Millennials—who are they, why are they here, what do they want, and when will they get a move on? Numbering in the tens of millions in the United States and the billions worldwide, a demographic bulge whose birth years are loosely defined as extending from 1982 to 2004, Millennials, Generation Y, Gen M’ers, Generation Next, or Millies—as I prefer to call them, for the sake of catchiness—inspire an animosity, suspicion, and wary prejudice usually reserved for misunderstood, aberrant minorities, such as the original X-Men. The first generation of digital natives and Facebook fiends, Millies possess the biological attributes of other Earth dwellers but appear to represent an evolutionary hop into a future that seems stuck in traffic. Ready to take on a world that isn’t making room for them, they’re thwarted, slowly, awkwardly, fitfully integrating into adult society and doing a remarkable job of getting on everybody’s nerves. They walk among us, though most of them don’t appear to mind where they’re going, their eyes and forefinger scrolling down ghostly screens as they maintain constant textual linkage with fellow mutants and finesse their flat affect. They work among us, although if the testimonies of executives, middle management, and Human Resources can be credited, Millies require a constant drizzle of compliments and acknowledgments—strokings and pokings—to remain motivated or at least stop fidgeting. Whatever Millies do or consume, they want to feel special, because so many of them have been treated as special all of their lives. This perception is at the hard nub of the resentment against their generation—the notion that they’re a spoiled, entitled legion of precious snowflakes who expect prizes just for showing up, pout when they’re insufficiently petted, and never go anywhere without slathering on creamy layers of self-esteem.

Is this group caricature anywhere close to fair, or a more virulent strain of traditional intergenerational bigotry? “I see something nasty in the getoffmylawnism that we get today that I don’t really remember previously,” the blogger Duncan Black noted at Eschaton. “I see a lot of hatred of the youngs. It’s troubling and weird.” Washington Post Wonkblog contributor Christopher Ingraham also sees a whole lot of hatin’ goin’ on, but believes it’s for the wrong reasons. Forget “the derisive talk of selfies and selfishness and Snapchat,” Ingraham wrote. “If you do want to hate on millennials, at least do them the credit of hating them for the right reasons,” he advises, helpfully coming up with five biggies, based upon recent polling. (1) Millennials are the most unpatriotic generation, a disgrace to everything John Wayne growled for. (The upside to this, though neocons will not see it as such, is that Millies “are also far less supportive of the use of military force and may have internalized a permanent case of ‘Iraq Aversion,’ ” according to a Cato Institute white paper called “Millennials and U.S. Foreign Policy.”) (2) For all their multi-culti airs, Millies are as racist in their attitudes as older coots. (3) They are the most clueless, duh generation when it comes to the news. (4) They’re the leading vaccine skeptics, “seven times as likely as seniors to believe in the unequivocally discredited link between vaccines and autism.” (5) They are queasy about free speech and expression, though I don’t consider the survey Ingraham cites on publishing Muhammad cartoons a convincing example. A better citation might have been the wave of “trigger warnings,” safe places, “micro-aggressions,” and virtuoso claims of victim status that are turning so many universities into high-rent nurseries. It is such coddling and cocooning of educated Millennials within a comfort zone patrolled by helicopter parents and their proxies that provoked the novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis to diaper-pin them as the hypersensitive “Generation Wuss.” The little wussies are fickle, too.

Many corporate executives are making no effort to attract workers under age 35, a new survey [conducted by Duke University and CFO magazine] says. One reason: Millennials are developing a reputation as workplace divas who need more handholding and who will bolt from jobs at the drop of a hat.
—Kim Peterson, CBS Moneywatch, December 10, 2014.

As a veteran contributor to Vanity Fair, I am unfazed by such talk of divas. Pull up to the campfire some night and I will relate thrilling tales of Divas I Have Known, or at least heard about over lunch. I suspect Millennials are minor-leaguers by comparison, but I’m spared the friction of finding out firsthand. In fact I feel I bring a cool impartiality to the topic, since I am not a marketer, manager, teacher, or, sigh of relief, parent; I don’t have to put up with Millennials, nor they with me, on a routine, close-quarter basis; and, as a good liberal of the Larry David school, I strive to avoid facile generalizing, following a policy of judging people not based on their birth cohort but strictly as individual interfaces, each with something unique and/or annoying to offer. If I am favorably inclined toward the Millies, it’s because the shining young exemplars I have come into contact with tend to be recent college graduates interested in arts journalism and criticism—smart, avid, outgoing, energetic, smooth, and almost opaline they are, displaying far better manners than many of the crocks I run into at the ballet or theater. With their dynamically designed résumés, business cards, and follow-up notes, these cadets are far more entrepreneurial and savvy than I was at their age. They have to be—they’re facing far greater odds, far fewer entry points to advance beyond magazine and cable-news internship, if they’re lucky enough to land even that. The multi-tiered print world that racketed and teemed when I arrived has been deforested and arts journalism largely vaporized; the post-dot-com-boom avalanche of Internet riches hasn’t flowed to creatives, but to Atlas Shrugged Silicon Valley app innovators, content funnels, and platform owners—“into the pockets of Digital Monopolists and Digital Thieves,” as Jonathan Taplin, the director of the U.S.C. Annenberg Innovation Lab, put it in an open letter to Millennials titled “Sleeping Through a Revolution,” which appeared online at Medium. Over the last two decades artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, critics, and performers have seen their livelihoods devastated by the piracy and streaming-content penury of the Internet, but it’s not as if the carnage were limited to the infotainment sphere. Taplin: “My feeling is that media is just the canary in the coal mine, and that in the next 20 years, millions of the jobs you [Millennials] are training for might be automated.”

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Oh, great, now they’ll never move out of the basement, goes up a mighty groan from moms and dads across the land. All that college tuition and private tutoring to produce a sunken Atlantis of subterranean boarders. “Stop talking about basements,” snaps Derek Thompson at The Atlantic. It’s base salary we should be concerned about. Millies got no money. In a post titled “How to Freak Out About Millennials in a Statistically Responsible Manner,” Thompson points out that in the post-2008 Great Recession “the number of young adults making less than $25,000 has increased by six million; the number of young adults making more than $25,000 has declined by almost two million.” With disproportionate benefits going to seniors who are hanging around longer just so they can watch Fox News, affordable home formation is out of the cards for millions of Millies, despite their college diplomas and place in the on-deck circle. “More years of school + more student debt + lower starting salaries + a nervous housing market + stricter rules for new home-buyers = no new home-buyers.” This lid on upward mobility creates a pressure to pursue validation and an illusion of progress and productivity within the hamster wheels of social media.

“Anxiety and neediness are the defining aspects of Generation Wuss,” Ellis wrote, “and when you don’t have the cushion of rising through the world economically then what do you rely on? Well, your social media presence: maintaining it, keeping the brand in play, striving to be liked, to be liked, to be liked. And this creates its own kind of ceaseless anxiety.” The only real antidote to anxiety is action, and the only way out is up, as exemplified by Bree Newsome when she scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina statehouse and took down the Confederate battle flag, a Spider-Woman feat that earned her the handle “Millennial freedom fighter.” Everyone talks about seizing the day, but when someone actually goes out and does it, the unaccustomed world reels back and says, Wow. In one defiant moment, Newsome exposed political theater in this country, especially in the South, as a sclerotic, scarecrow con game. We may need Millennials to remind us what we should have remembered from the 60s, that social change comes only once you stop playing charades.

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