Millennials have been the internet’s favorite punching bag for years. Their interests and habits are constantly picked apart, whether it’s avocado toast, their love for Harry Potter, their taste in cozy, sentimental home decor, or the infamous “millennial pause.” And just when it seems to die down, another trend pops up to drag them again.
Fed up with the endless criticism, one woman took to TikTok to fire back—not just at Gen Z, but at every generation that’s ever taken a shot at millennials. Her video blew up, and now the question is yours to answer: was she right to push back, or did she overdo it?
Millennials have been the internet’s favorite punching bag for years
Image credits: autumntheeseason
So, fed up with the criticism, one woman went on a viral rant, firing back at every other generation
Image credits: Eliott Reyna / unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Getty Images / unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: S O C I A L . C U T / unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: autumntheeseason
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How did the generations get their names, and why do they hate each other?
Baby Boomers are entitled, Millennials are cringe, Gen Z is lazy, Gen Alpha has already been labeled as iPad babies, and Gen X? Well, they’re kind of like the middle child—always there, but often overlooked. No matter what we do, it seems like we can’t escape these stereotypes. But when did we start dividing ourselves into generations, and why do we keep taking shots at each other?
The idea of categorizing generations has been around for about a century. Kelli María Korducki at Insider writes that sociologist Karl Mannheim introduced the idea of categorizing generations in his 1928 essay The Problem of Generations. He argued that people who experience major historical or cultural events at a formative age develop a shared consciousness that shapes their identity.
Fast forward to 2021, and writer Louis Menand linked this idea to a surprising factor: the rise of high school attendance in the U.S. In 1910, only 14% of teens between 14 and 17 were in school. By 1940, that number had jumped to 73%. Menand argued that this shift helped create the modern “teenager”—a brand-new social category that marketers could target.
Even though this generational concept lingered for decades, the obsession with it really took off after the 1992 book Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe. According to sociologists Andrew M. Lindner, Sophia Stelboum, and Azizul Hakim, the authors drew on “a long lineage of quasi-scientific romantic historical generational thinking” to help cement the generational labels we use today. Fun fact: the book even coined the term millennial.
“Since the release of Strauss and Howe’s influential book, the generational labels of ‘Baby Boomer,’ ‘Gen X,’ ‘Millennials,’ and ‘Gen Z’ have appeared in dozens of trade paperbacks, thousands of newspaper headlines, and all over social media,” Lindner and his colleagues told Insider. “Each of these labels is associated with a package of supposed psychological traits, behavioral patterns, and political commitments typical of each respective generation (e.g., being narcissistic, parting one’s hair in the middle, destroying the global economy).”
But generational feuds? They’re nothing new. In fact, they’ve been around for thousands of years, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to speculate that they’ve existed as long as humans have. A 2017 BBC article by Amanda Ruggeri points out that for at least two millennia, older generations have been grumbling about the younger ones.
And the complaints barely change. Older folks always say young people are lazy, self-absorbed, overconfident yet inexperienced, bad with money, and not as well-educated. Naturally, younger generations fire back with their own criticisms. Here are just a few examples from history that sound way too familiar:
- “[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.” — Aristotle, 4th Century BC
- “The Chairman alluding to the problem of young people and their English said his experience was that many did not seem able to express or convey to other people what they meant. They could not put their meaning into words, and found the same difficulty when it came to writing.” — Gloucester Citizen, 1936
- “Probably there is no period in history in which young people have given such emphatic utterance to a tendency to reject that which is old and to wish for that which is new.” — Portsmouth Evening News, 1936
- “They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial.” — Proceeding with Caution, Time, 2001
- “They are the most threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution, not because they're trying to take over the Establishment but because they're growing up without one.” — Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation, Time, 2013
So, why do we hate each other? Honestly, it’s just in our nature. Older generations will always think younger ones are ruining everything, and younger generations will always think the older ones have messed it all up. The only difference now? We have official labels to argue over—and that probably isn’t changing anytime soon.
Image credits: Kateryna Hliznitsova / unsplash (not the actual photo)
Readers didn’t hold back, adding their own digs at Gen Z
