Talkin' Bout My Generation

Generational Fallacies Never Go Out of Style

I hate the Verve Pipe. Well, not hate, but I certainly don’t enjoy them. I’ve seen them live. They were fine. Brian Vander Ark was right about one thing - when I was young I really did know everything. The wisdom of youth should have been tattooed on my forehead.

Generational fallacies show up in the workplace. In Science. In culture. They probably show up in your lexicon. Have you ever said something about kids these days? Have you ever complained about Gen Z or A art? What about their work habits? Parenting?

That’s not to say that generational differences don’t exist. Shared experiences at points in your development are a very real thing. I exist in the “unluckiest generation.”

Millennials, members of the generation born between 1981 and 1996, have been dubbed the “unluckiest generation” regarding financial timing. They are coming of age during economic instability and macro environment changes that have drastically affected their opportunities.

Our shared traumas are many. Our earliest memory tends to be the Challenger explosion - at least for the elder statesmen of the millennials. Or maybe Baby Jessica. Definitely a lot of us remember the Berlin Wall coming down, though that wasn’t a trauma. It did give credence to Reagan and his abhorrent politics though.

We’ve been under siege from a right wing fascist assault our whole lives. It’s a problem globally. The fairness doctrine was repealed in 87, so a war had been waged on media our whole lives.

The LA Riots happened on the verge of my 10th birthday. In high school? The Dot-Com Bubble Burst. Columbine kicked off a wave of school shootings. We saw two wars in Iraq, once in our childhood and once as we became adults. I had a fear of being drafted in college.

I remember walking out of my dorm room into our shared living room and seeing the news. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. You might think that would be the biggest event of our lifetime. And we really thought it would be. The moment that fascism in the US was looking for. It’s hard to fathom, but Nixon would be a liberal by modern Republican standards.

After I graduated from college, I got a job in telecommunications. Things were on the mend. We survived the dotcom bubble bursting. We had hope and change, our first black President. He was young too.

Neo-Liberal Obama is more conservative than you might believe in American politics. Let me be clear, this is not a “both sides are the same” rally cry. Far from it. Nor an indictment of voting Democrat. Ideally the modern Democratic party would be our right wing party.

I had a great job in 2007. I was making 3k a WEEK in commission in 2008. That’s 156k AFTER taxes. I was a bit more conservative back then too. I’m not too proud to admit that my politics were clouded by my personal success. If you’re following along with this broad history lesson, you probably know what’s coming next. Something I have never, ever truly recovered from financially. Sub-prime mortgages caused the housing market bubble to collapse.

I went from thousands a week to hundreds. Personally, I was able to leverage this generational crisis. I bought a house with NO money down and I was given a tax credit that allowed me to pay off my student loan debt. I was extremely fortunate.

People ages 30 to 38 account for nearly $4 trillion of total household debt in the U.S. For millennials, that's a 27% increase in debt compared to 2019 — a steeper hike than any other generation, Yahoo Finance reporter Akiko Fujita told CBS News.

Millennials are Adults, you know?

If you’re wondering why millennials aren’t having kids, well… There’s a lot of other things in our cultural make-up that are essentially lies we were sold. Parental advisories, PG-13, D.A.R.E, abstinence based sex education and the Easter Bunny. Ironically, the assault of the “moral majority” has lead to a rise in atheism.

Overall, 35% of adult Millennials (Americans born between 1981 and 1996) are religiously unaffiliated. Far more Millennials say they have no religious affiliation compared with those who identify as evangelical Protestants (21%), Catholics (16%) or mainline Protestants (11%).

We’re currently in a shared collective trauma. Most Generation Z have no recollection of 9/11, in the way that the challenger explosion is at best a hazy memory for millennials. Covid-19 is going to have lasting impacts we can’t even begin to fathom.

For a generation already having children later due to economic stressors, Covid is another layer in the baby bust cake.

Nearly every aspect of childbirth and child rearing is made exponentially more difficult by the pandemic, from the experience of giving birth to the struggle to balance work with 24/7 childcare.

The right’s reaction to declining birthrates in millennials has been waging a war on reproductive rights. Another interesting development is in the politics of millennials.

Millennials are more likely to prefer socialism and communism than the rest of the country. Fifty-nine percent of all respondents chose capitalism as their preferred arrangement, compared to 34 percent who said socialism, 4 percent fascism and 3 percent communism.

Troubling, though, is the 4% who prefer fascism. In much the same way that fascists infiltrated the church or music scenes, they have weaponized the internet.

Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine the combination of street violence meeting internet memes. But experts say that the “alt-right” have stormed mainstream consciousness by weaponizing irony, and by using humour and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents.

It’s having an impact on Gen Z. They have been dubbed the “School Shooting Generation.”

Something I’m not particularly proud of - in middle school a friend and I fantasized about shooting up our school. How we would do it. That was years before two children made a horrible decision fostered by right wing rhetoric that the NRA managed to spin.

This might feel a bit fatalistic, but actually there is hope for a progressive future:

Millennials remain the most liberal and Democratic of the adult generations. They continue to be the most likely to identify with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic. In addition, far more Millennials than those in older generational cohorts favor the Democratic candidate in November’s midterm congressional elections.

In fact, in an early test of midterm voting preferences (in January), 62% of Millennial registered voters said they preferred a Democratic candidate for Congress in their district this fall, which is higher than the shares of Millennials expressing support for the Democratic candidate in any midterm dating back to 2006, based on surveys conducted in midterm years.

Kids these days, am I right?

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