Where Millennials Come From
And why we insist on
blaming them for it.
A generation has
inherited a world without being able to live in it.
Imagine, as I often
do, that our world were to end tomorrow, and that alien researchers many years
in the future were tasked with reconstructing the demise of civilization from
the news. If they persevered past the coverage of our President, they would soon
identify the curious figure of the millennial as a suspect. A composite image
would emerge, of a twitchy and phone-addicted pest who eats away at beloved
American institutions the way boll weevils feed on crops. Millennials, according to recent
headlines, are killing hotels, department stores, chain restaurants, the car
industry, the diamond industry, the napkin industry, homeownership, marriage,
doorbells, motorcycles, fabric softener, hotel-loyalty programs, casinos,
Goldman Sachs, serendipity, and the McDonald’s McWrap. à[Demand Shift:
Millennials].
The idea that millennials are capriciously wrecking the landscape
of American consumption grants quite a bit of power to a group that is still on
the younger side. Born in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, millennials are
now in their twenties and thirties. But the popular image of this
generation—given its name, in 1987, by William
Strauss and Neil Howe—has long been connected with the notion of disruptive
self-interest. Over the past decade, that connection has been codified by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at
San Diego State University, who writes about those younger than herself with an
air of pragmatic evenhandedness and an undercurrent of moral alarm. (An
article adapted from her most recent book, “iGen,” about the cohort after
millennials, was published in the September issue of The Atlantic with
the headline “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”
It went viral.) In
2006, Twenge published “Generation Me: Why
Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More
Miserable Than Ever Before.” The book’s cover emblazoned the
title across a bare midriff, a flamboyant illustration of millennial
self-importance, sandwiched between a navel piercing and a pair of low-rise
jeans.
According to Twenge, millennials are “tolerant, confident,
open-minded, and ambitious, but also disengaged, narcissistic, distrustful, and
anxious.” She presents a barrage of statistics in support of this assessment,
along with anecdotal testimonials and pop-cultural examples that neatly confirm
the trends she identifies. (A revised edition, published in 2014, mentions the HBO
show “Girls” six times.) Twenge acknowledges that the generation has come of
age inside an “economic squeeze created by underemployment and rising costs,”
but she mostly explains millennial traits in terms of culture and choice.
Parents overemphasized self-esteem and happiness, while kids took their cues
from an era of diversity initiatives, decentralized authority, online avatars,
and reality TV. As a result, millennials have become irresponsible and fundamentally
maladjusted. They “believe that every job will be fulfilling and then can’t
even find a boring one.” They must lower their expectations and dim their
glittering self-images in order to become functional adults.
This argument has a conservative appeal, given its focus on the
individual rather than on the structures and the conditions that govern one’s
life. Twenge wonders, “Is the upswing in minority kids’ self-esteem an
unmitigated good?” and then observes, “Raising children’s self-esteem is not
going to solve the problems of poverty and crime.” It’s possible to reach such
moralizing conclusions even if one begins with the opposite economic premise. In “The Vanishing American
Adult,” published in May, Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska,
insists that we live in a time of generalized “affluenza,” in which “much of
our stress now flows not from deprivation but, oddly, from surplus.”
Millennials have “far too few problems,” he argues.
Sasse chastises parents for allowing their kids to succumb to the
character-eroding temptations of contemporary abundance and offers suggestions
for turning the school-age generation into the sort of hardworking, financially
independent grownups that the millennials have yet to become.
The image of millennials has darkened since Strauss and Howe walked the beat: in their
2000 book, “Millennials Rising,” they claimed that the members of this
surging generation were uniquely earnest, industrious, and positive. But
the decline in that reputation is hardly surprising. Since the
nineteen-sixties, most generational analysis has revolved around the
groundbreaking idea that young people are selfish. Twenge’s term for
millennials merely flips an older one, the “me generation,” inspired by a 1976 New
York cover story by Tom Wolfe about the baby boomers.
(The voluble Wolfe, born in 1930, is a member of the silent generation.) Wolfe
argued that three decades of postwar economic growth had produced a mania for
“remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . .
and observing, studying, and doting on it.” The fear of growing selfishness
has, in the forty years since, only increased.
That fear is grounded in concrete changes: the story of American
self-interest is a continuous one that nonetheless contains major institutional
and economic shifts. Adapting to those shifts does tend to produce certain
effects. I was born smack in the middle of the standard millennial range, and
Twenge’s description of my generation’s personality strikes me as broadly
accurate. Lately, millennial dreams tend less toward global fame and more
toward affordable health insurance, but she is correct that my cohort has grown
up under the influence of novel and powerful incentives to focus on the self.
If for the baby boomers self-actualization was a conscious project, and if for
Gen X—born in the sixties and seventies—it was a mandate to be undermined,
then for millennials it’s more like an atmospheric condition: inescapable,
ordinary, and, perhaps, increasingly toxic. A generation has inherited a world
without being able to live in it. How did that happen? And why do so many
people insist on blaming them for it?
