Here's an idea.
Millennials have ruined everything as an attempt
to escape the past.
In case you haven't heard the news
according to Google autocomplete, which
is populated by likely search terms,
millennials are poor dumb idiots.
We are stupid, rude, lazy, and obsessed
with side hustles, which seems contradictory.
We've also killed crowdfunding, the Olympics, and cereal,
as well as suits, running, the American dream, soap, diamonds,
home ownership, the investment industry, and the Mcwrap,
which let's be honest all of those
are just different parts of the American dream.
For a bunch of poor, dumb, idiots,
we sure can do a lot of damage.
For comparison, at least Baby Boomers,
our parents are the worst, though I wouldn't be surprised
if those results auto complete that way because millennials
ruined them.
And the silent generation, our grandparents,
are oh, how appropriate.
Boiling an entire generation of people
down into one neat little set of descriptors
or pinning upon them the responsibility
for the failure of some industry or fast-food item is absurd.
It's also worth pointing out that at any given time
there can be upwards of six generations currently living,
and while sure, one may dominate the headlines we should be wary
when that same generation is unilaterally condemned
for some such calamity.
But either way, it happens, and in
our current click-based dystopia,
it happens to millennials a lot.
Maybe because since we are narcissistic,
we're obsessed with what people are saying about us,
so we'll click on whatever calls us out
and because as we work through our hit list of industries,
olds want to know what segment of the capitalist utopia
we're gunning for next.
(Whispering) Psst.
It's vacations.
The reason why will blow your mind.
(Speaking normally) As a generation,
the Millennials are an exceptionally economically
viable scapegoat for the internet outrage.
I mean publishing, the internet publishing industry.
Publishing, as it turns out, is actually
something we're pretty good at.
How convenient.
It's probably because we don't have interior lives
and document all of our experiences
using technology, never actually living
in the mohe-- living in the moho-- I can't do it.
I just can't do it.
Either way, the important thing to note
is that Millennials kill industries.
Industries don't die, and so there's a sense
that some terrible fate is avoidable
until the kids show up.
Blaming younger generations for ruining things is nothing new.
The yun'uns have always been derided for their noisy music
and disrespecting their elders, except our music is noise
and to hear some people describe us,
disrespect is practically our way of life.
So here's what I want to do.
I want to accept this silly premise
that Millennials are lazy ruiners of things
who never want to grow up.
And I want to talk on the complainers
own terms about why that might be the case.
And to do that, first we're going
to talk about how generations work.
And as a really brief aside, we are taking a different tact
here from Adam Conover, who recently ruined Millennials.
And
The fact is that generations in general don't exist.
We made them up.
Generations are not naturally occurring, true,
but social divisions are nonetheless really powerful.
To understand how that power functions, as I mentioned
we're accepting the angry gray-hairs Millennial premise
in order to question it.
And if you haven't seen Adam's talk, you should.
It's great.
OK, on to how generations work which, OK, right off the bat
this seems very easy.
A generation is a group of people roughly the same age.
But stop the presses.
Not just because the presses are no longer
an economically viable method for mass communication
in the post-millennial apocalypse,
but also because I'm closer in age
to many Gen Xers than young Millennials, whose outlook I
share.
So is that it-- similar age, similar outlook?
Well, no.
We wouldn't say that someone my age who
thinks that technology is ruining our humanity
isn't in the same generation as me.
So what's the answer here?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
German sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote in 1927
about this the problem of generations in an essay
by the same name.
He says you've got a group of people
born around the same time, and that's a generation.
Sure, that's how most people think of generations.
But as we've just seen, it's useless.
So within a generation, Mannheim says, you also
have these two other groups.
You have an actual generation, which
are people who experience the same social and historical
problems, and within that, generation units,
groups within the same actual generation who work up
the material of their common experiences
in different and specific ways.
So while me and a 30-something construction worker from Hunan
may be in the same generation, we could be in different actual
generations if we haven't experienced the same social
and historical problems, which probably we haven't.
This is also why though we're close in age I'm not a Gen Xer.
Different problems.
Me and Straw Mike are in the same actual generation,
but different generation units because he works up
the material of his experiences differently
and has a very different outlook from mine.
You call these online jerks friends?
You haven't even met them.
Aw Buddy, don't ever change, because we
need you to keep saying stuff like this for the show.
Mannheim says an important part of this whole process,
how we relate within and between generations
and what generations do, has to do with our memories.
The experiences you have when you're young
have a big impact on who you turn out to be, duh,
but they also help you identify with people
who share those memories.
This is why there is a difference between generations
and actual generations, the members of which
have similar personally acquired memories
and can therefore relate to one another.
Mannheim also writes about appropriated memories,
what we may know or remember from previous generations.
Knowledge of the world which is just in the ether.
