Typically I’m a big fan of The Washington Post, D.C.’s most widely circulated newspaper. They’ve got some great writers and do some really good blogging online (i.e., WonkBlog), but today I came across a post from them claiming ‘Millennials’ don’t exist and the entire generational identity of being a Millennial is a lie, and that rustled my jimmies.
Firstly, I came across the post seeking to eviscerate millennials titled ‘Your generational identity is a lie‘ via a glorious tweet from @SavedYouAClick where they so cheekily pointed out that WaPo can’t even spell ‘Millennials’ correctly, let alone discredit an entire generation’s existence:
In his article seeking to unravel the fibers of Millennials’ very being, Philip Bump makes a few good points:
Born in 1988? You have been told that you’re a Millennial or, a decade ago, that you were in Generation Y.
Sure, it was pretty obnoxious for us older Gen-Y people to accept that we’re now ‘Millennials’, but that’s our own goddamn burden, and it’s not for you to pretend like it wasn’t a cognizant decision on our parts to align with the generation to which we most represent: Millennials.
We obsess over our generations the way we obsess over our horoscopes, recognizing that it’s a dumb approximation of who we are but mining every description for the details that we think are correct. The advent of the clickbait Web has meant that we’re awash with “You know you’re a Millennial if” or “22 things only Gen Xers will remember” nonsense. And we mean “nonsense” in two ways: Those stories are usually fluff, and from a demographic perspective, the idea that Generation X is a set generation is nonsense.
Uhhhhh, exsqueeze me? If by ‘we obsess over’ do you mean that only the media obsesses over this? Have you ever seen an argument on the street where someone’s identity was wounded and they were forced to defend themselves as party of a certain generation? Nobody DESPERATELY needs to be a millennial, the media needs them to identify with that generation because it’s easier to report news and comment on trends when you’re lumping people into categories.
“The Baby Boom is distinguished by a dramatic increase in birth rates following World War II and comprises one of the largest generations in U.S. history,” Hogan wrote. “Unlike the baby boom generation, the birth years and characteristics for other generations are not as distinguishable and there are varying definitions used by the public.” So the Census Bureau will put together numbers for Boomers, because that’s a real, demographic generation. It doesn’t release numbers on “Millennials” because you made that term up.
WE DIDN’T MAKE UP ANYTHING. Again, the media NEEDS the term ‘Millennials’ to exist so they can lump anyone of a certain age into categories to inflate crises or report on emerging trends. It’s easier for writers and reporters to say ‘Millennials’ than it is for them to say ‘All men and women, born between the ages of 1981 and the early 2000’s, give or take a few’.
By slapping the term ‘millennials’ onto our generation advertising execs all across the world were able to speak more competently about the age demographic to which they’re serving up impressions and ads online.
“Right now, we’re in a kind of a unique period where young adults are undergoing some rapid demographic changes,” PRB’s Mather said. “They’re getting married much later; fertility rates are dropping. If some of those changes become long-term, I can see that today’s young adults might fall into some new cohort that we can define based on their unique characteristics.”
Meaning that Millennials might join Boomers in being a defined group that even the stodgy Census Bureau sees fit to recognize. And wouldn’t that just be like the Millennials? That group, born between January 1, 1981 and December 31, 2003, is always so desperate for attention.
The smugness of that last line makes me want to jump through my computer and slap some humility into that man. Does he not realize that he’s the asshole who sat down to blog for attention? In many ways he’s trying to troll the trolling generation, only his argument never takes a strong foothold and he continues to ramble on about how millennials don’t exist.
You know what else didn’t exist until we fucking said it did? The United States of America. That’s right, we told the British to spoon tea from our arses because we’re a goddamn free nation, and just like that we came to exist. So the entire argument of ‘millennials only exist because they say so’ holds no weight, as that city of Washington D.C. where the blog of ‘Your Generational Identity Is A Lie‘ was penned wouldn’t exist in its current form had we not spoke up and said we have the right to exist….. /endrant