Don't Call Us Heroes: the Truth about Generations

Time Magazine’s cover relating to Millennials, from May 2013.

Here's a game: find a self-serious person in their thirties and, in conversation, refer to them as a millennial.

Some will take it as an accurate statement, but I'm going to guess that a significant share are going to be offended. They're going to take umbrage at the fact that you mentioned the demographic category that an accident of chronology placed them in. That's largely because popular American media has spent years labeling the cohort of adults born between 1980 and 1996 (or 2004 – demography, it turns out, is hardly an exact science,) as feckless, immature wastrels who spend too much time on instagram and murder innocent multinationals in their spare time. When they say this, they label Millennials as “hipsters”.

Still others, perhaps those with a more Marxist bent, will point out that a significant portion of this group came out of college as the most indebted generation with the least job prospects after having been sold a bill of goods that it's ridiculous to think that a Capitalist economy can ever deliver upon. When they say this, they label Millennials as "the precariat”.

I've written about this generation here – in what I called “the millennial monomyth” – and I also wrote about the Millennial Condition on my previous website, the now defunct Cameronsummerswrites – which was originally where I was putting in my ten thousand hours on fiction, but polemic is easy and fun (just get angry and type fast.) When I posted that on Facebook, I actually got in a bit of a tiff with one of my former professors, and made the mistake of lashing out out of wounded pride, I so identified the subject with my identity. So what I am about to write is something of a dramatic reversal:

There is no such thing as a Millennial, because the concept of a generation with a distinct character is incoherent.

Allow me to explain. Recently I've been taking aim at essentialism, and the first thing you do when you think about attacking a trend in thinking is examine your beliefs about the world and see if you're guilty of taking part in it. If you spot it, then you have to examine it, and see if you can rip it out.

So here's me, ripping out the concept of the generation.

To get deeper into it, the concept of Generations as having distinct characters was popularized (I hesitate to say invented) by a pair of admen – Neil Strauss and William Howe. They put names to the five generations in America at the time – the Lost Generation of the 1920s and early 1930s, the G.I. Generation (what we often call “the Greatest Generation”), the Silent Generation who led to the initial postwar cultural boom, the Baby Boomers, the 13ers (what we call “Generation X” because somehow that still sounds better than “13er”) – and made predictions about the then-nascent millennial generation. Strauss and Howe did a lot of legwork, and made a fortune talking about how Millennials will save America and talking about how to ride the wave of collective can-do joy.

One of countless memes based on the time cover.

Now, looking back, it's almost ridiculous that they didn't predict the widespread depression, anxiety, and memes.

Their central thesis was that History proceeds in rough cycles: a period of increased social stability leads to a religious or spiritual or philosophical awakening; the institutions that pushed stability up begin to crumble and society grows decadent until it's faced with a crisis from outside, and the energy of overcoming that crisis leads to reinvigorated institutions that are then pushed further and further to another awakening.

These parts of the cycle roughly correspond with archetypal characters: the Prophet (Baby Boomers), the Nomad (Lost and X), Hero (Greatest and Millennial), and Artist (Silent, Generation Z). Supposedly, this means something. Supposedly, this is a guide to policy and advertising and everything else, some tool to help us structure the world

It's just the capitalist boom-and-bust cycle writ large on history.

But they did have one good insight, even if they took it someplace useless, a fairly obvious one in retrospect: we tend to think of the young people of the 1960s as being hippies in perpetuity. They are, however, the same people that sold out and clawed their way up to the boardroom for the 1980s cocaine-and-larceny party. The young people of the earlier era bring the lessons they learn forward into their midlife and later years.

However, Strauss and Howe said that history always happens in cycles, and each step in the cycle engenders the same essential character in the people growing up in that period: so the Lost Generation of the 1920s and Generation X are fundamentally the same kind of people, the Millennials are fundamentally identical to the Greatest Generation and the generation that fought the Revolutionary War.

The problem is that even their recounting of history doesn't support this: the Saeculum (80-year-period) of the Civil War doesn't match the model, and they utterly ignore the effects of the Spanish-American War and World War I – somehow, only the Glorious Revolution (an event I had to look up,) the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War I qualified in the past 350 years.

