People Don’t Hate Millennials

I know, I know. Millennials have been written to death. But I’m going to make like the millennial I am and say it’s my duty, as the voice of my generation (avoice of a generation?), to proclaim: You don’t hate millennials; you hate the 21^st century.

Millennials, those born roughly between 1980 and 2000, are infamously narcissistic,entitled, lazy, arrogant, wild, politically disengaged suckers who will fall for any weird fad. But except for that last one, which is totally true, these clichés are silly and easily debunked. Yet people keep spitting out condescending explainers and bitter grumbles about “millennial” propensities like slacktivism, iPhone addiction, and irony culture.

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But new research published in Psychological Science shows that over the years, people across generations have become more individualistic and less trustful of institutions and political leaders. That makes a lot more sense than imagining one group changing with the times while the rest somehow remain unaltered, as though they exist in a cultural vacuum. If you’re a boomer or Gen Xer, you’re probably doing and feeling the same things, at least to some extent: It’s definitely not just millennials I see ignoring the world, enraptured by their screens on the train. And maybe you hate it when you look up and realize you’ve spent an hour doing nothing on the Internet. And maybe that same day, you’ll criticize millennials for doing it because you wish we’d all just stop.