The Millennials Have Been Dumped Upon
I’ve recently seen a lot of people kicking the ‘millennials,’ the generation born between roughly 1983 and 2001. The complaints suggest they don’t want to work, they still live in their parents’ basement, they are overly sensitive, they are morbidly self-involved, and they’re zombified with iGadgets. Such commenters prattle on about the virtues of the baby boomers and the so-called “Greatest Generation,” but they see the millennials as falling far short.
So, let me start by saying this clearly:
The millennials have been wronged. They are living in a putrid mess that the boomers and the Greats left for them.
Casting millions of people into generational groups is silly, of course – in the end we all stand or fall as individuals – but since these groups do move together through time, there’s at least some relevance to this. And the millennials have been wronged.
Are some millennials self-involved zombies? Of course they are. So were plenty of boomers and Greats. If you want to pick a handful of examples out of millions, you can paint any picture you like.
The millennials are struggling to get ahead with thick chains around their ankles and sometimes around their wrists as well. That they are not producing great results is no surprise. And to criticize them for this is cruel, especially when it comes from the same people who helped to forge those chains.
What I Want to Tell the Millennials
I was born during the baby boom years and I’ve spent lots of time in discussions with people born before even World War I. So, beyond my reading, I have a lot of actual human experience to go by. Based upon all of that, I have three things that I’d like to tell all my young millennial friends:
#1: You are by no means inferior to the generations before you.
Great-grandpa started with nothing and finished a wealthy man. You’re stuck working at a coffee shop. Does that mean grandpa was somehow a better man than you? Hell no… you’re practically the same guy!
Great-grandma raised six kids, mended clothes, fed the neighbors during the depression, and was beloved by all. You, on the other hand, hustle your kids off to day care and pray that it isn’t the one where a maniac works… if you can even afford to have children. Does that mean grandma was a better woman than you? Again, no. You’re practically the same woman.
The truth is that you are every bit as talented and capable as your parents and grandparents. What has changed is the ambient, the conditions that surround you. Great-great-grandpa and grandma paid no income tax (federal or local), no sales tax, or a dozen other taxes. When they made money, they pretty much kept it. And it was far, far easier for them to start a business. In multiple ways, your grandparents had it easy compared to you.
#2: You are paying the price for the prosperity of the boomers and Greats.
Here I must repeat that we are all individuals, and that many boomers and Greats are fine human beings. That said, the section title is true: you are paying for their ease of life.
The boomers and Greats prospered by piling up debt. As a result, the entire modern economy is weighed down with it. For example, depending on whose numbers you prefer, total US government debt and obligations is between 70 and 220 trillion dollars, an unconscionable figure. It was the generations before you that dumped that on you. (And I’m not even counting the intentional slavery of student loans.)
Debt affects just about everything. And it is very definitely a chain around your life. And just to illustrate the immorality of this, here’s something George Washington wrote to James Madison:
No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence.
And here’s something Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Taylor:
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling posterity on a large scale.
Bottom line: You’ve been swindled.
#3: The status quo is choking you and won’t let go.
Your grandparents generally had what Aristotle would call a life that afforded them scope. They faced obstacles, as do we all, but they weren’t hemmed in on every side by regulators and enforcers. Your generation in the West may be the most regulated in all of human history. There are permissions required for every business activity, every profession, and almost every move you make. The control freaks have gorged themselves on the fear and obedience of the populace.
Because of this and other things, the status quo can no longer deliver prosperity… and they’re making you think it’s your fault. It isn’t. The scarcities you face are artificial – most of them would fade away if the lords of the status quo would get out of your way. (They won’t of course; they’ll watch you die before they give up power.)
I Could Go On…
But I won’t. Longer and more detailed arguments don’t really help. The facts here are fairly simple. Those who disagree don’t lack intellectual ability; they lack emotional ability. In particular, they are emotionally unable to consider that the status quo is flawed, failed, and oppositional.
On this point turn a great many things. We often see more and know more than we have strength to admit.
But it’s time to start facing this truth squarely. You don’t owe the status quo a perpetual benefit of the doubt. It’s time to hold yourself above them.
Paul Rosenberg
[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]
yes, and poverty creates crime…deze nevah had it soze bad.
So what , who cares ? Maybe a little bit of… hard times… Will wake these creatures from their slumber.
They should have ducked!
What a bland, overly simplified piece. If Paul Rosenberg is really an outside-the-matrix individual, he would have provided more truthful and meaningful reasons for his hypothesis. This piece is as plain vanilla-bland as 99% of those Millennials are.
IS and bb
That’s fucked up and bullshit.
I.C.
Care to give us a better rundown?
BEIBER IN 2020!
Campaign to Lower Voting Age to 16 in Local Races Ignites a Debate
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/us/politics/campaign-to-lower-voting-age-to-16-in-local-races-ignites-a-debate.html?_r=0
My grandmother (age 90) kept her house “neat as a pin”, worked full-time in a grade school and still managed to have a hot, meat-and-potatoes meal on for dinner for her husband every night, homemade pie or cake for him to have with his coffee, all while raising two kids. To do this, she got up at 5 am every day and worked without stopping until after the dinner dishes were done, and to this day is so unaccustomed to television that her eyes and brain cannot put meaning together for most programming. To say she had no stress or worries would be misleading, she had circumstances that could have been stressful, but she was raised to enjoy hard work and find satisfaction in keeping a tidy and welcoming home and satisfied husband. (Insofar as she has been misled by the government and the Fed to accept Social Security and Medicare, I believe, the purveyors of the deceit are more liable than she, as she would never knowingly take part in it knowing its true nature and actually thinks there is a “lockbox” for her deposits.)
