Six Myths About Milllennials

It would seem that 2015 is the year that Millennials were "discovered", because all of a sudden they seem to be everywhere, at least in the popular media. Millennials are hard working, Millennials are slackers, Millennials are entrepreneurial, Millennials are good workers. What Millennials seem to be most, by this reckoning, is confused.

I've written about Millennials in several recent posts, but when I write about them, I specifically am writing about a particular group of people - those people born roughly between 1980 and 2000. Why those two years? There are in fact several reasons, some having to do with demographics (in 1978 or so, birth rates, which had been falling since the late 1950s, stabilized), some having to do with the fact that this period represents the rise of the personal computer, with 2000 being a natural coda, some due to the "generational theory" of Strauss and Howe. 

More importantly, it is a bucket. It is a way to look at how a generation of people, roughly 20 years long, changes over time. Unfortunately, many people confuse the people in the bucket with the bucket itself, and so some broad generalizations about Millennials have been made that are just patently silly, mostly because many of the assertions that are made are made about ALL people who are in their twenties and thirties, and have NOTHING to do with the historical context in which they are growing up.

So, time for a bit of myth debunking:

Millennials Are Uniformly Alike

Nope. Those born in the early years of the generation look a lot like the youngest GenXers. They were babies under Reagan, attended High School under Clinton, were attending college on 9/11 under Bush, Jr. At home as young kids, most of them likely had (very) basic computers (Ataris, Commodore 64s, PCs and Apple IIs) at home, vaguely remember TVs with 13 channels, cassette tapes for both music recording and data recording, can still imitate the distinctive sound of a modem starting up (shwrwrwrwr-chong-chong-chbang-chbang-chbang-wheeeeeeeee.....) and for them the Internet was a novelty, filled largely with static web pages done up in glaring colors, and was generally only really available in professional level and above homes.

They had the misfortune of coming out of college just as the tech market collapsed, and cell phones were things carried in cars and that weighed about the same as a smallish brick. Their default search engine was Alta Vista, and the default operating system their computers used was Microsoft Windows, which also provided the dominant office suite, with Apple taking up the rest. Social media meant Compuserve or, at the very end, AOL. The oldest are about 34 today.

The youngest were born at the turn of the century. For them, the Internet is ubiquitous, smart phones and selfies are the norm, Microsoft is a gaming platform called XBox, 3D animation in movies and even at home is the norm, CDs are old school and most media (and news) comes from the Internet. They know exactly where they are at all times, to within a few feet. They're in early high school today, and will enter college in a couple of years, even though many are questioning whether there's really value in college anymore.

They youngest know everything, or at least have the knowledge that they can know everything within seconds. They're growing up with self-driving cars, living cyborgs, and inflatable robots (on a scale of one to ten ...), at least on the close horizon.TV is an anachronism. Many do robotics as hobbies after school.

The key point here is that the very youngest Millennials are starting out in the science fiction future of the oldest. The world bears, at least in rough form, a disturbing degree of similarity to the topsy turvy world of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which was written in 1992 when the oldest Millennials were about eleven. That there is in fact anything even remotely  similar between the youngest and oldest in terms of their world experience is laughable, save that even the oldest Millennials lived in an almost inconceivably different world than the oldest GenXers.

There's a more subtle point too - the same changes that have been happening to the youngest Millennials are happening to everyone else. In my fifties (a very early GenXer), I also know everything (or can at least find out) and know where I am with astonishing precision. The difference, and what makes this most notable, is that these aren't first assumptions for me, or for those that were born around the same time. These are things that shape values, expectations, the formation of social circles, the starting assumptions about how the world will look in a couple of decades.

I think that when the modern media talks about Millennials, they are talking about someone who was born in 1992 (roughly the mid-point of the Millennials), and who would now be about 23 years old, which is more or less the age of my eldest daughter, someone who's been in the workforce for a couple of years and who actually pretty much embodies most of the current tropes about Millennials. However, she is not her "generation"..

