Kids These Days

I was at a meeting of a local, grassroots environmental group a few years ago. There were perhaps a dozen of us, and I was one of the few people under 40 in attendance. As we sat and discussed possible actions for pushing back against fracking as extraction industries encroached on our county, the person in charge made some off-hand comment about how few "young people" were involved; back in her day, this retiree complained, the youth were so much more interested! This grated on my nerves. I looked at her intently and said, "Do you honestly want to know the answer to that question?” Not realizing how much of a chord she had struck with me, she said yes.

So I told her.

I told her that almost everyone I went to school with worked a second job, ran a small business, or had some other sort of side hustle in addition to their regular employment. They were doing this to try to save something, to have a fallback in case they were laid off, or just to try to make ends meet in an economy that simply doesn’t work for them.

I told her that nobody had any job security any more, and that everyone I knew had some kind of backup plan if they went to work one morning and found out they'd been let go. Millennials, you see, aren’t job-hopping flakes.

I told her about how many of my friends had gone without health insurance because they could not afford it, and were rolling the dice every day hoping they didn't get sick or injured — because getting a massive medical bill would almost certainly ruin them financially for decades, if not the rest of their lives.

I told her about how I was the last generation for whom higher education was still mostly affordable, and that basically everyone younger than me was under a pile of student debt — and this was getting worse.

I told her how many people I knew with roommates — not just fresh grads or people living in high-cost neighborhoods, but married couples and professionals that couldn’t make rent despite “good” jobs. I told her about the people I knew who were married, working full time, and still living in their parents' basement, because housing prices were so high that was the only realistic option.

I told her that every couple I knew had a two-income household out of necessity, and with nobody able to be a stay-at-home parent, they were also shouldering the hassle and costs of child care.

I told her how many I knew that, despite all this, they were trying to make society better. They were volunteering as poll workers and doing get-out-the-vote drives. They were serving on school boards. They were donating to the ACLU, the EFF, Planned Parenthood, and other causes the believed in. We led Girl Scout troops and coached grade school soccer and volunteered and called our Congressmen and protested in the streets.

I told her how "young people" were looking out for others, sending money or helping out any way they could when one of our number drew a bad hand and was about to get knocked out of the game.

I explained that the “young people” don’t live in the same world that previous generations did, thanks to rising inequality, the ever-increasing pace of technological change, and the pressure that continues to place on society.

And I told her that all of this would be a hell of a lot easier if the baby boomers hadn't squandered their gains, tried to burn down the economy, continually pushed all the problems downstream for us “young people” to clean up, and then had the audacity to complain that we weren’t doing it right or fast enough.

Some of this, of course, is just natural friction between generations, and it is perhaps unfair of me to paint with such broad strokes for any group. Every generation has its stereotypes: baby boomers are greedy hypocrites, gen-Xers are slackers, millennials are self-absorbed snowflakes. “Kids these days!” has been a grumble of older people since there have been kids at which to grumble. (It is claimed — almost certainly incorrectly — that Socrates himself said: “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” Regardless of veracity, I find the fact that people think he might have said it telling.)

People naturally tend to distrust and even fear trends and changes that are new, and it seems that change has its foot to the floor. But the next time that someone wants to go on about how “young people should stand up,” I hope they take a moment to realize that we’re already doing so, while also dealing with our own unique pressures and circumstances — just as every generation has.