So, this has been bothering me, and especially over the last few days, really over the last 24 hours. There has been a large volume of conversations I have been involved in online regarding the election. In almost all of them it ends up being one or two people my age debating with someone of my parents generation and in almost EVERY conversation there comes a point where the older person in some way dismisses the opinions of the younger as being childish or immature, in many cases when that younger person is presenting their view points in a reasonable and articulate fashion.
People want to complain about millennials, a lot. About everything. And I get it, we are tied to our phones (but so are you), we still indulge in childish passions (comics, cartoons, YA novels), and we only care about ourselves (unlike the previous generation, who wait...are exactly the same).
Some food for thought.
I know that we complain about adulting, in a way that, I assume, other generations haven't. Have you considered it is because a lot of us were utterly failed by our parents? I know so many people who never learned to cook or clean or handle money because their parents didn't teach them, didn't involve them, and then they got thrust into the world on their own and had to figure it out, usually after a lot of messing up, and you just see all the missteps they took in learning, but really, what can be expected in that situation? You complain about schools not teaching stuff anymore, but what right do you have to complain when you couldn't be bothered to teach things to your own kids.
And I get it, there are shitty situations that make it hard to do so, you know you were working two jobs and raising 3 kids on your own and you did the laundry at 2 am because that is when you had a minute, so you couldn't show your kids, except that isn't true for most of you. You just never bothered because either you didn't do it yourself or you were too controlling to let someone else do it.
Participation trophies. Again you want to complain about this, but kids don't give themselves participation trophies, so if this was really a problem it was one you created. I never got a participation trophy in my life, granted I didn't do a lot of participating in anything, but I think you guys are really exaggerating the extent to which this happened.
Also there is this tendency for people of our parents generation to shut us down as adults, like we aren't real adults, we can't understand politics, we can't understand finance, or complex situations, our opinions are invalid. We are treated like we are still children who should be quiet while the "real" adults talk. At 30+ years old we are talked down to in a way that our parents would NEVER have put up with from their parents.
But when I look around, when I see people who are looking for problems to solve, who are coming up with novel solutions to issues, to the people who are reaching out to people unlike themselves to make sure they are included in conversations and decisions, I am seeing people who are usually much closer to my age than my parents age.
I am not saying that we are some magic, superior generation. We can be too wrapped up in the internet and its assorted nonsense, we have a tendency to blow things out of proportion, some of us are more involved in our looks and instagram likes then is probably healthy, and some of us can't handle any amount of critcism without shutting down. We have problems, but so do our parents, and much like them, a lot of our problems stem from ones they passed on to us. Each generation inherits issues from the previous ones, some get recognized as problems and fixed, others just get passed on. It didn't start with us and it won't end with us, but we aren't lesser adults because of it either.
You don't have to "get" us, just accept that we are real adults, we have real opinions and we have real things to say, even if we are wearing a batman shirt and have my little pony colored hair while we say them.
You do not get to treat us like children because we are disagreeing with you.
