Another really great article that sums up my feelings about people who hate our generation. I personally love us. I think that we’ve been pressured and molded into such a bind that’s a miracle how some of us rise above it. Read it, you won’t regret it.
I really liked the last paragraph:
So maybe I’m okay with being called entitled. An entitled generation may end up being the most civically and politically engaged generation in decades. It may get off the treadmills we’ve been placed on by the generations before us (get yours, get ahead, forget everyone else), look around, and decide the system is broken. It may stop treating unfairness, exploitation, and hopelessness as normal. It may decide that hope, stability, and choice should not just be for the wealthy and the privileged, that it isn’t greedy to demand those things for everyone else, too.
I’m tired of people acting like millenials have had their futures served to them on a silver platter, and we just batted them away like petulant children.
Emphasis hers. I think this attitude is a knee-jerk reaction on the part of older people who cannot and will not admit how horribly fucked up the system is now. They managed to create a system in which the standard of living for their children is objectively worse than the one they enjoy. When was the last time that happened in America? I don’t think it’s within living memory.
I’m never quite sure if I qualify as a millennial, because the cut-off dates seem to vary based on the article, but even if I am not, my experience overlaps largely with what’s laid out in this one. I was fortunate enough to be able to temp my way into a job that would eventually (though it took five years) get me into a job I actually wanted, but to go any farther in my field, I would have to go back to graduate school, and I refuse to do so until I can pay for the expenses out of pocket, rather than taking on more student debt, and this insistence is looked at as rather “quirky” by many. But after paying $150+ every month (and more, before I paid off an additional separate loan) for the last, oh, 8 years, and the student loan debt hardly dented, I don’t really want to play into that system anymore.