Tomi Lahren got slammed for saying that millennials don’t like labels – but she wasn’t wrong. Ironically, the one label millennials dislike the most is the millennial label itself.
In fact, a new study by the marketing agency ZAK shows that three quarters of those under 30 say the term does not represents them and more than a third say they don’t even know what it means.
Now, The Telegraph is reporting on one simple fact that shouldn’t be surprising to many. The difference of a decade doesn’t change who we are as people.
Mark Ritson, marketing professor at Melbourne Business School & Singapore Management University, told researchers that “brains don’t change in a decade. We’re still driven by the same goals as our ancestors.”
This truly should come as no surprise. Human nature is human nature. Survival of the fittests has been around for centuries and isn’t going away anytime soon. We may consume differently — like avocado toast and microbrews — and interact differently — digitally instead of face-to-face — but we are still biologically the same as our ancestors.
It turns out that millennials have been stereotyped incorrectly. Perhaps the worst character trait assigned to the millennial label is that millennials are lazy. It encompasses too many groups in an age where technology, culture, and opinion can change rapidly and on a global scale – something other generations haven’t dealt with. Just keeping up with the changing times requires effort. In fact, studies show that the millennial generation is incredibly hard working – just look at how many of us have a side hustle in addition to our full-time job.
Professor Cary Cooper, of Manchester business school, argues that the term “millennial” has become meaningless because it encompassed too many different groups; I agree.
There is a wide-ranging group of people born between the 1980s and the late 1990s. Perhaps, in addition to being hard working, that’s why older millennials don’t feel like millennials… because they’re simply older than 90s babies. They didn’t grow up with the same technology younger millennials did and experienced much of childhood before the economic downturn. This does shape one’s outlook on life.
Professor Cooper gets it – you can’t label an entire generation and give an accurate representation of what they’re all about. The label especially doesn’t work when it’s used in such a generally disparaging way. Boomers are often considered industrious and hardworking. Generation X, the MTV generation, is credited with being entrepreneurial and artistic. Millennials get shafted, though. Millennials are generalized as lazy and needy.
As the french writer Alexandre Dumas said, “all generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”
Perhaps one of the most dangerous results of the “lazy generation” generalization is the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to feedback between belief and behavior. As silly as this sounds, when you tell someone enough times that they won’t amount to much, you’re bound to see negative results.
Coupled with the self-fulfilling prophecy is the environment in which millennials have grown up.
Why don’t millennials settle down? Why don’t they have complete faith and loyalty to companies they work for? Why don’t they interpret the world the same as other generations, especially if our brains all operate the same way?
Perhaps it is because the world isn’t all that it was promised to be.
“Young people were shaped by watching their parents divorce, lessening their enthusiasm for romantic commitment, and watching older family members be laid off during the financial crisis, reducing their faith in employers,” Cooper concludes.
In short, millennials don’t want to end up just like their parents: unemployed and holding out hope that social security will be held afloat by generations younger. Perhaps that’s the only broad brush-stroke with which you can paint millennials.
Throwing all millennials into the same basket does a sincere disservice in many ways, especially to the young people who are working hard to live a responsible and successful life, disproving the stereotype they’ve been assigned.
