Oh look, another trite article about millennials! They're constantly playing the victim! Why don't they just shut up and accept their lot in life! Something something great wealth transfer something something make them rich! Why do they gripe so much?

Look, I am not a big fan of generational markers. They tend to be overly broad, and part of the reason I take issue with the whole concept of generations is that they are so broad that it can be difficult to lump a bunch of people together and call them a group.

I am (functionally) an "elder millennial," which puts me close enough to 40 that I should be having a midlife crisis at this point. Well, except that we've been having a collective midlife crisis since we were 12, and I can't afford to have a midlife crisis anyway.

That said, I tend to relate more to younger GenX folks than I do to younger people in my own generation. On a similar note, I have a boomer friend who relates more to older GenX folks than he does to most other boomers.

Generational markers are kind of overly broad and dumb, is what I'm saying. At least if you ask me.

And, because they're so broad, a lot of people that fall into the "millennial" bracket don't have even remotely the same experiences as each other. I was born in the mid-80s, and I have a hard time relating to what someone born in 1996 has been through in their life.

For reference, I graduated college in 2009, right at the bottom of the stock market and the first years of the Great Recession. I had to fight tooth and nail for a job and was fortunate to get one in my field in 2010. Someone born in 1996 would have graduated college around 2018 (give or take), which was a pretty good time for the job market.

This is not to crap on younger millennials for getting a solid job market — quite the opposite, a lot of them lost their jobs in 2020 when COVID hit and the newest people at many jobs got cut to save costs. We've sort of been hosed as a generation, just, across the board.

I have solid memories of the dot.com bubble, the Great Recession, and then the COVID crash, starting in my teenage years and rolling through most of my career. Columbine happened when I was in middle school, and when I was in high school, 9/11 happened. There was a lot of talk and concern about whether my classmates and I would be drafted into the military to go fight in the middle east.

And yeah, it feels like after 9/11 happened, everything has gotten perpetually worse with each passing year. My whole adult life has been marked by global crisis after global crisis, and all the while my generation has become one of the poorest since the industrial revolution.

Still, we are somehow at fault for all of the things that have happened to us. Remember when there was a flood of "millennials are killing X thing" articles? We apparently are responsible for the downfall of everything from paper napkins to Applebees, depending on what articles you read.

A lot of older folks (generally boomers, but also plenty of GenXers) like to bash on Millennials for our "odd" spending habits and the way we act and dress, among other things. It all has a very distinct "old man yells at cloud" feel about it at this point, but for a long time, it was pretty impactful on our generation as a whole.

And now, as us elder millennials are in their 40s and our youngest members rapidly approach 30, GenZ is coming for us.

I watched a video by a decently popular GenZ creator that was bashing on the trend of people buying nice old houses, tearing out all of the old wood and beautiful features, and painting everything beige. The video in particular that they were critiquing was of a woman who bought a large old house with a beautiful curved staircase, only to tear it out and gut the whole thing for a "modern farmhouse" look.

That is her prerogative, of course — she bought the house and can do what she wants with it. However, it got a lot of backlash online (rightfully so if you ask me) because she destroyed anything that made the house unique and nice to turn it into something very bland by comparison.

In this way, the creator has a great point. There are far too many beautiful houses that are victim to house flippers who destroy anything unique about those nice homes to put in cheap "modern" fixtures to make it appealing to a broader audience. Plus, they are taking something in limited supply — old houses with nice features — and creating just another bland beige box for mass consumption, something that there is already too much of.

However, the thing that I took a lot of issue with was the creator's point that these flippers, who are often older millennials, have accumulated a disproportionate amount of resources to do this. There are flippers on TikTok who flaunt their flips, doing the math and showing their five and six-figure profits from those flips.

Those flippers started somewhere and more often than not they already had a lot of resources that most millennials don't have access to in the first place. Generational wealth is very much a thing, and again, while the so-called "great wealth transfer" will make some millennials very wealthy, most of us won't see a ding-dang dime.

The millennials who are flipping houses and tearing out old wood for white walls are, by and large, already very wealthy. There is a new class war brewing — the majority of millennials versus the top 10%. You see, while the average millennial has far less wealth than the generations that came before them, that top 10% of millennials have much more wealth than previous generations.

This has resulted in a divide inside the millennial generation, as a handful of "haves" do things that make everything worse for the majority of us "have-nots." House flippers in their 30s and 40s are generally much wealthier than most of the rest of us, and the houses they flip are targeted at more wealthy middle-aged and older folks, not the rest of us.

