Everybody — but especially the olds — loves to hate on millennials. We’re lazy, entitled, emotionally stunted, spendthrift, narcissistic, promiscuous snowflakes.
.. But if Bill Clinton was once our “first black president,” surely Trump can be our first millennial president.
.. despite the fact that as of Monday — more than a month after Hurricane Maria hit — four-fifths of the island still has no power. A quarter lacks clean drinking water.
.. This is hardly the first time Trump has insisted upon, or even invented, accolades to celebrate his own mediocrity. He claimed to have received environmental awards that never existed. His golf clubs displayed fake Time magazine covers featuring his face.
.. Millennial Trump overshares constantly on social media, sometimes even Instagramming his food. He live-tweets his favorite TV show instead of getting real work done. Although no longer a minor, he still requires constant helicopter parenting from the grown-ups around him, as if he’s in an adult day care.
.. he can’t tolerate speech that hurts his feewings . Words that offend him are “unfair,” “frankly disgusting,” “bad for the country.” He then tries every weapon available to shut down those words.
.. Trump personally demanded that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate media outlets he dislikes and suggested that networks should have their broadcast licenses revoked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in subsequent days a Morning Consult poll found that half of Republicans agreed with him.
Huh. It’s almost as if 19-year-olds aren’t actually the country’s greatest threat to the First Amendment.
.. Trump casts himself as a perpetual victim, the uncontested winner of the oppression Olympics.
.. As with millennials, Trump has taken on loads of debt — though to be fair, that seems to bring much more joy to Trump than to 20- and 30-somethings. Maybe because real millennials expect to pay it back.
.. Morally lax, prone to revisionist history and obsessed with identity politics, Trump exemplifies all that is annoying and wrong with my generation — at least according to every Lena-Dunham-despising crank who once walked uphill both ways.
.. Like any true millennial, Trump refused to pay his dues in an industry where he had no experience. Instead, on the strength of his personal brand alone, he declared himself entitled to the top job. Self-promotion leading to immediate professional promotion?
America’s Retailers Have a New Target Customer: The 26-Year-Old Millennial
This age bracket, bigger than any other, is pushing companies to revamp marketing and products, including a lot of remedial education
The Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. has started offering gardening lessons for young homeowners that cover basic tips—really, really basic—like making sure sunlight can reach plants.
“These are simple things we wouldn’t have really thought to do or needed to do 15 to 20 years ago,” says Jim King, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Scotts. “But this is a group who may not have grown up putting their hands in the dirt growing their vegetable garden in mom and dad’s backyard.”
.. “We find that the younger generation is a bit more crunched for time and less likely to do a big, deep clean,” says Kevin Wenzel, an associate brand director for P&G’s North America surface care business.
Instead, millennials are more likely to clean as needed, which P&G calls “maintenance” cleaning.
.. 44% of millennials say they will move in the next year... “They’re much more of a ‘Do-It-for-Me’ type of customer than a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ customer,”.. Millennials were buying the pricier appliances as a quick cosmetic upgrade to their homes. “It’s millennials’ beginner way to remodel their kitchen.. sales of edible plants are strong among millennials, with a growth rate nine times the rate for baby boomers. Millennial households that participated in food gardening increased by four million during 2011 to 2015, equaling the rise of all other age groups combined over the same period,
White millennials are just as racist as their grandparents
David Duke is still around, but as a charismatic figurehead he has mostly been displaced by the likes of 39-year-old Richard Spencer, 26-year-old Matthew Heimbach and 29-year-old Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet.
.. Some seem to be reactionaries, essentially trolls who may or may not truly believe the anti-Semitic and racist bile that they meme and share to get a rise out of the politically correct left. If youthful rebellion in the 1960s meant embracing free love, peace and equality, then today — at least for anti-anti-Trumpers — it is about promoting hatred and structural inequity.
.. It is a flawed system, after all, one whose recent financial crisis irreparably scarred millennials’ economic prospects. Most anti-establishment millennials have drifted toward leftist populist alternatives, but some have sorted into the opposite (and more violent) extreme. For right-wing populists, the key flaw with the system is not that it allows the rich to hoard all the money, but that it privileges undeserving minorities at innocent whites’ expense.
.. Just as “socialism” is not a toxic word to people who came of age after the Cold War, perhaps aligning with Nazis no longer seems as inherently, reflexively evil for those so far removed from World War II.
.. Millennials overall are more racially tolerant than earlier generations — but that’s because young people today are less likely to be white. White millennials exhibit about as much racial prejudice, as measured by explicit bias, as white Gen Xers and boomers.
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.
.. She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
.. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.
.. the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.
.. the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
.. Today’s teens are also less likely to date.
.. The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer.
.. Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens.
.. In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.
.. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
.. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.
.. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less... Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy... The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.