Time Dings Millennials, Awaits Sweet Death

Time magazine's cover story this month is entitled "Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation." As the title subtly suggests, millennials have turned out to be shallow, narcissistic, entitled little shits who are tragically destined to wrest control of the world from their wise, patient, sexy elders. Millennials have also achieved some good things, probably, but mostly they have those smartphones and communicate electronically, and that is just the worst. It's author is Joel Stein, an X-er who has been called "a god to people in their twenties and thirties" by boomer and Time editor Richard Stengel. Stein has statistics and studies to back up his claims, so you know he's on the level. And in case you were beginning to think that Time doesn't understand millennials deeper than is necessary to exploit the subscription money out of an aging generation's natural suspicion of everything that will replace it, they made it even more enticing for young people by pay-walling the article; we can't resist paying for content.

If you ask Time why print is dying, they'll stare at you blankly before asking if they can "have money now."

Stein's already been reamed pretty good. Elspeth Reeve pokes some holes in the statistics before digging up a century's worth of exposes on the ever-pending horror of "self-obsessed little monsters," a story originally scooped, I believe, by Socrates.

Marc Tracy takes Stein nearly point for point, concluding:

Right now, older generations are in the process of slowly bequeathing millennials a society more “in debt” than ever before: “in debt” in the sense of living on borrowed time, with only future, merely hypothetical promises as collateral—“in debt” ecologically, financially, politically, culturally. At this moment, Time has decided to focus on the millennials, and to tar them as “entitled” for not feeling totally okay about all of this.

Piling on with Tracy--though actually pre-dating the Time article--Annie Lowrey points out that, whatever millennials' faults, we haven't exactly been given much to work with, observing that "even though the recession is over, this generation is not looking to gorge; instead, they are the kind of hungry that cannot stop thinking about food."

And over at Salon, Daniel D'Addario addresses the media's love affair with our love affair with attention, two phenomenons that would appear to be servicing each other in some kind of accidental circle-jerk. Lowrey and D'Addario's pieces are like better-researched, better-written takes on my own post from last year about millennial self-obsession conflicting with grim socio-economic reality and boomers' tendencies toward self-congratulation. As I wrote (yes, a millennial is about to quote himself; try not to swoon):

Remember: we did not set up the lavish high school graduation ceremonies--ostensibly for our benefit--during which self-important prigs like McCulloch tell us that we actually kinda suck.  Even when not used for the purposes of insulting us, what kind of attitudes do you expect these farces to instill in us?  To say nothing of the middle school, elementary school, and kindergarten graduations that I took part in growing up.  If our achievements are so banal, why throw the parties? 

I don't know how much of this sort of infantilizing castigation is spurred by a feeling of "how dare attention be lavished on people who aren't us; we're still here" (someone recently pointed out to me that Forrest Gump ends in the mid-80s, just about the time that the X-ers started moving in on the sort of culture-shaping that the film celebrates as the birthright of the boomers). But I suspect we can look forward to a few more, increasingly irritating years of this sort of thing. And by then we'll be chastising our own kids for spending so much time on the HoloNet having sex with space aliens, when they should be watching us Google ourselves.

This I can say with some certainty: generations that are given access to social networks can at least provide their own self-love, rather than having to demand that reverence from others.