Millennials Don't Exist! Adam Conover at Deep Shift

Adam Conover did a great talk about this [0]. It was entitled "Millenials Don't Exist". In it he humorously but also seriously asserts that lumping people together as generations is useless at best and harmful at worst. [0] ▶ this video

Needs a "Boomer: " prefix or "says boomer" postfix. "I’m surprised to see online videos at the bottom of the list with just 16%. I suspect that this percentage is higher among millennials and lower among baby boomers. I prefer to read about how to do something as opposed to watching a video — that is, unless I’m trying to take something apart to fix it. Having a video is often better than looking at photos or drawings." I guess that the responsible thing is to let this article fade into irrelevance, but I felt like sharing. ▶ this video

I like to refer to Adam ruins everything on Millennials: ▶ this video TL;DW Generational titles (Boomers, Gen X, Y, whatever) are invented by authors to sell books. They never bring people up and are always used to tear people down. Everything said about Millennials has been said about every generation ever. You can take a Time magazine cover from the 50s about the entitled generation and slap a modern photo on it and it's the same damn thing. It's lazy. Millennials are the most diverse of any generation. That's about all you can really say, other than we're the most in debt and most likely to take unpaid internships compared to any previous generation. It's a straw man and it needs to die.

"The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating." -Thomas Jefferson I know I mention this book a lot on here, but _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ is the most amazing book I've ever read on the history of debt, money and slavery. Debt relief has to come. Every great civilization throughout history has had to forgive debts. Current student debt is not even remotely payable. Millennials are the most in debt out of any generation, the lowest paid and most likely to take unpaid internships[1]. They put up with so much more that no previous generation would have even stood for. "A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point we can’t even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe." Graber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years [1]: ▶ this video

Adam (from Adam Ruins Everything) does a really good talk at a marketing conference on why Millennials don't exist. Generational titles are never used to bring people up, but always tear a group of people down. Time magazine covers about Baby Boomers from decades ago are almost identical to those calling Millennials entitled today: ▶ this video

It kinda makes me thing of the "Millennials Don't Exist" talk by Adam Conover. He talks about how generational terms are just made up by authors who want to get rich and they're almost always condescending (those entitled baby boomers, those lazy millennials, those gen x-ers) and how people don't liked to be talked down to: ▶ this video Are millennials attached do their cellphones? Yes .. so are mothers, fathers, grandparents and some dogs. It's literally the most compact and powerful communication and computational device we've ever had. When you break down all the labels, all you really have is people. Talk to them like people.

There's a lot wrong with this article. Do people actually use their phones for transit? I have transit cards from like 10 cities, and transit cards don't run out of batteries. Cards/cash don't run out of batteries either, and you can use them to refill your transit card, and I don't see those getting replaced any time soon. (Germans still use cash for like everything, which feels weird in an EU country). And we still have plenty of phone booths ... if you need to take a piss. I'm pretty sure that's the only thing they're used for in London. Seriously don't touch those; they're disgusting. Do people actually meet legit partners and friends from apps? I've never met anyone off Tinder (I'm not all that cute really), dating websites are a wasteland and all the people I've had meaningful relationships I've met at things I like to do. Sure we have meetups, but they really just facilitate what we use to do with flyers/posters before. Meeting people still takes work. No one meets of Internet chat rooms like in the AOL/Seinfeld era. The Facebook generation of social networks wants you to only connect with people you already know. Smart phones, cell phones, affordable laptops, the Internet, television, radio, magazines, news and print media ... Every advancement is huge. Every advancement initially supplied free and open speech. Printing presses pre-civil war were less than $10k USD to setup (in today's money). Papers crossed the country and spread news and opinions. Large media, adver

I still see the term 'millennial fashion' and 'the noughties' been thrown around, but these are meaningless terms. Here's an interesting talk by Adam Conover debunking the term millennial: ▶ this video

I've seen this talk before, and he makes a ton of assertions mostly backed by often-repeated cliches rather than data (e.g. participation trophies). This is a really good talk I've seen posted in response to this very video before, so I'll post it again. ▶ this video

Millennials don't exist, according to Adam Conover: ▶ this video I'm careful using the word "Millennial" these days and increasingly skeptical of online articles with the word "Millennial" in the title. Thanks to shows like Adam Ruins Everything[1], I am more informed on a variety of topics. (I learn visually and prefer to watch his videos instead of read an article). [1]: link

Agreed. My favorite quote was "In some ways I love being a millennial, because it’s so much easier to be better than the rest of our generation" I can't tell if this statement supports or contradicts the rest of the article, but regardless, this bears watching again... ▶ this video The generational pile-on goes back and is pretty meaningless.