“Kids These Days:
Human Capital and the Making of Millennials,” by Malcolm Harris (Little,
Brown), is the first major accounting of the millennial generation written by
someone who belongs to it. Harris is twenty-eight—the book’s cover announces his birth
year next to a sardonic illustration of elementary-school stickers—and he has
already rounded the bases of young, literary, leftist media: he is a writer and
editor for the online magazine the New Inquiry; he has written for Jacobin and n+1.
He got his first taste of notoriety during Occupy Wall Street: shortly after
activists settled in at Zuccotti Park, he wrote a blog post for Jacobin in
which he claimed to have “heard unconfirmed reports that Radiohead is planning
a concert at the occupation this week.” He set up an e-mail account using the
name of the band’s manager and wrote to Occupy organizers, conveying the band’s
interest in performing. Later, in a piece for Gawker titled “I’m the Jerk Who Pranked Occupy Wall Street,” he explained
that his goal was to get more people to the protest, and expressed disdain for
the way the organizers responded. (Fooled by his e-mail, they held a press
conference and confirmed the band’s plan to appear.)
Harris’s anatomizing of his peers begins with the star stickers
that, along with grade-school participation trophies, so fascinate Sasse,
Twenge, and other writers of generational trend pieces. “You suck, you still
get a trophy” is how Twenge puts it, describing contemporary K through five as
an endless awards ceremony. Harris, on the other hand, regards elementary
school as a capitalist boot camp, in which children perform unpaid labor, learn
the importance of year-over-year growth through standardized testing, and get
accustomed to constant, quantified, increasingly efficient work. The two
descriptions are not as far apart as one might think: assuring kids that
they’re super special—and telling them, as Sasse does, that they have a duty to
improve themselves through constant enrichment—is a good way to get them to
cleave to a culture of around-the-clock labor. And conditioning them to seek
rewards in the form of positive feedback—stars and trophies, hearts and
likes—is a great way to get them used to performing that labor for free.
My memories of childhood—in a suburban neighborhood in west
Houston that felt newly hatched, as open as farmland—are different, breezy and
hot and sunlit. I attended, mostly on scholarship, a Southern Baptist school
attached to one of the largest megachurches in America, and elementary school
seemed like the natural price of admission for friends, birthday parties, and
long summers full of shrieking, unsupervised play. (The very young aren’t much
for picking up on indoctrination techniques; the religious agitprop felt
natural enough, too.) But some kind of training did kick in around the time I
entered high school, when I began spending fourteen-hour days on campus with
the understanding that I needed to earn a scholarship to a good college.
College, of course, is where the millennial lounges around on lush green quads,
spends someone else’s money, insists on “safe spaces,” protests her school’s
heteronormative core curriculum, and wages war on her professors if she
receives a grade below an A. I did the first two of those things, thanks to the
Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia. I also took six
classes a semester, worked part time, and crammed my schedule with clubs and
committees—in between naps on the quad and beers with friends on my porch couch
and long meditative sessions figuring out what kind of a person I was going to
be.
Most undergraduates don’t have such a luxurious and debt-free
experience. The majority of American college students never live on campus;
around a third go to community college. The type of millennial that much of the
media flocks to—white, rich, thoughtlessly entitled—is largely unrepresentative
of what is, in fact, a diverse and often downwardly mobile group. (Millennials
are the first generation to have just a fifty-fifty chance of being financially
better off than their parents.) Many millennials grew up poor, went to crummy
schools, and have been shuttled toward for-profit colleges and minimum-wage
jobs, if not the prison system. (For-profit colleges, which disproportionately
serve low-income students, account for roughly a tenth of undergraduates, and
more than a third of student-loan defaults.) Average student debt has doubled
just within this generation, surging from around eighteen thousand dollars at
graduation for the class of 2003 to thirty-seven thousand for the class of
2016. (Under the tax plan recently passed by House Republicans, the situation
worsens for student borrowers and their families: that bill eliminates the
deduction on student-loan interest and voids the income-tax exemption for
tuition benefits.)
A young college graduate, having faithfully followed the American
path of hard work and achievement, might now find herself in a position akin to
a homeowner with negative equity: in possession of an asset that is worth much
less than what she owes. In these conditions, the concept of self-interest
starts to splinter. For young people, I suspect, the idea of specialness looks
like a reward but mostly functions as punishment, bestowing on us the idea
that there is no good way of existing other than constantly generating returns.
Harris and I were born in the same year, and we were in college
when the financial crisis hit, in 2008. As I approached graduation, I watched
news footage of crumple-faced families carrying boxes out of foreclosed houses,
followed by shots of expensively dressed professionals walking to work at their
bailed-out banks. I joined the Peace Corps, and was assigned to Kyrgyzstan.
Shortly after I returned to the U.S., in 2011, the grungy, amorphous Occupy
movement started blooming; protesters were railing against the impunity of “the
one per cent” in Houston, as they were in dozens of other cities across the
country. Suspended in the amber of my temporary underemployment, I spent long
afternoons hanging around Hermann Square, downtown, making small talk with libertarian
lawyers, pan-activists in bandannas and hiking sandals, and a lot of people in
my own demographic—millennials coming into their political discontent.
