Are the Millennials really the Me generation?

I don't know if I do that either as I am somewhat indifferent to most trends however I am discovering that there were a lot of changes in technology that I probably missed.

I have gotten constant dressing downs (I say that lightly as my parents are much more...brutal about it) for not keeping up with the times. I thought older adults would be happier that a kid could care less about getting into frivolous stuff just for the sake of it?

Or is that just yet another hypocrisy of the older generations showing.....

edited 12th Oct '15 4:38:11 PM by Bleddyn

I suppose you are right but sometimes I feel like I was missing out on a lot of things because I mostly stay inside rather and/or visit my parents rather than do lots of stuff although it isn't as good as I thought it was.

I kinda lost track of the tech advancements in recent years. For example, I didn't realize I can buy a Roomba clone for $100.

As for the Millennials being the "Me" generation, I'm absolutely stunned by the blatant entitlement of the so-called "social justice warriors" - sometimes they demand unreasonable, absurd things without even thinking of their effects and consequences for the society, reaching the Himalayas of hypocrisy. And when someone calls them on their bullshit, their usual defense is bleating how "oppressed" they are.

Seriously, I may be a cynical old bastard and I'm not even trying to deny it, but the behavior of those people is at least troubling if not worse. Particularly when their demands lead straight to oppressing the currently privileged groups for no reason other than petty vengeance.

The key to advancing social change is to ask for what's currently unthinkable. Eventually you get what is currently thinkable, and the boundaries of unthinkable slide a little further.

Not really quite that simple but that is a subject best saved for another thread.

It will be interesting to how the Millenials do when the reins of power finally pass over to them as a larger group.

Nothing is ever as simple as the people advocating social change have to convince themselves it is. If people were honest with themselves about how difficult it is to change millions of minds, nothing would get done.

Not what I meant and this isn't the thread for it.

I dread that day more than my own death. I pray the robots take over before that happens...

Jawel: you should have heard the gnashing of teeth at the thought of Gen X in power.

Well, here we are... No better or worse than anybody else. When we can get our Boomer parents to quit meddling.

It's always like this. <_< Just ask the various letters and curses of Ancient China, Egypt or Greece.

edited 5th Sep '16 3:53:13 AM by Euodiachloris

How do you respond to the statement about First World problems?

Every generation thinks those that follow it are spoiled to some effect.

Having dated millenials (and was married to one, too), I think many have unrealistic expectations of where they will be in life at any given age and grossly overestimate their capabilities.

First World Problems is when the world doesn't conform to their ideal that everything and everyone should take notice of them and tend to their every need and whim immediately. In its most distilled form it means, stop whining. The human condition can tolerate massive amounts of suffering, and let's not forget for every girl who is writing a Yelp review of Lyft service in her area, there's one who has served this country in some of the worst shitholes the ME has to offer.

I know I'm not a Social Justice Warrior, and I know I've got ambitions on my own, but my laziness, overuse of social media and memes and my gender and sexuality makes me feel like I'm part of the problem.

Me Too minus the social media. To be honest I found those activists whether SJ Ws or Anti SJ Ws are both poisonous and should not be taken too seriously. I am all for causes but it seems that they seem more interested (at least in internet) more flinging feces at each other than at the arguments.

edited 13th Nov '16 2:29:28 PM by GAP

Not all of us; my dad gave me beatings frequently and relentlessly, and made it 100% clear that I should regret wasting my life plotting others' misery.

Cross Post:

This is a question that has been on my mind: Are Safe Spaces inherently bad? I know they are guys who say that it is and they call other people out for being 'thin skinned' but is a wrong to have a safe space? What exactly is wrong with them?

Edit: Also, I had been watching some of those so called Rationalist videos and I might be getting older but I am realizing that some of those so called Rationals aren't really as rational as I thought.

In my experience, the people who complain the most about safe spaces are usually the most prone to wail and gnash teeth when their own designated safe spaces are, to their own minds, violated in some fashion. The idea that their areas of interest or passion are no longer walled gardens unsettles them; but quite often, they cannot precisely articulate why, whether because they lack the necessary self-awareness or because admitting that having their coddled view of Things As They Are jostled upsets them requires a vulnerability that is, in their eyes, an open invitation to ridicule. Dale Beran's article on the mindset of channer reactionaries is relevant here.

