Either/Or.
It could be that millennials as a generation are just inherently lazy and entitled, sure.
It could also be that millennials watched many of their parents work themselves into physical and emotional wrecks until their hearts and marriages gave out so predatory capitalists and their shiftless politician allies could one day raid their savings, stock portfolios, and pension funds. It could be that they watched their older siblings walk into colleges full of promise and ambition and walk out full of debt, to fight for scraps of employment that wouldn’t pay them enough to live on, much less what they were worth.
It could be that millennials are “lazy” because they see no point in applying effort to a game whose rules have been obviously rewritten to perpetuate the success of a select few. It could be that millennials are “entitled” because they regularly see ridiculous, terrible people elevated to positions of significant power and influence for reasons that make little to no sense, and they have every right to demand the same if this is the topsy-turvy asylum that their forebears have chosen to make them inhabit.
We could be generous, compassionate, and open to such possibilities about the nature of millennials. Or we could get page after page of harrumphing opinion columnists, explaining in their savage prose how this generation as a whole seems unwilling or unable to grow crops in the field while conveniently glossing over how much salt, for how many decades, they and their peers were allowing to be poured into the soil.
I don’t say this to absolve millennials of their social responsibilities. I say it to make their elders stop pretending that many of them didn’t also renounce their own responsibilities, long before.
Sincerely,
Somebody Willing To Believe In Millennials And Who Thinks He’s Technically Generation X, But Seriously What Do These Labels Even Mean Anymore
Creative Control 