Anyone Else Growing Tired Of The ‘Millennials Are Slackers’ Refrain?

See here, one more example of a middle aged, middle class man in a position of relative power, taking it upon himself to tell us ungrateful millennials about how privileged and incapable we all are. Because we haven’t had our fill of that already…

This time the usual presumptive drabble arrives at our feet as spouted from the mouth of public school headmaster Douglas Robb, who recently wrote a blog post for the school’s website. ‘Grit is not a new idea, nor even a new buzzword’, he wrote. ‘Grit remains, however, something that schools and parents seem to have failed to engender in large swathes of young people’, he wrote.

‘A generation has come of age where many more individuals perceive themselves to be “one in a million”’.

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Sound familiar? 'Course it does. It’s the classic ‘snowflake’ doctrinethat we’ve all grown tired of defending ourselves against. Headmaster Robb doesn’t think that being gritless and ‘average’ is all of our own doing, though. Our generation has an underlying sense of entitlement, apparently. He said: ‘I don’t blame them. They have been advertised to since birth; they have had credit and loans on a plate; they have been overly molly-coddled; and they have been overwhelmed by a strange combination of fictional sit-com characters, reality TV and social media starts, who paint a picture of perfection to be achieved.’

An interesting perception there, don’t you think? So fucking novel of a Baby Boomer to rationalise generational differences with the presumed ease with which we consume advertising, lap up credit card debt and take performed reality as fact. Good job, sir. You’ve effectively diluted what may have once upon a time been an important conversation about nurturing resilience in a generation faced with challenges that the most attentive Baby Boom Parents couldn’t have seen coming. A generation that, as it happens, is constantly overwhelmed by the bombardment of images of Instagram perfection and didn't wander into a shit storm of debt, just to get out of doing some old-fashioned hard work.

Once again, the important issues that are prevalently faced by millennials such as the influence (and safe use) of social media and the dramatically bleak financial prospects for salary, pension, homeownership and higher education, are the cause of our perceived lack of ‘grit’, entitled nature and lacking in ‘pride associated with doing “an honest day’s work”’.

How better to demonstrate the effective undermining of potential progress for generation rent, an age bracket that we may as well consider synonymous with both ‘snowflake’ and ‘millennial’ at this point, than by completely disregarding the socio-economic reality of our current lives? Well, Robb added that we ‘have even been encouraged by governments to believe that they deserve “more” than their parents and grandparents had (capitalism, after all, requires consumers to always want to have “more”)’.

If capitalism is to blame for our assured demands for government backed support to reverse the impact of the financial domino effect that, with the crash of 2007, screwed a generation out of being able to buy or own with the same ease that our analogue aged predecessors did, then well at least there's somewhere else to point the finger. But let's not dismiss the big picture that's being blocked by the headmaster of a private school who likely resides in a privileged bubble that distances him even further from the reality of so many young adults right now.

We are the first generation to live our lives online, consider instant digital responses the default mode of communication and have a less economic power than our parents. Negative stereotypes ironically imposed by a middle-aged man who holds to potential to positively influence upcoming generation (who's lives will differ even further from the days that he considers 'lost') don't help any of us as we try to navigate the ever-evolving world of what it means to be an adult.

Follow Jazmin on Instagram @JazKopotsha

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.