Millennials Are Young and Clueless

Again, no. Perhaps a more accurate way of stating this is that the young and clueless are currently Millennials. Twenty years ago, the young and clueless were mainly GenXers, and most of the tripe that is written today about Millennials is rehashed from what was said about my generation.

Okay, a few obvious points here. If you're 23 years old, you're just starting out in your career, and likely not going to be in the same job, or even career track, as you will be in your forties or fifties. If you're 23 years old, you are probably not yet married (by the way, this IS a big demographic shift from forty years ago, where you probably would be married - it's these kinds of things that demographers look at). If you're 23 years old, you're likely not going to be running your own company, have a pretty good chance of still living at home, and will be all about partying, watching the latest shows, working with the coolest tech, and likely be pretty liberal in your beliefs. Your friends will be more important than your work at 23 years old, and your hobbies will still likely reflect those things you did as kids.

If you replace "23 years old" with the phrase "a Millennial", then most of the things will be true, if you're a 23 year old Millennial.

One of the hardest things for demographers and social scientists to explain is that the reason that you put things into buckets is to make analysis easier, but that if there is in fact wide variance in your data, then the analysis will not necessarily be completely accurate for any given individual. There's also the challenge of separating out age-based characteristics from common cultural ones. You can say, with some veracity, that most Millennials grew up exposed to computers in their homes as children, and that they likely had some hands on experience with computers as a consequence. Saying that all Millennials are Selfie happy is just plain absurdity, though it is almost certainly true that Millennials were the first to adopt that trend, because the capability to do so came about during their generation (and is still most heavily practiced by that generation).

Generational theory has some predictive capabilities, because it is, in general, true that people born within the same year will tend to develop similar values and patterns of behavior. Moreover, there's a gaussian distribution of quite a few years where these common characteristics hold, though there's also a decay from a central point, as you'd expect from any gaussian. When change occurs rapidly, the decay is likely stronger, so generalizations about Millennials in particular are likely harder to make simply because there is such a stark contrast between the beginning and end of that putative generation. 

Millennials Are Poor and Unemployed

There's a bit of truth in this one. The eldest Millennials had the misfortune of starting in the work force just as the tech recession hit, and tech in general tends to absorb young people faster than other industries, which meant that employment was just picking up for Millennials in 2008 when the housing market caused one of the worst recessions since the 1930s Depression.

The tech market has largely recovered, but again, this tends to benefit those in their mid-20s strongest, which means that there is a striation employment, with bends of early vs late employment throughout this generation. As getting a job is increasingly dependent upon having a job, this striation can mean significant differences in the overall employment patterns within these bands. It also means that the average wealth of Millennials will likely be significantly lower than the average wealth for GenXers when they were the same age, though the distribution will be different - the 80s started out slowly, but the economy was growing and job opportunities were rising from about 1985 on, with the exception of a two year period around 1990.

The housing recession will have had a serious negative effect upon overall wealth formation for Millennials, made worse by the fact that the Housing bust of 2008 meant a paucity of entry level jobs for nearly four years, something that hit Millennials disproportionately just at the time when most were engaged in capital accumulation. This will have an impact on when families get started and similar follow-on effects, that will likely also mean that capital formation will be a problem for this generation in total over their lifetime.

Millennials Are Gay-Friendly, Liberal Urbanites

Again, there is some truth to this that extends beyond age effects. For the last half century, both urban size and urban density have been increasing, even as rural densities continue to drop dramatically. What this means in practical terms is that a house in the "suburbs" in 1985 would likely be considered in the city in 2005, with the rise of social and cultural amenities and problems that cities bring with them. It's not so much that people are moving to the big city - rather, the big city is moving to them.

Additionally, one thing that is common to all people in this generation is the fact that computerized social media has been a given, at first among the professional classes, and later, more universally. One impact of social media is that you are more likely to encounter people holding differing viewpoints than your own, and while it can cause tribalization, it also tends among the young to inculcate a more open worldview.

These factors combine to make it more likely that people born between 1980 and 2000 will be urbanites and have an open world-view that is more characteristic of social liberalism.

