Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
Millennials—why am I always reading about them? Why should I care? And why do they always seem to be eating brunch?
Hungry for truth,
Darcy
I don’t really like to stereotype large groups of people, except for Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, seniors, Southerners, et al. And not because I’m racist, ageist, or even locationist. But because stripping people of nuance and imputing broad group-identity characteristics to them as individuals helps cut them down to size, making them more journalistically manageable so I can track in the easy, prefab generalizations that professionally-trained perception brokers such as myself readily employ to make us seem more insightful than we actually are.
But I have noticed as a keen observer of the scene that Generation Y (or Generation Why?, as I’ve taken to calling them) has become insufferable. Not so much due to their own behavior, but because of the media child pornographers who fetishize them, paying an ungodly amount of attention to their every whim, utterance, and predilection. Studies that I’ve not yet located but that I’m fairly certain exist show that one out of every five newspaper stories is now about millennials. Not that millennials would know, since they don’t read newspapers, on account of being too busy gazing into their hand computers and/or storming their college administration buildings to demand that free speech be abolished.
Sure, it’s fun to play along with the stereotypes, and perpetuate that they’re lazy, entitled, have poor posture from hauling around all those participation trophies, and live in their parents’ basements—victims of a tight job market, a disappearing middle class, and older generations refusing to die and make way. Also, their beloved technology is automating entry-level jobs right out of existence. Though they should take heart, since some day, highly skilled occupations such as doctors, engineers, and faux-advice columnists will similarly be algorithmed into extinction. (Stay in school, kids—forever, if you can—since there’s no point in entering the job market. Even if Mr. Trump brings all those coal-mining jobs back, they’ll probably just invent an app to do them.)
But I like to think that for every lazy, entitled millennial, there’s a resourceful, industrious, conscientious one, too. In other words, despite reductive low-IQ trend stories suggesting otherwise, millennials are not some unified, monochromatic bloc. In fact, they’re not really all that convincing as a bloc at all, since demographers differ on when the Age of the Millennial even begins and ends. Depending on which parameters you use, millennials are now roughly 19-37 years old. And a 37 year old generally has a lot more in common with a 50 year old than they do a 19 year old. So like each generation before them, they encompass every hue and variation of the human animal. They are nihilistic and idealistic, ugly and beautiful, brilliant and dumb. Older generations will be relieved to know they are just like us, but with worse taste in music. (It’s unfair to blame something as horrible as EDM on youth alone.)
I try to be respectful toward millennials—at least to their faces—with an eye toward the day when one of them will become my boss and try to replace me with a younger version of myself. (Or a robot version of myself, who will be capable of procrastinating, dawdling, and taking three-hour lunches with much greater efficiency than I do now.) But my own seething resentments toward millennials stem from the fact that I am a Gen X’er. As a phony trend-story demographic, we received about two weeks of generational over-analysis in the early ’90s, somewhere between Douglas Coupland’s literary stardom and the release of Reality Bites. But then Kurt Cobain died, and everybody stopped caring, including us. If memory serves, we were supposed to be the apathetic generation, though I don’t care enough to look it up.
We Gen X’ers fading fast as cultural clickbait was a lucky break for narcissistic boomer journalists, who could then turn their attention back to what they cared about most: themselves. That is, until the Barney-watching brats known as millennials came along, eventually outnumbering Boomers, while retaining a similar bottomless appetite for self-examination. (Millennials now represent over a quarter of the country’s population.) And since they’ve come of age, we’ve all been subjected to non-stop, nutrition-free, BS stories about them—for a good decade and a half, now, with no end in sight.
Part of this is just good old-fashioned youth worship. It is not uncommon to fixate on the young. They represent promise and possibility. Their course is not yet fixed with unbreakable bad habits and failures. They are generally more attractive, and, on average, have less body fat. And they love taking pictures of themselves, so they are easily stalk-able on Instagram.
But fixating on youth is like trying to lasso the wind. For youth, like all things, passes, and fast. The young, like the old, are forever being replaced. Today’s Generation Why fever will someday soon become Generation Zzz fever. And I’ll have to pretend all over again to give a toss, as I read yet another bogus New York Times trend story about What It All Means. (Hint: It means we’re all getting older, and forever need to find new ways to amuse ourselves.)
I try to remind the millennial kids of this when I’m lecturing on campuses. I say, “Look, guys, I know I might appear old to you now, with my rotary-dial cellphone and ancient wisdom. But time is relative. In 70 or 80 years, we’ll both be equally dead. So choke that down your gullets and vocal-fry it.” That’s when they usually look up from their hand computers, call the campus police, and have me removed for misgendering them.
As for brunch, it is the one millennial stereotype that seems to be the truest. Millennials love them some brunch. Why is unclear. I suspect it’s because they grew up in a world of endless choices. And so when Sunday morning’s coming down, they have trouble deciding. Do I eat breakfast? Do I eat lunch? They freeze, incapacitated by self-doubt, and split the baby with brunch. Which isn’t a real meal. It’s breakfast, without the courage of its convictions. It’s lunch, with commitment-phobia.
Personally, I hate brunch, as I hate anything where eggs are present. I hate the look of eggs, the smell of eggs, the texture of them. They remind me too much of chicken abortions. And as a pro-lifer, I can’t participate in this senseless slaughter, at least not until the chickens become KFC-sized. But just to make sure I had brunch right, I emailed my twenty-something millennial niece, Adria, asking why all the brunching?
She wrote back: “Cures your hangover. We love champagne. It’s an acceptable reason to drink before noon. Shampoo effect (when you were already drunk the night before and have one drink at brunch….you’re automatically drunk again). I’m currently with all my sorority sisters in Boston and that’s all we could come up with while walking to brunch.”
And here I’d always thought that the best method to cure a hangover was to drink often enough that you never get one. So as you can see, I’m not just here to teach, I’m here to learn, even from dreaded millennials. I thank my niece for putting down her selfie stick long enough to show old Uncle Matt A Better Way. Maybe the children are our future.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