Honestly, how one defines a "safe space" is important here. Sometimes people need places to get away from negativity and tacit judgement, and in that capacity, I don't begrudge setting aside zones where certain the lines of decorum are tightened compared to the world beyond. I also feel that an institution which intends to serve and accommodate a wide array of different sorts of people and ideas should be able to deny a platform for incitement against a particular group or ideology while still fostering an environment in which heterogeneous views not predicated on, say, race hatred, may be openly debated without rancour, which is a fine line to walk.

That's a good article, but it does make one significant error.

The "left" and "right" aren't as outdated as some would like to think. It's a great assumption to pretend it's not a way to change the status quo while, go figure, it pretty much is. The left pretty much surrendered, abandoning their old class issues and going for the trendy new ones, while all stem from the same root problem: capitalism nowadays has degenerated in a way that could not be tempered by 20th century's social-democratic solutions. I read an article about the mindset of Swedes, who are brought up as a "modern", "open", "accepting" society, yet run on the same clannish, cliquish mindset as everyone else. They just smarted up enough not to say anything of it out loud. One of the people interviewed was a policeman who immigrated from Afghanistan as a kid. He talked a lot about how the new immigrants are unwilling to integrate and how the Swedes aren't really helping anything. Another interviewee, a social worker of Middle-Eastern descent, complained how the Swedish left willingly ignores systemic, religiously-motivated oppression using "cultural differences" as an excuse.

No wonder some people gravitate towards the other extreme when they realize that the "open, accepting society" turns out to be a sham.

Has anyone dealt with the so called "End of the Century" mentality in the past?

Yes. I graduated in the year 2000 and it was an odd time from certain perspectives. Lots of chatter about the end of an era and the start of a new one and all that hoopla.

Good thing we made it to the current year.

Quick question: what's the cutoff point for being a millenial (I was born in 98)

It really depends on how the generations are defined. Most generations have a bit of crossover between them. For example, take me. Depending on how my generation is defined, born in 1981, I am either a millennial-Gen Y, Gen X or Latch Key Kids, or more realistically part of those generational crossover years. They sometimes call the crossover group the "Oregon Trail Generation" or "Xennials". Which is kind of an odd spot to be because there are fragments of the past generation affecting how you grew up, but also a good bit of the next generation. You sort of are getting splashed by both.

You fall into a similar murky area where you are riding a not really defined gap of years which puts you in both, an unusual experience. The most generic terms are Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z. You fall into the Y/Z transition zone. It is pretty common to define generations in 20-year blocks but no one seems to really have settled on a specific start/end date. Gen Z is being largely defined by the technology birthed in the last 20-30 years such as the spread of the net in common use, mobile devices, netnews, and social media. I have seen some call it the Technology Generation, Post Millenials, Digital Generation, The Digital Natives came up in some article a while back, and even The Homeland Generation because of the aftermath of Sep 11th and its serious impacts on the US and the world over.

If it were up to me I would use the 20 years segments as the primary guidelines with a soft 5-year crossover with a transitional generation as there is always a period of transition and change. Even then I wouldn't write that in stone.

Don't sweat it too much. Do your best to live in the era until it changes and ride the wave.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Sep 12th 2018 at 6:18:54 AM

A word on "safe spaces" - we all have safe spaces. The rise of blogs and forms in the Turn of the Millennium allowed fanboys and trolls of all stripes to have their private little corners of the 'net to be unchallenged.

I grew up when educators said "you need to be challenged, you need to read the other side". Even my parents said "you need to see the other side".

Of course I had teachers who blew their stack when I dared to disagree with them, very conservative parents and friends in High School and College that got pissed because I dared not agree with their position or be into the thing they were into.

But I tired to see both sides, my favorite teachers/professors were those who forced me to look into both sides.

