I actually spent about a half hour writing a (sort of bitter and angry) response to this... but I just deleted it because the world doesn't need more negativity.

hold my beer

I know a kid. Dennis. Dennis was in my CNC class; he wasn't old enough to drink and he supplemented his family's income by working at a kennel. Dennis was the first person I saw display true, vehement rage at Millennials - he hated our instructor but he hated him as an entire class of people. Dennis was the first person I heard say "no one gives a shit if you're a ravenclaw or a hufflepuff, ass." I of course know a bunch of older GenX and their hatred of Millennials is something, but they got nuthin' on Dennis.

You know what I hate? Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. I hate it for the same reason I hate homeopathy: It has a gloss of sensibility but it's nonsense deep down inside, I know it's nonsense, and yet Bach flower essences calm me down. I see the voodoo for what it is and yet I am a zombie.

Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is where we get "millennials" from. They coined a name for GenX, too ("thirteeners") but since it was stupid, dismissive and demonstrated the archetypal 'boomer hatred for GenX, GenX adopted Douglas Coupland. "Millennials" stuck because the generation itself was still eating play-doh while their parents were busy hating on the slackers that were about to invent the Internet.

So okay. Thumbnail sketch of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is that sociologically? What matters is who you grow up with, and who your parents are. Your life experience is dictated by what you were allowed to do as kids and who you were allowed to do it with. Chinese Zodiac ain't much different, it's just more granular. Latin Zodiac is a totally different thing. The Romans? The Romans believed in Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. That's who Strauss and Howe cribbed it from. It's a philosophy of empire, through and through, a patrician, moneyed and elitist explanation of the Decline and Fall. Romans called 'em saeculums because the Romans never thought of anything original, they were a borrowing culture, and they borrowed saeculums from the Etruscans. Etruscans thought a saeculum was a human lifetime, thought their culture had ten of 'em, and lasted roughly 850 years. Strauss and Howe took it one better and went "you're a kid, you're a parent, you're a grandparent, you're dead" for a human lifetime and decided that any given lifetime, excuse me saeculum was divisible into four generations.

Strauss and Howe made a big point about how their theory demonstrates all of American history but they also count American history back to 1600 and they go "yeah, Civil War, big head-scratcher that one" and predicting the past is hella easier than predicting the future but goddammit, there's truthiness here.

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"GREATEST GENERATION" Saved the goddamn world from fascism and it was a close thing. Sacrificed a bunch and shall never be criticized as a result. Threw vastly more socialism at post-war Europe than they were willing to enjoy at home because Red Menace but also because too much capitalism among the ruins and you end up with warlords.

SILENT GENERATION: Too young to fight WWII, too old to do anything but get in the way and raise Generation X. Spent their adulthood being accused of communism whenever their skirts were too short or their term papers weren't decorated with American flags by "the Greatest Generation" which, as previously discussed, is immune to criticism of any kind.

BABY BOOMER GENERATION: Kids of the Greatest Generation who can always hold "I fought Nazis" over the heads of their spoiled children, who came of age during the Golden Age of Capitalism and wanted for nothing. Teenagers did not exist prior to the 'boomers. The 'boomers were the first generation to consistently go to high school let alone college. They grew up in an era of military, economic and cultural superiority that has never been seen on this earth before and will never be seen again. They worked for nothing, they wanted for nothing, their contribution to society was largely not making as much of a fuss as their parents did when they were forced to share their classrooms with minorities.

GENERATION X: Too young to fight Vietnam, too old to do anything but get in the way and raise Generation Z. Spent their adulthood being accused of communism whenever their paychecks were too small or their music wasn't decorated with American flags by the 'boomers who, as previously discussed, never.worked.for.anything.in.their.lives.

MILLENNIAL GENERATION: Came of age after The End of History, after peak oil, after September 11, into an economy that had no room for them, with the least-understanding parents and grandparents in the history of mankind. Weren't so much promised a golden future as expected to create it for the 'boomers. The Long Boom was over for Generation X but the 'boomers had no reason to notice that because it was fucking over someone else's kids, not theirs and fuckin' hell they'd bought a house and a car on one blue-collar income what the fuck is wrong with you, Junior?

GENERATION Z: Grew up with the most cynical parents in the modern history of America, picking over the cultural ruins of boomer and millennial detritus, cultural hegemony in the rear window and global wars of scarcity erupting in places the news tells them not to care about. Legitimate fears about the planet being unlivable in their twilight years as a direct consequence of oldsters who are telling them what to do. If that's not enough, Strauss and Howe don't call them "Generation Z" they call them the "Homeland Generation" and fully expect them to fix everything, because as the last generation in the saeculum, that's their fucking job.

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So there's your framework. Millennials, as a group, can't catch a fucking break because their parents ate all the cake and then told them they didn't get a slice because they're too slow. The kids around them, meanwhile, only know the cake through rumors and have no problem telling them to shut the fuck up if they want real problems they should take their fucking noses out of their Friends reruns and smell the melting permafrost. The guy who wrote A Generation of Sociopaths got a book deal because he first wrote an essay called "They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" because the beating heart of millennial culture is disappointment and betrayal and no one fucking cares.

There's a real undercurrent of millennial writing that fundamentally boils down to "spoiled child after her parents went bankrupt." It engenders virulent selfishness; Ayn Rand grew up bourgeois in Moscow and then the Whites stole her birthright, et voila, "objectivism." Every supervillain origin story is some form of "promise betrayed" with various aspects of culpability depending on what sort of villainy you need; the culture millennials grew up in was one in which their parents clearly didn't trust them to walk to school, let alone save the world. GenX? Lawn darts and three-wheelers. Millennials? Super Soaker bans. And then to make matters worse, GenX flipped the whole goddamn script by inventing the Internet and then the Millennials created social media so their parents could compare notes about how much they suck across thousands of miles of distance.

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Not all millennials are bitter, disappointed underachievers scratching out a living by ranting about their childhood on Substack but it's definitely a genre. It's the disasterporn of a subsector of society that would rather figure out what went wrong than how to make it right. Plenty of people move on and make lives; their identity isn't bound up in how great malls used to be. What's interesting to me is Freddy DeBoer's adulation of Generation X, the message of which is "your whole childhood was bullshit for us, and it was because your parents were busy spoiling you." Coupland is a 'boomer and he clearly and obviously saw everything going wrong. If you read Generation X it's about a bunch of people who can't form personal friendships even in a place where personal friendships are the only thing to do because they've been ignored their entire lives and don't know how to do it. If you read DeBoer's rant, it's about how great things were back when he could talk to people. His principle complaint is that things were great back when culture was pushed at him relentlessly and now that he lives in a "pull" world he has no fucking idea what to do with himself.

It's the fundamental "millennial" problem: some people don't know how to make lemonade. There's a fundamental lack of adaptation at the heart of every one of these laments and it's always some form of "but you promised" without any aspect of "so instead I." Make no mistake: millennials have a lot to bitch about. But there's a real self-celebratory vein of millennial culture, as exemplified by Freddy DeBoer, that insists on knowing why nobody is listening.