What everyone gets wrong about ‘millennial snowflakes’

Maybe many of the assumptions we make about Gen Y aren’t unique to this generation. Maybe they’re specific to young people in general, writes Amanda Ruggeri.

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The problem is, she’s not a millennial. She’s a baby boomer in her late 50s.

But when it comes to millennials, these analyses often go haywire. Before we know it, we’re not talking about how certain trends are squeezing all of society – and some groups in different ways than others. We’re talking about how millennials are lazy, entitled and really just need to work harder. (Even though, confusingly, they’re also workaholics). 

Step one: take bad data (or no data at all). Forget that what data you can find usually looks at today’s younger cohort in isolation, rather than comparing them to older generations when they were the same age. Step two: ignore – or play down – external factors and demographic changes that may have influenced any differences found. Step three: layer on stereotypes. Step four: wring hands. 

For example, are millennials really buying houseplants more than older generations? Even if so, are they really buying more than their grandparents did when they were young and setting up their own households? And if urbanisation is a factor, which the article nods to, could it be because people have fewer outdoor gardens in cities, so plants need to come indoors? Or is it really that millennials living in cities feel rootless, have voids in their hearts and “need something to nurture”?

Result: we think we know a lot about millennials, and about how different they are from any other generation, ever. And those things we think we know about them are so terrible, we hate them for it.

The problem is a lot of that knowledge is a little off.

Many of the stereotypes, and studies, come out of the US, where millennials now make up the largest living generation. (In Europe, on the other hand, they are a minority of all adults). Even within the US, the image of a typical millennial is taken from a narrow slice of the population: think of how Lena Dunham’s show Girls was held up as a send-up of general Generation Y tendencies – despite its narrow portrait of privileged, aimless and almost all white Brooklyn transplants.

But even within the US, where huge research firms like Pew and Gallup often indulge intergenerational fascinations, there’s more to the data than it seems at first glance. Take living arrangements. In the US in 2014, for the first time in 130 years, it became more common for those aged 18-34 to live with their parents than with a spouse or romantic partner. Jobless, lazy, entitled – the statistics fit the stereotype. 

But as the data shows, US millennials aren’t actually living with their parents in record numbers. Interestingly, that peak happened in 1940. (Those young people would have been members of what Americans now call the Greatest Generation). And while the economy is a factor, three out of four of those who live with their parents today aren’t “idle”: they have jobs or are in higher education. 

And although it’s tempting to infer an interpretation about commitment levels in that data (or to write a headline like, “Young Americans are killing marriage”), let’s not forget in the US it is baby boomers who not only have higher current rates of divorce than any other age group right now, but who also got divorced in unprecedented numbers when they were in their 20s and 30s. 

Remaining single isn’t the only demographic shift that’s changing how people live in the US. Another is the rising Asian and Hispanic population, which is more likely to live in multigenerational households. In fact, “Adjusted for demographic shifts, the share of young adults living in their parents’ home was actually lower in 2015 than in the pre-bubble years of the late 1990s. In other words, young people today are less likely to live with their parents than young people with the same demographics 20 years ago were,” writes economist Jed Kolko. 

Maybe many of the characteristics we like ascribing to millennials aren’t unique to this generation. Maybe they’re specific to young people of any generation. If only there was some way to see what older people had written about young people throughout the years. 

Fortunately, of course, there is. As the Atlantic put it a couple of years ago, “Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation”. It’s such a favourite trope, we’re even running out of different permutations of generation nicknames. The baby boomers were “the ‘me’ generation”. Millennials? “Generation Me”. 

But The Atlantic story barely scratches the surface. Unsurprisingly, older people have been criticising younger people for all of recorded history. More surprising – at least to me – was that many of these decades-old concerns exactly match the same raised today. 

“These were the special children of perfect parents, and they’ve had very little practice in dealing with failure or rejection,” US author Susan Littwin told the Toronto Star. “But fate has taken these bright charming middle-class aristocrats and dumped them into a rude, tight-fisted world. They tried independence, it didn’t work, and that sapped their confidence and sent them home crying.” 

Sounds just like millennial snowflakes, alright… except that she was speaking in 1989 and the generation she was describing was Gen X (or, as the headline calls them, “The no-name generation group born in the 60s”). 

The trend goes all the way back to the ancient world. Romans in their 20s and 30s were often written about negatively – and older Romans were the ones usually doing the writing, suggest the authors of Youth in the Roman Empire. But it went beyond criticism. “There was a great reluctance to entrust honourable offices and liturgies to young people – even greater than to do so to women, who were strictly forbidden by law to hold any office whatsoever but who nonetheless quite often served”, the historians write.

So, what about these much-maligned millennials? (Of which I am, of course, one. After all, I’m clearly oversensitive, and I do like a houseplant!). Are any of their characteristics really generation-related, not age-induced? 

One way to tell is to find out whether these characteristics remain the same as millennials age. Now that the older end of Generation Y is setting up camp in their mid-30s, millennials are… acting a lot like previous generations did.

If you’re wondering how those kombucha-swigging, selfie-obsessed millennials could have suddenly turned into responsible matriarchs and patriarchs, remember: people don’t just change as we get older. We change so much that, according to one recent long-term study, there is very little correlation at all between 77-year-olds and their teenaged selves. 

But sometimes, of course, it’s not that millennials are maturing. It’s that the evidence wasn’t so solid to begin with. After all, if you want to focus on millennial trends, you need to get them from studies that compare millennials to other generations – best of all, to other generations when they were the same age. 

Here are some of what those types of studies have unearthed: 

All three countries fear that millennials will be the first generation to be worse off than their parents – and they aren’t the only ones. 

When they do change their jobs, an international survey found they do so for the same pragmatic reasons – like making more money or having more responsibility – as Gen Xers and baby boomers. Only one in five millennials (21%) said they’d leave to follow their passion, more than baby boomers (16%) but less than Gen Xers (24%). 

So basically, millennials are the same as other generations were at their age. Only a little different. More global, maybe. More diverse. More progressive. Definitely poorer. But a unique group of monsters, the entitled wrath of which the world has ever seen before? I’m not so sure. But I’ll get back to you after I’ve taken a few more selfies.

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