I resent being a millennial. I know that I can’t be held responsible for when I was born, but I can sense the disapproving gaze of my elders—“She must be a millennial”—and I feel inadequate and unprepared for life in the real world. Millennial: a word heavy with connotations of laziness, dependency, and an unhealthy obsession with technological devices. In my mind, my life has more meaning than this. I have (possibly) intelligent conversations with my peers about the world. I read things other than the back of the cereal box. I know how to work hard. And I happen to know a lot of other millennials, all of whom are complex, multidimensional, productive members of society.
Well, most of the time. Because sometimes we play right into the millennial stereotypes (of which there are many!) and prove that they might exist for a reason. As much progress as we make, some of our behaviors really aren’t helping our cause. Sort of a two steps forward, one step back situation.
Like when we’re all sitting around the table at a restaurant taking pictures of our food—maybe to post on Facebook or Insta, to message to mom and dad, or to snap to our roommate—while the food just sits there. Forget living in the moment: we transcend it with our photographic evidence. But trust us, this semi-questionable use of technological devices definitely makes the food taste better when we actually get around to eating it.
Or when we speak in abbrevs. Cutesy acronyms made sense when we all had flip phones without QWERTY keyboards (#tbt), and they kind of make sense with smart phones (although I’ve definitely spent a lot of time fighting auto-correct about such words, so maybe they don’t make sense to use). But these abbreviations are really not that useful in actual conversation. You might save a syllable or two, but you will totes lose your dignity, IMHO.
What about all the time we spend sitting at our desks, laptops open in front of us, using our phones to surf the web and watch videos of cats? Hello, you have a wonderful computing device with a real screen right in front of you. Think of what these tiny screens will do to our eyes! And also how silly we look, perpetuating the image of our technology-saturated existences. It certainly makes it difficult to defend ourselves when we do things like this.
There’s also the thing where we call our parents for advice about everything from boiling water to buying new shoes. Because while we love Google, our innate laziness tells us it’s easier just to call them than it is to sift through Yahoo Answers and Ask.com for a suitable answer. Plus, we’ve learned never to trust the internet, but our parents would never lie, right?
Or what about the fact that we call our parents at all? Why do millennials talk to our parents so much? Don’t we realize that if we want to succeed in this world we must cut them off completely? We are all weaklings with no spines and no potential!
And the way we carry around reusable water bottles. People get it, hydration is important. But do millennials really have to flaunt the fact that we drink water? And the fact that we’re doing it in an trendy environmentally friendly way is just too typical. Could we please love our bodies and the planet a little less? Thank you very much.
Plus there’s the way we need to breathe—not just every other day or something, but all the time. So excessive. We millennials are known for being irresponsible and wasteful, and this clearly demonstrates that. Do we really think oxygen grows on trees?
Wait. You say everyone breathes? And drinks water? And calls their parents? Maybe those aren’t actually “millennial” things, but human needs? Whoa, such revolutionary thinking. While millennials may do some things that previous generations did not—like use technology 24/7 and depend excessively on Google—we are also just people living our lives. Just like the Generation X-ers and the Baby Boomers, who, I’d like to point out, have their own charming habits. So, to amend my previous statement, I don’t resent being born a millennial. I resent what it has come to mean. And while I’ll concede that my generation may deserve some of the stereotypes we’ve been labeled with, I’d like to ask society to think long and hard about whether certain things are actually “millennial” in nature. Maybe they’re just human in nature! If they’re really not, you can add them to the list of reasons why we are destroying all your hope for the future of our planet. Personally, I think our planet will be just fine under the care of the millennials, especially if we can eat, sleep, and breathe without being judged. Or is that too much to ask?
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