We have two popular historians to blame for our profound misunderstanding of young people’s lifestyle choices.
.. Which explanation seems more likely? Do we use Zipcar because we are ideologically committed to sharing, or because car ownership is still out of reach for a lot of people and renting piecemeal is the next best thing? Does a
married couple decide to live with roommates because of our generational “openness to communal living” or because people in New York face impossible rents?
.. headlines of “
Millennials are killing the X industry” could just as easily read “Millennials are locked out of the X industry.” There’s nothing like being told precarity is actually your cool lifestyle choice.
.. William Strauss and Neil Howe, a popular-historian duo, coined the term “millennial” in 1987, to refer to the children who would graduate high school in the year 2000.
.. “Every generation belongs to one of four life-cycle types that seems to repeat in the same order over time.” There are generations of prophets, followed by nomads, heroes, then artists. The G.I. generation—whom they are fond of calling “the greatest generation”—are, obviously, heroes; a so-called Silent Generation are artists; the Boomers are prophets; Gen X they deem a lost cohort of nomads; and millennials are destined to be heroes like their war-era grandparents.
.. After Strauss died in 2007, Howe continued to run LifeCourse Associates with three employees, giving about 60 speeches per year,
The Chronicle for Higher Education reported in 2009. Clients include big media companies (CNN, Hearst), universities, the U.S. Army, and companies like Ford and PepsiCo. In April 2015, LifeCourse Associates prepared a
report for the Congressional Institute on how the GOP could best connect with millennials voters, whom they were still calling “special,” “sheltered,” “teamworking,” and “confident.” In business as well as government, we’re deeply invested in a view of today’s young adults that was formulated before they even grew up.
.. The authors of Millennials Rising were what you might call self-hating Boomers. They hoped for a new generation that would rescue society from the excesses of their own.
.. As the support for Bernie Sanders this election cycle has shown, young people want to see a reckoning with precarity and inequality. The myth that underemployed, poorly housed young people are joyfully engaged in a project of creative destruction misrepresents our economic reality