But what's happening now is that any speaker, student, book, website etc that makes the student body uncomfortable is now verboten. Christina Hoff-Summers is invited to speak and all hell broke lose. I like that there was a spot with play-doh and a therapy dog for the children students who were uncomfortable with her views. If you hate her, that's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. It's the mental midgets on the faculty and the student body that I despise - again, education is about having your opinions confronted.

A girl I dated was...I won't describe what her ex did to her...she had to retreat to a "safe space" when the world got too much to her. A dude in AIT did 3 tours in Iraq - an NCO found him curled up in the back of a HMMWV one night when the mock attacks got too much for him.

So a safe space isn't a bad thing.

It's when people think that just because words or ideas are offensive that they need to be 'protected from them—that's 1950's red-bating or "burn this book" style of thinking.

I don't read certain books, but I don't care if anyone else does. I do try to read blogs and news sites I disagree with -spoiler alert, I'm okay.

This idea that people - especially college students - need protection from ideas is absurd.

Now there are speakers (looking at you Alex Jones) who just incite violence. That's a given and that's just par for the course. A university or a school can't afford to have Alex Jones speak because the cost of security may be too high. That doesn't mean they should block infowars or that his material can't be seen in the classroom.

In a comment on Imgur.com, I mocked the "mature" tag and that any nudity seems to be banned (even some artistic pics). For a bunch of liberals, the mods were acting worse than my MAGA-hat wearing uncle.

When I mock safe-spaces, I'm not mocking a generation, I'm mocking the idea that anyone is so fragile that an idea can hurt them.

A word on generations:

The World War Two generation came out of that looking for a better life and scarred by the worst conflict in history. As a result, McCarthyism crept in on little flat feet along with redlining and other bits of racism and scare-mongering.

The Baby Boomers came in full of wonder and then said "tune in, turn on and drop out" (read: get high and party). They protested a war - only when their white middle-class butts might be drafted into fighting it ^note See Paul Begala's article "The Worst Generation" Civil right made great strides, sure, if you were hetrosexual. The flower children became the yuppies of the 80's.

Us Gen-Xers were an entitled lot. The Cold War ended, there was the dotcom boom. We became slackers - not involved until the news was bad, then going back to being uninvolved. We helped invent huge chucks of the internet, we brought disco back and carried the momentum that lead to same-sex marriage and the 1st black president. And we took out the loans that helped kickstart the Great Recession.

Millennials have absorbed the best and the worst of all these generation. They are the bulk of the post 9/11 military. No really, there are officers and senior enlisted that were born after the Wall Came down and there are recruits who were born after 9/11^note  ~*takes old lady pills.

Do Millennials ask for "free stuff"? Yes. So did Gen-X (we thought the boomers owed us), the Boomers (who mocked their parents and then expected them to pay for college) and the World War Two generation (who wanted a fair shake, as long as those non-whites were kept down).

Many hide in the Tumblr, Reddit and Image Board echo-chambers. There they get coddled and don't have to work about facts or different opinions.

But many took to the polls and voted, and ran for office, volunteered or did something.

But if you guys want to shake off the label, be better than us. Don't make the mistakes we made:

• Don't mistake volume for number. The KKK, Gordon Gecko-style Yuppies or slovenly slackers no more represent everyone of the past generations than 4chan and Tumblr snowflakes do yours.

• Reach across the isle - a lot of the best and most crafty politicians, leaders and activists worked within the system instead of screaming "FUUUUK EVERTHING!". Bring bi-partisnship back.

• Satire and ridicule should be aimed at the powerful, as Terry Pratchet said, when satire and ridicule are aimed at the weak it's bullying. That's how we got Trump.

• If you feel so p.o.'d at the world, DO SOMETHING. Don't slack off on your studies or tune out the world.

• Just because the otherside has a point, don't try to silence debate or use the rules against your opponent.

Are Millennials the "me" generation? Not really when compared to the other generations. Every cohort wants to look out for themselves.

We screwed up, we missed several opportunities to make it right, be better than us. The power is going to be in your hands and that will show us that you're no "me" generation.

Edited by TairaMai on Sep 12th 2018 at 7:38:10 PM