Most millennials have no example of this, even my generation (X) many families were fragmented, and parents who were together needed to keep two incomes. As kids, from genX and forward, many were more trained in multi-tasking (like maintaining two separate homes and life narratives, one at Dad’s and one at Mom’s), than in learning homemaking, budgeting, or other practical skills. I had more than one classmate whose mother LITERALLY did not know how to make anything in the oven. I agree that they have been short-changed, and with so many economic/political/social/etc forces arrayed to destroy traditional family and “patriarchal” structure, I don’t see how they figure it out for themselves.
@nurse ratched – Bingo, the divorce craze of the last 35 years has screwed up more than just a generation, as the ones doing the divorcing were frequently to immature to make good decisions for themselves, let alone their children.
There is a generation between the greats and the boomers called The Silent Generation and includes people like Nancy Pelosi, John McCain and all the people born from the mid 1920’s who where too young to serve in WW2 until the first Boomers where born in 1945.
Some of the Silent Generation lead the charge and pillaged and plundered the country like a swarm of starving locusts and had lots of help for some boomers.
Nobody now in their 70’s or early 80’s is a boomer or part of the greatest generation.
It keeps getting worse. An outdoorsman I know teaches 9 to 11 year olds cross-country skiing. He’s getting fed up with helicopter parents complaining that he upsets their ‘special snowflake’ children by insisting they learn to tie their own shoe laces so he doesn’t waste class time doing it for them.
The number one type of kids’ shoes sold have velcro closures (no shoe laces) and the number one kids’ shirts are T’s (no buttons). Scary thought, but these are the dimwits who are going to be looking after us in our nursing homes!
Boomer are fucked up and bullshit. Selfish, self-centered, the “love” generation, the “me” generation. They so desperately want to forget how catastrophically they fucked up, fuck up, and will continue to fuck up.
When this generation completes its pass through bowels of the universe, everything everywhere will heave a great sigh, as The Great Constipation will be over.
There’s so much more so say on the subject of the pathology of the Boomers, but why waste one’s time? Better to put it simply: Boomers are fucked up and bullshit.
Born rich, school was a pushover, read and write crap, no Draft or military service, little work experience, victim complex, socialist, godless, over sexed, pot, lazy…what could go wrong?
nurse ratched said:
“I agree that they have been short-changed, and with so many economic/political/social/etc forces arrayed to destroy traditional family and “patriarchal” structure, I don’t see how they figure it out for themselves.”
That’s why I call it The Great Regression. Each generation is becoming less intelligent than the last. Think of all the technical and practical skills plus common sense our grandparents had? Think of the common sense and drive they had. No one is teaching any of that. Our technology makes us collectively dumber. School curriculum from grade school to college is being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator and parents, among others, continue to believe that every kid deserves a trophy. Look at how fast the ghetto rat FSA is regressing. Ignorant (young) teenagers giving birth to even more ignorant chirrens. How do you come to know what you don’t know if there is no one around to teach you?
My wife teaches basic astronomy to Boy Scouts. The tasks they are required to perform are simple like “draw the Moon on four consecutive nights”. They turn in their work and it gets rejected because my wife KNOWS they lied. For instance they draw a nearly full Moon with dates that coincide with full Moon or they claim to have done it when it was cloudy or storming. Their parents come unglued when my wife fails them. How do you fix that?
The knowledge will still exist in books right up until some generation of cherubs decides books are no longer needed or taking up too much space or needs to burn them for heat. I believe humans as a group reached peak intelligence in about 1970. We poke fun at and ridicule the millenials but just imagine how dumb their kids and grand kids will be.
Cry me a river. Millennials and Gen xers have it easy compared to Boomers and Silents. Look at how much has changed in the past 75 years. My Dad used to farm with a team of mules; couldn’t afford a tractor. When he finally could buy one all he could afford was a 30’s model Farmall with a crank and steel wheels; no hydraulics. He payed another farmer to use his steam-driven threshing machine at harvest time. Mom used a wringer washer on the back porch in Winter in the Midwest. No running water, she had to heft it in bucket from the cistern. Killed chickens for our dinner table with an ax; made everything from scratch. As a kid to make money I “put up” hay hefting 100 lb bails into a hayloft that would reach 115 degrees at midday. I had a daily newspaper route with about 70 customers that was all uphill, and I did my own collections. As a young Man I worked in the Radio broadcasting industry where job security was non-existent. One year I moved 6 times, with my family, in a U-haul. My cars were literally held together with bailing wire and duck tape.
So now, tell me Mr. Rosenburg, just what did I as a Boomer do to diss the Millennials and cause all their “distress”?
Westcoaster – you had some really great experience, and a keen work ethic.
With your background, I am enormously surprised you turned into such a dick.
lol! It’s that mental disorder thing llpoh. Liberalism does that to folks.