I was in post-graduate university when I first heard the term “millennial.” It was at a conference. The session was about how to serve millennial students, because they have different characteristics than the Generation X students that went before them.
It was here that I first started hearing things like “millennials need to be recognised for participation,” “millennials feel they are special,” “millennials are sheltered,” “millennials are likely to have helicopter parents,” so on.
Society as a whole loves to hate on the millennial generation (those born between 1980-1999), calling us “special snowflakes” and sarcastically referring to us as “social justice warriors,” calling us out for “being offended by everything” and, everybody’s favourite, pointing out how very entitled we are.
Here’s the secret: We’re not.
The negative opinions directed at millennials are a perfect example, on an enormous societal scale, of cultural gaslighting.
What’s ‘gaslighting’?
Glad you asked. I learned about gaslighting within the last couple years as I explored topics surrounding emotional abuse and narcissism. Gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of making someone question their own sanity. It’s an emotional abuse tactic. It can also be described as “the attempt of one person to overwrite another person’s reality” (as defined in this article from Everyday Feminism).
Top Comments
Baby boomer bashing is also prevalent. I think each generation goes through "Why everybody is picking on us?"stage. Not just millenials.
It's not clear what problems of the world the author believes her generation is being asked to fix. What I took away was that she equated the problems of the world to her decision to take out bank loans to pay for a uni degree (not clear why HECS and working part time wasn't enough), and now she's having to start working in low paid jobs after graduation. This observation isn't "gaslighting" - it's merely pointing out some pretty weird logic.
HECS is a loan and you do have to pay it back. University fees are extremely high. She didn't mention bank loans for university, she said massive loans. Considering how expensive university is she'd be right about that one. I think the author made some very good points that could be viewed as constructive criticism, something we can learn from. As an xgen I have noticed the constant criticism and contempt that I'm not convinced that they deserve. I don't recall xgen being criticized in the same way. In fact I don't hear much about us at all. Maybe xgen aka the latch key generation is now the invisible generation (suits me fine, I don't mind being invisible). Having baby boomer parents and WW2 veteran grandparents I think baby boomers had it easier than they let on in many ways. Not sure why I keep hearing baby boomers giving the younger generation such a hard time. Is it their sense of entitlement to constantly bring younger people down?
I'm guessing the author is American and therefore HECS/HELP is not an option. Citing the US Chamber of Commerce makes this seem fairly likely to me.
I know how HECS works; that's how I afforded my tertiary education. You don't start paying it back until you're well over minimum wage. Thanks, though, to the other poster who pointed out this piece was likely by an American - I'd missed that (and if that's the case, expensive uni fees is hardly peculiar to the current generation). As a Gen X, I found this piece really just confirmed many of the stereotypes applied to Millennials - bit of an own-goal there.