Again, there is danger in too much generalization here. Local cultural differences still exist and typically have a strong influence on outlook. People in Seattle or San Francisco, for instance, will likely continue to be far more liberal than people in the Midwest or the Southeast, and if anything, the reduced densification will tend to make rural areas especially even more conservative, but in terms of overall numbers, the population is becoming more socially open as it becomes more urbanized.

The gay-friendly part is actually an interesting artifact - the move towards the normalization of gay marriage was driven primarily by people in their 20s and 30s, and again was pushed principally by urbanites (where gay population densities are higher than average). This neither discounts the work put in by older people or those in rural areas, but a certain critical mass needed to be met to change enough public opinion to make it socially acceptable, and this was driven by Millennials

So again, these are aggregate characteristics, not individual ones, and the change overall accounts only for a few percent of the total population shifting one way or another. However, when a populace is more or less evenly divided, a shift of a few percent can topple governments.

Millennials Are Surgically Attached to their SmartPhones

If you were an artist depicting a teenaged girl in the 1950s, chances are pretty good you'd draw her in street clothes on her bed, talking on the phone with her boyfriend or best girlfriend (or listening to music on her "portable" record player). In many respects, this really hasn't changed in sixty years.

That this generation was the first to exploit networked electronic social media is not really an issue, and even today, the largest demographic for non-audio smart-phone use is still (and likely will always be) Millennials. What has changed is the opportunity to maintain inexpensive contact with a far broader number of people, and to share these experiences at a richer level.

I'll use my "Millennial" daughter as representative here. She uses her cell phone almost continuously, but she uses it primarily to text or chat,rather than speak. The dominant form of communication has become asynchronous text rather than synchronous like a phone call (in fact she feels distinctly shy and uneasy about talking on the phone, something that I've noticed is almost universal among her circle of friends).

I think its a mistake to think that simply because the means to have more channels of communication are there that Millennials are simply more social media happy. Communication modalities are in fact a very clear indicator of generation - people in their 60s and 70s are call on the phone (or send cards) than someone in their forties or fifties, who are more likely to use email or call compared to those in their twenties and thirties, who are more likely to use multimodal communication. People in their 80s dislike even calling, preferring long hand-written letters. 

I expect that as the "social-media" generation gets older, the people within it will likely moderate their behavior somewhat, as rules determining "acceptable" social behavior for such communication move beyond the best practices stage into accepted social convention. If and when pure electronic telepathy becomes developed, social behavior will change to accommodate this, but that older generations will complain about how their teenage daughters just stare off into space all the time.

Millennials Are Entrepreneurial

There are typically two periods when a person is likely to start their own business - when they are in their twenties and when they are in their mid-to late 40s. When jobs are scarce, when the barrier to entry of starting a business is low, and when coordinating a team remotely is easy, the likelihood that you will see more businesses start up among the young is higher, though the likelihood of success is somewhat lower.

If the economic niche is there to support the business need, then the business may catch on, if it isn't, then businesses end up competing with one another very early on for a limited number of slots, with advantages to the incumbents. 

My suspicions (and they are based on anecdotes) is that Millennials are no more or less inclined to be entrepreneurial than the previous generation, but they have the need to be more entrepreneurial simply because the traditional jobs are not there.

Experience begets expertise. Starting a business is a skill like any other, you get better at it the more often you try. This may mean that, looking back, Millennials will have proven to be (marginally) more entrepreneurial than previous generations, but local economic conditions as much as anything will be a factor there. 

Millennials Are

In short, in order to understand Millennials (and generational theory in general) it is critical to differentiate what is ultimately common shared cultural and societal factors rather than simply age related characteristics, and to realize that these are simply markers for tracking and analysing characteristics of age related cohorts. Overgeneralization is easy to do, and has about as much predictive value as throwing entrails on the ground and see which way they splatter.

On the other hand, it's also a mistake to think that shared cultural, economic and societal experiences do not have some impact upon people. We are each of us individuals, but our environments do imprint us nonetheless. Used as a tool, the concept of cohorts makes a lot of sense - just don't assume that it can be used blanketly at the individual level.

Kurt Cagle is the founder and CEO of Semantical LLC.