The whole thing is exacerbated by social media and the 24-hour news cycle, where everyone must be constantly pushing out content to stay relevant. This led to the uptick in "millennials are killing X thing" articles five or so years ago, and even still, a lot of 60 and 70-something "money gurus" criticize us for having bad money habits despite not having a clue as to what our lives are really like.

The rise of social media has also led to an uptick in wealthy millennials flaunting their wealth on platforms like TikTok and the like. That in turn has led to an uptick of GenZ creators criticizing us, both individual millennials destroying homes and the generation at large.

And, once again, millennials — which as a generation spans about 20 years of vastly different experiences — are getting painted with a broad brush. The creator who was critiquing the whole beige box phenomenon spoke for a few minutes about millennials as the major perpetrators of this phenomenon, having had time to accumulate enough resources to do this. According to them, we have the money and leverage to buy old houses and flip them into bland garbage homes, and that's a pox on our generation.

Meanwhile, me and every other millennial I know are doing our damnedest to keep our heads above water most of the time.

While a small chunk of millennials have the resources to buy houses and either flip them for profit or build out their farmhouse chic "dream home" full of whitewashed wood, most of us just don't. Those of us who have homes are constantly being crushed under maintenance and repair costs, to the point where we are having fewer (or no) children to compensate for all of the expenses of just living.

So yeah, what should be a battle over the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us has become another generational conflict. Yet again.

By the gods I'm so tired of it.

I hate having to constantly fend off criticism of how lazy my generation is, how bad we are at budgeting (daily lattes and little treat culture, anyone?), and how we are at fault for what seems like everything. It comes from those older than us, those younger than us, and from inside the house, so to speak, and it's so, so tiring.

I feel so old with how tired I am, and I've felt so old for what feels like a very long time, but I'm not even 40.

Millennials have become the punching bag generation, and I am so tired of it. There is always some conflict between older folks and younger folks, and older generations have shifted a lot of their focus to criticizing GenZ and their work habits, but millennials still get a lot of flak. We are still "young dumb kids" to many boomers, despite most of us being pretty close to 40 and having our own kids.

And, unfortunately, the generation wars have distracted us from what the actual conflict should be — those of us with not very much against the top 10% by wealth. Most of us across all generations — from older boomers to younger GenZ — are being crushed by those with wealth and resources, those who control both business and government.

They make the rules that keep us from gaining the education and resources to call them on their crap, instead stoking our constant infighting via 24-hour news and social media campaigns. They need us to be divided against ourselves, because if we all worked together against the shareholder class, heads would roll.

Maybe even literally, based on some of the stuff I've seen.

Millennials are one of the most ineffectual generations for a hundred years, largely because we have been put in the corner by those older than us and kept there by an aging population that won't let go of power. Now that the younger generations are coming for us too, what is there even to do but stay in our defensive stance?

Most of us millennials have minimal resources and power to effect any sort of change, and those of us who do largely use their power to entrench themselves rather than help the rest of us. The top 10% of millennials make the rest of us look bad, and the great wealth transfer will only exacerbate this trend since, for the most part, it will only benefit that top 10%.

Still, I also kind of wonder if a lot of us aren't just resigned to our fate as a nothing-burger generation. We have this sort of learned helplessness that comes from watching those older than us and younger than us get the opportunities that we missed.

GenXers are largely poised to take over at the top of a lot of companies, having been middle and upper managers for quite a while. Now that the boomers are finally relinquishing power (albeit slowly), GenX is poised to take the reins while a lot of millennials toil away in lower-level jobs where we've been stuck for over a decade.

GenZ, particularly older GenZers, are taking advantage of the good economy and a job market that has recently favored job seekers to leverage better jobs. As long as they can get past the image of their generation as lazy and entitled, they are generally doing better than millennials (particularly older millennials) did at their age.

And so, us poor ol' millennials continue to get the short end of the stick. Besieged on all sides and lacking resources, power, and motivation, it feels like we mostly just sit here and take our blows. Millennials, "Generation Why," the first digital natives, have become the punching bag for everyone else, including other millennials that have more money than we do.

Oh well. Guess there's nothing to be done but suffer through another 30 years of being crapped on until a lucky few of us can retire while the rest of us toil away at WalMart to keep afloat. That's assuming that America hasn't descended into fascism and the planet hasn't become unstable due to global climate change.

You know, maybe that's the reason that millennials are often apathetic and depressed. We have a broken social contract, the American Dream is on life support, democracy is on the brink, and the planet is dying. And yet somehow, we're the ones to blame when our parents were (and still are) largely responsible for all of it.

Guess I'll go get a latte and some avocado toast to mourn the death of all things good in the world. It'll be a nice little treat for myself while I watch society crumble.

Be well out there.

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