in 2000.

I clearly and distinctly remember the varied promises and assurances that college was still affordable despite Regan's "re-working of the system" and that college was still a guarantee to a good job. All we had to do was work hard find a starter job and keep our noses to grind stone and things would just work out. By the time I was Junior in high school the news that your degree wasn't really worth what it used to be, wages had started falling, and college costs were creeping up rapidly. Then a few years later 9/11 while I was in college desperately struggling with effectively having to live three lives at once while being dirt poor and dependent on what little income Marine reserves paid. To me the entire world seemed to explode and lose control.

I left that school came back to NE, went to a community college to fix up my mangled academic record and then went to UNO for a semester. I got a good look at the walking cluster fuck that is modern college courses while earning barely above minimum wage for two people. I said screw that I needed to work to survive and I didn't want to drown in the huge amount of debt it would have taken to get a degree that really isn't worth it anymore. While I would certainly like a degree it is not realistically a feasible option for me at this point. Neither are any of the trade schools as they all have latched onto the excessive cost scam that is private schools.

My wife desperate to find a decent paying job seeing as how she already had a degree that did nothing was fed the same lines that you needed a degree to do anything that wasn't minimum wage with college debt riding on her back. She bought into the bogus narrative of private colleges especially ITT Tech. For those who don't know the best way to describe that school is a predatory lending scam for degrees that are not really worth it. It may have been worth it in the past but they have long since turned into a pointless degree mill subsisting mostly off students in debt to them and their attached lenders. They are in fact in quite a bit of trouble for it but it will of course be a while before my wife sees any justice for their abuses.

To add salt to the open wound you can't discharge your student debts effectively trapping you in a nasty cycle. Many low and even mid end jobs are big on the "Over qualified" line of bullshit meaning you have more then one degree even an associates your chances of finding work just to survive is pretty crappy. There are only a few exceptions and even my friends in other states have hit the same walls.

From where I sit I didn't cause this shit storm that is our modern era, my parents did what they could but it wasn't enough and it was largely those that came before them that fucked things up for the rest of us. We didn't make this soggy shit sandwich but someone sure as hell is making sure we get the bigger bites. The best we can do is recognize things have gone pear-shaped, push aside those that made it that way and fix the mess for the generations behind us so they don't have to worry as much as we did.

My only consolation is it is the year 2015 and we are doing ok now. Not good, not well off, and one bad day could kick us all the way back to the bottom but we are ok. That and those that caused this mess are slowly dying off, going to prison, or slowly being ousted from power. It is a long road to a better future but I think we can make it.

I would agree with that assertion and the assertion in the posts above me.

A lot of people seem to agree that the Boomers for a lack of a better way to say it, fucked up the economy situation for the generations after somewhere along the line. The problem wasn't awful then but it just so happened to grow and gotten worse over the years.

From my experiences the Boomers won't entirely admit to how they screwed things up though which is where the frustrations lie. I had a teacher who happened to be a Boomer in my last year of high school for my economy class (Yeah I know) constantly push this prerogative that the kids of today were irresponsible punks that can't handle responsibility. While I would agree to some degree as every generation has there fair share of immature, irresponsible idiots I would not necessarily agree that all of us can be grouped into that.

Hell someone else in my class even politely argued with him at one point that the problem didn't start with our generation and there generation was far from responsible either....

edited 23rd Sep '15 6:13:45 PM by Bleddyn