“You are nothing but a lazy, narcissistic, avocado-on-toast eating snowflake who has no respect for anyone or anything but yourself.” If you are a Millenial, this is the narrative blasted into your face on a daily basis.
And it’s not OK.
I would bet my left big toe that people born 20 years ahead of Mozart thought he was some crazy kid with a wild streak who played music that was going to ruin society. All the people who still loved listening to the lute were trash-mouthing Motzy by saying he was the definition of what’s wrong with the world.
And most people don’t know that Herman Melville had his wife chain him to his desk so he’d finish his colossal-sized novel, Moby Dick. If there were “pundits” around at the same time he was writing in the 1800s; they’d be saying he was a good-for-nothing procrastinator who thinks too highly of himself writing a book he can’t even finish.
Yep, people have been complaining about other people for a long time.
In the 1950s, the pelvis-shaking singer named Elvis and his rock-n-roll contemporaries were on a mission to soil the innocence of American youth. In the 1960s, if you were a man with hair that was longer than your collar, you were a good-for-nothing hippie. If you didn’t wear a bra in the 1970s, you were a crazy feminist destroying families. Fast forward to the 1980s, if you were successful in business and wore expensive clothes you were a Yuppie—that evil group of professionals who only thought about making money while driving flashy BMWs and running over baby rabbits.
Flinging crappy stereotypes onto other people has been around a long time. But now, it seems meaner, stinkier, and well, more pervasive. And the worst part is that the general public is buying into the gross exaggerations of a group of people born in a particular year.
And it’s not OK.
My nieces and nephews are considered Millenials, and they are some of the funniest, kindest, most hard-working, trustworthy people I know. They are decent young adults who treat everyone with respect and want equality for all their fellow human beings— I wouldn’t call that “soft’ or “snowflakish” they’re just great people. Isn’t that what we want our young citizens to be?
My daughter is almost 16, and my son is 12, and they make up Generation Z. This is a newly-minted title bestowed on their age group — so not enough has been written to smear their good name in the mud…yet. But whispers of narcissism and other traits carried over from The Millennials have already been graffitied onto their generation-labeled moniker, and this Generation Xer mama bear (hey, I’m not watching my MTV!) isn’t going to have any of it.
Let’s stop making unfounded, sweeping statements about a person because of their age. Let’s start to take the time to know the people who live next door to us or work in the store we buy our groceries in, and dig a little deeper than what the Internet says a person is. Besides just being the right thing to do, we might found out we are all a lot more alike than we are different.
And that’s OK.