Opinion | A Rude Awakening Is Ahead for Young Employees
www.wsj.com
A recession will hand the bargaining power to their bosses.

Breaking news, there's this hot new trend in financial journalism called "zombie writing."

When it's a slow news day, the author writes about something that's literally always been the case and then adds "Millennials are doing X and that's new and scary".

Symptoms of "zombie writing" can include drooling, extreme fatigue, and a lack of financial income.

    • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I don't think most people know how old Millennials are. I've seen people born in 1991 and 1986 calling people under 20 Millennials.

      • TillieNeuen [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It's strange. I don't remember people holding on to the idea that "Gen X = young" the way they're holding on to "Millennial = young." Maybe it just didn't stick in my craw the same way since I'm not Gen X.

        • booty [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          It's definitely a phenomenon unique to millennials (at least of the generations alive right now). No idea what caused it though.

          • Deadend [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Refusal to admit that they are now grandparent aged and aren't doing so great themselves.

              • Deadend [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Millennials are 40s. The people who complain about them are 64 and about to retire with nothing

              • Spike [none/use name]
                ·
                2 years ago

                45 isn't actually that unreasonable to be a grandparent. You have kid when you're 21, your kid has a kid when they're 24 and you're a grandparent at 45

                • SadStruggle92 [none/use name]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  I mean I'm not saying that it doesn't happen; but also I suppose I would say that before 25 is probably not the wisest time to have kids.

                  At least both my parents & my grandparents were older than that when they started their families.

        • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Probably because these generational terms have become heavily marketed. It's why Zoomer is also becoming more of a thing than it would have if this were forty years ago.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Even when gen x was a term I feel like it meant a specific type of aesthetic rather than an age group. It meant someone who wore doc martens and a flannel shirt around their waist and they're always smoking a cigarette in front of the 711.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I've had coworkers as young as 20 try to make fun of who they called Millennials, but they seemed to mean people even younger than them. At this point I think the term just means any young adult who exhibits qualities the user of the word finds annoying, like being non-binary or vegan or being disinterested in climbing a career ladder.

      I tried saying to one of them that I'm a millennial, and he didn't know what I meant by just my age alone, but he eventually agreed with me once I said I'm vegan. Like "Oh, yeah now I can see it"