That September, Occupy set up its makeshift camp in lower
Manhattan. On the first day of October, some seven hundred demonstrators were
arrested and charged with disorderly conduct as they walked on the roadway of
the Brooklyn Bridge, blocking traffic. Harris was one of them. He argued, along
with many others, that the police had led the group onto the bridge and then
arrested them. In 2012, as the case was going forward, his Twitter archive was
subpoenaed. Twitter resisted the order, but eventually provided the tweets,
which made it clear that Harris had heard the police warning protesters to stay
off the roadway. (“They tried to stop us,” he’d tweeted.) He was sentenced to
six days of community service. These Occupy stories don’t make it into “Kids
These Days”—Harris leaves out his personal experience altogether, keen to focus
on structural analysis rather than anecdote. He does observe, though, in a
discussion of social media, that “Coke tastes good even once you’ve seen what
it can do to a rusty nail.” He continues to make frequent use of Twitter.
When Twenge first
published “Generation Me,” social media had not yet become ubiquitous. Facebook
was limited to colleges and high schools, Twitter hadn’t formally launched, and
Instagram didn’t exist. But the millennial narrative was already taking its
mature shape, and social media fit into it seamlessly: the narcissism of status
updates, the shallow skimming of shiny surfaces, the inability to sit still.
One might therefore conclude that the story of generational self-centeredness
is so flexible as to have no real definition—it can cover anything, with a little
stretching. But there is another possibility: that social media feeds on the
same conditions that have made millennials what they are.
“Over the last decade, anxiety has overtaken depression as the most common
reason college students seek counseling services,” the Times Magazine noted
in October. Anxiety, Harris argues, isn’t just an unfortunate by-product of an
era when wages are low and job security is scarce. It’s useful: a constant
state of adrenalized agitation can make it hard to stop working and encourage
you to think of other aspects of your life—health, leisure, online
interaction—as work. Social media provides both an immediate release for that
anxiety and a replenishment of it, so that users keep coming back. Many jobs of
the sort that allow millennials to make sudden leaps into financial safety—in
tech, sports, music, film, “influencing,” and, occasionally, journalism—are
identity-based and mercurial, with the biggest payoffs and opportunities going
to those who have developed an online following. What’s more, cultivating a “personal brand” has become a matter of
prudence as well as ambition: there is a powerful incentive to be publicly
likable at a time when strangers routinely rate and review one another over
minor transactions—cat-sitting, assembling ikea furniture, sharing a car ride or a spare
bedroom—and people are forced to crowdsource money for their medical bills.
Young people have curled around their economic situation “like
vines on a trellis,” as Harris puts it. And, when humans learn to think of
themselves as assets competing in an unpredictable and punishing market, then
millennials—in all their anxious, twitchy, phone-addicted glory—are exactly
what you should expect. The disdain that so many people feel for Harris’s and
my generation reflects an unease about the forces of deregulation,
globalization, and technological acceleration that are transforming everyone’s
lives. (It does not seem coincidental that young people would be criticized for
being entitled at a time when people are being stripped of their entitlements.)
Millennials, in other words, have
adjusted too well to the world they grew up in; their perfect
synchronization with economic and cultural disruption has been mistaken for the
source of the disruption itself.
This idea runs parallel, in some ways, to the assessments of
Twenge and Sasse and other conservative commentators. But Harris’s conclusions
are precisely the opposite of theirs: instead of accommodating the situation
even further, he argues, kids should revolt. “Either we continue the trends
we’ve been given and enact the bad future, or we refuse it and cut the knot of
trend lines that defines our collectivity. We become fascists or
revolutionaries, one or the other.” It’s a near-apocalyptic vision. But the
polarization that permeates American politics—stemming, in part, from a sense
that extreme measures are necessary to render our world livable—is especially
evident among millennials, some disaffected portion of whom form much of the
racist alt-right, while a largerswath has adopted the leftist politics shared
by Harris. In the 2016
Presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders won more young votes than Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump combined.
“The newfound popularity of socialism among millennials is an
alarming trend,” Sasse writes in “The Vanishing American Adult.” He provides a
syllabus that he hopes will steer people away from such thinking, and toward an
intellectually mature adulthood, and he dutifully includes “The Communist
Manifesto,” so that his hypothetical pupils can properly grasp how wrong it is.
It seems more likely that a young person who opened “The Communist Manifesto”
tomorrow would underline the part about personal worth being reduced to
exchange value and go off to join the Democratic Socialists of America, which
has grown fivefold in the last year. One of its members, a Marine Corps veteran
named Lee Carter, was elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates in November. He
was born in 1987. “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of
the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” the critic and theorist
Fredric Jameson wrote, fourteen years ago. These days, the kids find it easy
enough to imagine both. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017,
issue, with the headline “Killing It.”
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