Millennials may have personal memories
of the global economic collapse and 9/11,
but appropriated memories of Pearl Harbor or the moon
landing and here, is where things get weird,
and also where we return to why we Millennials are awful.
Spoiler alert, it's not our fault,
because nothing is our fault, # no responsibility, # lazy,
# Teflon generation, # selfie.
So if actual generations cohere because of a shared
understanding of the world informed by shared personally
acquired memories, what does it mean when memories
are increasingly mediated?
Mannheim was writing decades before global pop culture
existed, but starting with the end of the silent generation
and up to now, there's only ever been an increasing prevalence
of media as part and parcel with a normal experience
of modern life, especially as children.
Books, radio, music, television, movies, news, games, media,
and media objects, organize and contribute
to our memory and understanding of
our social historical moment.
The longer this is the case, the more each generation
will have access in some form to the social historical moment
of previous generations.
So what I wonder is if this makes
the line between personally acquired memory
and appropriated memory blurry somehow.
I'm not saying that we remember things
that didn't happen to us because we can watch Looney Tunes, All
in the Family or news reports from the '70s.
What I am saying is that many of Millennials
personally acquired childhood memories largely concern media.
So if memories concern media and media
informs memory and memory relates a generation,
it's worth asking if that media has to be of that generation
only.
I wonder if the availability of previous generations' media
contributes to the shared Millennial memory and therefore
outlook.
And if that has something to do with us being whiny brats who
ruin everything.
I think it could.
First, the industry which produces
that media you have awesome memories of
has to figure out how to stay afloat.
There are lots of different ways for doing that,
but one common tactic for maintaining relevancy
is an emphasis on youth culture.
Increasingly popular culture is youth culture,
and arguably Millennials and Gen Xers
were the first two generations to be
born into a widespread equivalency
between popular culture and youth culture.
We have been shown with gusto that music, fashion, celebrity,
art, technology, progress itself is driven by young people.
Children have always been our future,
but in the interest of a relevant media ecosystem,
they must also be the present.
Would it be a shock, then, that some portion of Millennials
would be hesitant to become adults?
To willingly engage with actions and lifestyles which
symbolize adulthood and therefore insignificance,
the death of impactfulness?
Which brings us second to that which Millennials hath killed.
The importance of generations and having differences
between them, Mannheim explains is that new perspectives
urge progress.
What one generation sees as natural,
the next generation sees critically.
"The continuous emergence of new human beings
teaches us both to forget that which is no longer useful
and to covet that which is yet to be won," he wrote.
What is it that's being forgotten here?
And what does it mean to forget?
Forgetting attitudes, opinions, and habits
is one thing, but forgetting ever-present media
messages, literal infrastructure, industry,
and entrenched institutions-- cultural, economic political,
educational-- that is another thing.
For Millennials, more than any previous generation
I think the world is a database of what exactly has been done.
All the accomplishments of the generations before us
stand in authoritative repose.
We can even know how those accomplishments were made,
and in many cases the optimal recommended expected pathways
for repeating them.
In so far is it's the job of a new generation
to covet that which has yet to be won,
Millennials may stand in front of a crowded trophy case.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, joke about participation
trophies here.
To make room as a generation, Millennials can't just
forget what's standing in front of us,
we have to destroy it in order to make room
for our own accomplishments.
For Millennials to "kill" industries, "ruin" products,
let brands, companies, businesses, symbols of success,
progress, or work "die," that isn't just
laziness, narcissism, or stupidity.
It's a radical act of forgetfulness.
Trying to make room in the crowded landscape
for a foundation on which to construct our own success.
And if vacations, designer bags, or the Mcwrap
suffer in the process, well, then so be it.
What do you all think?
Why did Millennials ruin everything?
Let us know in the comments and I'll respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
There is no comment response video this week
for last week's episode about Borges and Pierre Menard,
author of Don Quixote.
But there is a new prep thread on the subreddit
for the next thing we're reading for the Idea Channel book
club, which is another Borges short story called
"The Library of Babel."
It's a great one, and there's already
really awesome supplementary material and additional reading
and already an awesome conversation in the thread.
We are going to be discussing that short story
on the subreddit in two weeks, so yeah, check out that thread.
Lots of great stuff there.
Special thanks to Vanessa Hill from BrainCraft for inspiring
this week's episode about Millennials
when she sent me story after story
about all of the things that Millennials kilt.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and subreddit links
in the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from us actually.
We are in the throes of figuring out what the next Idea Channel
t-shirt is going to be, and I think
there might be a sort of tournament-style voting
thing that happens.
And right now we're talking about whether or not
we're going to go with I pronounce
it "jife," possibly spell that with IPA, or "jife for life."
So if you want to vote on that Twitter poll.
We'll put a link to that in the doobly doo too.
And last but certainly not least to this week's episode
would not have been possible or good without the very hard work
of these ruiners of everything, except for this episode
and previous episodes.