Why Can't Johnny Live?

September 1, 2016 11:00 AM

"Millennials Rising (2000) gave us the myth that millennials are hard-wired to share, describing this generation as optimistic “team players” who “gravitate towards collective power.” The authors also laid the groundwork for a thousand think-pieces attacking “coddled youth” and “trigger warnings,” cautioning that millennials in their upbringing would be “the most watched-over generation in memory.” One reviewer prophesied that the millennial college experience would “give a new meaning to the word ‘overprotective.’” The same reviewer also worried that millennials “could be led astray by a demagogue or use technology in Orwellian ways.” It’s as though the moral outrage of the 2010s had been written in advance, before there were any facts to get wrong."
-- Laura Marsh in the New Republic on how the myth of "Millennials" as cultural rebels was formed before many of them were even born.
posted by Potomac Avenue (2 comments total)

I am shocked, shocked that a predetermined and widely publicized idea of how the Kids of Tomorrow would be coddled and useless turned into the conventional wisdom regardless of reality. Shocked.

I must repair to the fainting couch. Fetch the salts.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 11:08 AM on September 1, 2016

"Milennials" are an invention of their parents, the Baby Boomers who, for a little while longer, occupy the top tier of "thought leaders."
posted by My Dad at 11:08 AM on September 1, 2016