POLITICO MAGAZINE — To be fair, many of these pieces do offer some useful nuggets—you just to have to read them like you’re sifting for gold in a river of sludge. There is some value in understanding how the shared experiences of different age cohorts shape intergenerational dynamics and the social fabric of their times. Teenagers with cell phones and social media accounts are annoying (but so are parents with cell phones and social media accounts). Every politician and consultant over 40 should be forced to read Reason’s passages on communicating with people who don’t remember the Cold War: It is insane to tell us that politics boils down to a choice between Ronald Reagan’s version of American capitalism and Soviet-style communism.
But it’s hard to tease out useful generalizations about a diverse group of 80 million people, and much easier to shoot from the hip while cherry-picking the findings of PR-hungry market research firms. After all, it doesn’t seem to matter what you serve up, if you put “millennial” in the title, people will keep on clicking. So perhaps it’s not surprising that people over 40 have badly failed to decode America’s youth. Much like Dan, older pundits don’t really want to understand us anyways; they want to tell us who we are, and receive validation in return—in the form of votes, or book sales or acknowledgement of their moral superiority. Does this make them feel better about the world and where it’s headed?
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