We live in an age of ceaseless generational analysis. Among certain classes, especially business elites, it is considered a sign of profound insight to speak only in terms of youth and its consumer preferences. The jargon once endemic to Ad Age (which coined the term “Generation Y”) now peppers style sections and business books, earnest organizing meetings and talk shows, such that no one of any age can open a newspaper or a website without reading about the “millennials” — people born between 1982 and 2004 — and their doings, interests, and needs.It seems not to matter to the proliferation of writing about millennials that so much of it has been internally contradictory. In the year 2000, the sinister David Brooks said that stats suggested the boomers were raising friendly, sociable, and altruistic kids. In 2012, Jean Twenge at the Atlantic retaliated with fresh stats that revealed them to be inveterate narcissists profoundly uninterested in social problems. “Politicians: Millennials Won’t Vote Because They Hate You” declaimed Bloomberg, prompting an older Huffington Post correspondent to wonder ruefully, “Millennials: Why Do They Hate Us?” All this despite evidence that millennials vote in the same numbers as young people of previous generations. Millennials, according to Business Insider, are disaffected with workplace authority and value flexibility, but an IBM study written up in the Washington Post suggests that in this respect, too, millennials are indistinguishable from other generations. Reading around, you can form a picture of millennials either as great disrupters, creating massive discontinuities in civilization, or as essentially the same as everyone else. In this way generational analysis resembles astrology: ascribe any quality to a certain sign and your claims are guaranteed to be neither true nor false.
It’s easy, of course, to make fun of generational analysis. For many years generations have been the favored category of social pseudoscientists, not to mention marketing gurus and breathless lifestyle journalists. But much of the oxymoronic character of millennial-speak derives from its pairing claims to statistical rigor with an utterly unscientific fondness for making wild predictions. Behind this is a confusion of logic, according to which the present desires of humans create the future: once you know what young people want, you know what tomorrow will be like (and how to make a buck off it). Institutions, classes, and environments play hardly any role in this view. One influential example is Richard Florida’s theory of the “creative class,” which imagined the salvation of postindustrial cities resulting from young people choosing to live in them. If millennials like cities, the thinking went, then cities will be rejuvenated. In 2012, Florida sheepishly qualified some points of this theory in a new introduction to 2002’s The Rise of the Creative Class, but his original thesis was so persuasive that it’s still regarded as common knowledge. Meanwhile, the cities that banked on this kind of thinking, like St. Louis or Baltimore, have foundered spectacularly.
The abundance of such lazy analysis may seem reason enough to dismiss “generations” as a meaningful tool for understanding history. What are generations, one might say, but an ingenious marketing rubric we have come to treat as natural? But the fact remains that generations capture everyday divides that everyone recognizes intuitively. People are born into spans of time, into worlds that precede them and survive them. If it makes sense to segment history into periods, it follows that those periods have something to do with the people growing up and dying within them. (...)
But millennials grew up not self-making but defined and redefined by people several decades older. When the term was coined in 1991 by demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe, a great deal of hope was placed in millennials (the oldest of whom were around 8, and not especially responsive to polls). Nurtured by caring parents, Strauss and Howe argued, this new generation would be civic-minded and ethical. Not only would they be less interested in TV than their parents, but “what programs Millennials do watch will be sanitized and laden with moral lessons.” This hopeful portrait was a reaction to its time. It was the close of the Reagan era, when the once socially minded boomers were seen (even by themselves) as having become irremediable narcissists, and twentysomethings were portrayed as Patrick Bateman–type sociopaths. A crazy messianism attached itself to the youth: millennials were going to save this involutionary, belligerent, and vacuous country from itself. And in the years that followed, proliferating urban farms and community-supported agriculture and bike-shares — all faithfully chronicled in GOOD, the echt-millennial, nonprofit-loving magazine of the larger, for-profit Good Worldwide Inc. — began, if you squinted and cherry-picked, to prove the point. The religious fervor peaked with the election of Obama in 2008 — proof, it seemed, that millennials would change the world (66 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds who voted voted for Obama, though nearly half that group declined to vote at all).
Subsequently, the narrative changed. As the economy went into free fall, the fascination with millennials reached a new intensity, and the think pieces proliferated. And, increasingly, the think pieces disagreed. Who are the millennials, and how do we explain their behavior? What do they stand for? (As if 100 million people ever stood for a uniform thing.) The answers differed greatly depending on the writer and the poll, but the pitch of anxiety was constant. Much of the obsession came from the business world — from the older, wealthy, mostly white decision makers who longed for a master key to understanding the needs and attitudes of the young people who would make and consume their products. For their analysis, these businessfolk looked to the major media institutions — which, racked by the recession, in a panic to figure out the internet, and acutely aware that no one under 90 read the newspaper, were themselves obsessed with what young people wanted. So the papers and magazines catered to their loyal readership — wealthy older people — by feeding them piece after piece about millennials, who seemed less promising than they once had.
by The Editors, N+1 | Read more:
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