The big 'millennial' lie: what everyone gets wrong about twenty-somethings

[G_j]

http://fusion.net/story/266481/the-big-millennial-lie/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fusion8&utm_content=1&utm_term=fusion-newsletter-267238

Most stories about “millennials” focus on middle-class, educated twentysomethings, while the ones who grew up poor or working-class are simply ignored. Welcome to Uncovered, a series that sheds light on this forgotten group of our generation.

I often tell the story about the moment I realized the term “millennial” was bullshit. I was in Milwaukee in 2013, interviewing a few twenty-something employees at a startup, the kind with kegs, murals, and branded longboards. They used the “m” word liberally, as well as terms like “our generation” and “people our age.” They told me they wrestled with issues well-covered in the mainstream media: grappling with downward mobility and a seemingly worthless college degree, searching for meaning in the workplace, harnessing technology for success. They talked about Milwaukee’s gorgeous lake and how empowered they felt by the business-friendly city. Even though they were currently cash-poor, I got the sense that these optimists were going to be fine.

Then I stepped out of their adorable downtown loft space into the street, where fast food workers happened to be rallying for $15 an hour. Most of those workers looked to be under 30, black or Hispanic, and not the least bit concerned with the issues of the white startup kids. Brief chats with them revealed that they were more worried about being able to feed their children, staying safe in their neighborhoods, or juggling community college with three crappy jobs. They were the young people whose families couldn’t afford to send them checks, whose parents didn’t have a basement for them to languish in.


I understood then just how much talk of “millennials” had been aggressively focused on college-educated, upper-middle-class young people, even though they were hardly in the majority. There was a swath of millennials out there who grew up with entirely different financial baselines and cultural values, and they were being ignored.

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[kiva]

1. Meh, it was the same with baby boomers.

Look at the articles in newspapers and magazines from the 1960s, who did they talk about? College kids. Though I will say that, given the very active civil rights movement on most campuses, there was a fair amount of focus on black students.

Working class 20 somethings? Nope.

[GreatGazoo]

2. "Millenials" is a marketing term, much like "Boomers" or "Gen X"

Marketers, by definition are looking at how to sell things to people. They focus on each new group of consumers are try to find what motivates them to buy. It is by no means a way of looking at individuals or even look at groups of people as whole people but rather it filters everything down to numbers.

The CW is that you want to spend extra marketing dollars to sell to young twenty somethings because they are forming habits, addictions and lifestyles that will last a lifetime. A newer angle is to focus on people who have not yet exhausted their credit including those who do not have house payments yet. Database marketers look for key life events as triggers for your next major purchase -- graduation, leaving the military, buying a car, buying a house, even something like owning a dog can indicate that the person has extra money. With multivariate analysis they cluster behaviors and predict the next purchase. For example banks believe strongly that anyone who owns a dog and lives in an apartment is a good target for a mortgage (which may explain why most banks will not only let you bring your dog but also have dog treats available).

All of it is driven by customer data. People who do not have credit cards or car payments or other trackable data simply don't exist in these models. Some companies actively purge such Americans from their targeting.

[First Speaker]

3. True of every generation...

...the majority of kids in the 20s didn't have hip flasks or wear raccoon coats or go to Paris feeling Lost...the majority of the "Greatest Generation" didn't see any combat...the majority of kids in the 60s didn't engage in promiscuous sex, get stoned regularly, go to Woodstock, or come back from 'Nam with PTSD...the "identifying marks" of each generation generally come from a minority...

[Odin2005]

4. Working class Millennial here. the focus on better off Millennials is dilliberate.

Focusing on whiny middle-class Millennials allows the PTB to create the anti-progressive BS "Millennials are entitled and narcissistic" narrative.