The Case for Millennial Resiliency
My generation, the millennials, gets dumped on regularly.
Sure, Baby Boomers spend considerably too much time on Facebook posting "copy and paste this into your status" things. Gen Z has its weirdness but weirdness that millennials often get blamed for.
But no. Millennials are the problem. We're the ones who killed multiple industries. We're young and entitled (most of us are close to middle-aged for those paying attention...).
There aren't many thought pieces or "trends" articles that paint my generation positively.
Do you know what millennials are, though? If I had to describe us in a word, that word would be "resilient."
This short Instagram video captures this mindset eloquently. I felt seen.
Think about it.
I watched the twin towers fall live on TV but still had to finish my geometry test while all the adults spent that time freaking out.
We went to war in two different countries before I went to college. Several of us lost friends to those endeavors.
I graduated college during the Great Recession. I was lucky to land a marketing job as fast as I did. In my first job, I saw multiple rounds of layoffs (small, but man, what abrupt "welcome to the real world" moments those ended up being).
We started having kids and then faced a global pandemic that hadn't been seen in over a century.
Racial protests spread through every city worldwide at a scale not seen since the Civil Rights movement.
We had the 2020 election and all the baggage that went with that.
People in my generation get called everything from problematic, woke, ignorant, ableist, or sheep when most of us try our best to do the right thing for our families and those around us. It feels like some group is always mad at us about something.
Despite all that, we continue to get stuff done.
My generation has the lowest divorce rate on record (26%). Millennials have some of the most family-friendly work cultures. We put a higher value on building our families and put kids ahead of careers more so than generations past. Despite the popularity of labeling millennials as "entitled," we are far from it. From a recent Fortune article:
Today's twenty and thirty-somethings came of age in the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, she notes. They owe record levels of student loan debt, the job market is rough, and a full 45 percent of millennials are working gig economy jobs that offer no health benefits, pensions, or 401(k)s. On top of that, they face ridiculously high rents, tight mortgage restrictions, and stagnating wages.
In many ways, millennials are more similar to the Depression generation than to boomers and Gen Xers, according to Kobliner. "Although separated by 87 years, the Great Depression and the Great Recession generations both went through major economic upheavals that were not of their own making, in which millions of people lost their homes and had to dig themselves out of debt. Many millennials have seen what happened to parents; they've seen what can happen with adjustable mortgages when you can't make the spiraling monthly payments…No wonder they are cautious.
Older generations have complimented Megan and me for how we handled the past few years. While flattered, I also thought, "what other choice did we have?" We couldn't change world events, but we could control how we responded to them. My generation is good at that, by and large.
Say what you want about our generation. We're resilient.
While the rest of y'all blame us for killing industries that weren't our fault in the first place, we'll continue to put our heads down and get stuff done.