This book is absolute horseshit.

So this theory is a classic case of apophenia – overenthusiastic pattern recognition. They see a pattern that isn't there and then they take it a step further, making generalizations based on the perceived pattern. However, they did what advertisers so often do: they created a market based around the problem that they invented. You see, this idea is incoherent and useless, but it explains a lot of thinking in our society: both Al Gore (who gave a copy of Strauss and Howe's Generations: a History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 to every member of congress,) and Steve Bannon (former white house security adviser and three-time winner of “small-town-football-coach-who-touches-children look-alike” contest,) buy into this theory and used (or still use) it to guide their actions in regard to the public. Because powerful people believe this dumb idea, we have to know it.

But we can't buy into it, because it's pseudoscientific idiocy. Just look at the discourse around Millennials: it's not garden-variety “young people are ruining the world”, it's a jilted messianism. We were supposed to fix the world and we can't, because we're not a coherent group.

Yes, for people born in the appropriate age range, we are more in debt, somewhat less white, somewhat more educated, and significantly sadder and more anxious, but it's apophenia again. It's an artifact of the statistical models and doesn't bear out. Consider: we're all more in debt but only 47% of us have a degree, and only 60% attended college. The other 40% didn't, and they're still more in debt. Could it possibly be because our educational system hasn't caught up to the need to teach young people how to avoid having a significant share of their income captured by sophisticated financial instruments?

Student loans are a major problem, but the regime of debt in the country is broken because it got deregulated before many of us were born. We were the first generation that were vulnerable to the same degree of debt peonage – that doesn't mean that there's a shared character or mindset that led to that.

Yes, we have higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders, but that's because we're labeled as part of a group, given fewer opportunities (not out of design, we're just present when fewer opportunities exist,) and then infantilized and told we're weak. This is how you create a group, but it's such a large group, based on such an arbitrary category that it cannot possibly be a coherent one: despite what I wrote above, one in three people in my generation own a house; the median income is $69,000 (a caveat: medians and averages are often useless in my opinion; you need the mode, and no one collects that.) There are members of my generation that are doing great, and good for them. But many of my friends are service industry lifers, and have much more in common with older service industry lifers than they do with the people making nearly $70k a year.

So instead of generations, we need to talk about culture. We need to talk about subcultures, too. Not as a marketing gimmick, but to lay out just what is going on.

Edgar’s never read Sister Carrie as far as I can tell, but it almost made me swear off everything written before 1960. Garrison Keillor asked the only pertinent question about it: Why did they ever ban a book this bad?

Consider, much of a person's experience of culture, what they feel connected to, is a product of what is available to them to connect to. Edgar and their family were in a more rural area, and so the culture that they had access to was often more connected to what might be termed “Generation X” culture. In addition, due to what was on hand and other accidents of circumstance, Edgar feels much more connection to older literature, but I often find it difficult (a painful admission for an English Major.) I grew up in an urban area, with a library I could walk to and cable television. My culture, at that stage, was different because my context was different.

Culture trumps generation because it predicts more about values and character. When I was younger, Juggalos were the butt of many jokes in my friend circle (I don't particularly have many thoughts on them now – it's not my jam, but I don't care one way or the other on their music. I will say, however, that their treatment by the FBI and DOJ makes me more sympathetic to them); Edgar described how in one small town they lived in for a while, the juggalo they knew there was one of the coolest people, because he had access to a sort of cultural capital from that subculture. This is because cities, in addition to being engines for climate change, are also the crucible of culture – it's where new things are more likely to arise.

But culture diffuses outward from these centers of creation, gradually being picked up by the more diffuse pockets. It's a slow process, like heat being radiated into thin air, but it happens.

I live in the midwest, so I missed a lot of things on the coast, but Kansas City gets it before Wichita, which gets it before Joplin and Goodland and Dodge City, and they get it before people living outside of the cities might.

Generations don't exist, but cultural diffusion exists. History exists. Demographics exist.

So I'm only a millennial because that group has been created and I basically fall within it. But, as far as me being part of a “heroic” generation? No. That idea isn't coherent, put it away.

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