From hashtags “exposing” different famous people to hashtags celebrating the alleged end of a celebrity’s career, Twitter is often the best social media site to go to when you want to hear all of the grittiest gossip. This past Labor Day weekend was no exception to that unspoken rule, as the hashtag #HowToConfuseAMillennial started trending and baby boomers from the Twitter-sphere came out of the shadows to mock the entire millennial generation.
The criticisms came flying hard and fast, from joking quips to passive aggressive comments about millennials. Want to see some of my favorites? Here they are:
How could I have forgotten how much more useful encyclopedias are than Google? I would much rather sift through a 1,000-page book looking for one irrelevant fact than type a question into my search bar and get an answer immediately.
And then there’s this one:
Again, another great point. It was way better back in the good old days when we wrote letters by hand and sent them to our friends via ground delivery, waiting upwards of two weeks to get a response. My pesky iPhone has none of the nostalgia — I don’t even have to wait for a reply!
And finally, my personal favorite:
Of course, my millennial mind cannot comprehend the use of proper grammar. After all, we were taught using only emojis and acronyms, right?
As unbearable as it was to read through baby boomers’ different takes on millennials, members of the younger generation on Twitter quickly reclaimed the hashtag to put their own two cents in. And they had a lot to say:
I think the millennial followers above, and the rest of those who participated in reclaiming the hashtag, have said enough for the millions of us who didn’t. But the question still remains — why does every older generation hate millennials?
The millennial generation, those who were born from 1980-2000, grew up in a time where technology was rapidly advancing. In the blink of an eye, smartphones, laptops and video game consoles quickly became the norm in the average household. I was raised on VHS tapes and witnessed the transfer to DVDs. I used old dial-up computers in my home before we upgraded to Macs. I would thumb through our CD albums, try (and fail) to decipher navigational maps, write handwritten letters and mail them off to friends until I got a phone that could do all of that for me. With all of this in mind, I still have to ask why older generations are mad at us for embracing the technology that we grew up with, the technology of the modern world that has allowed us to simplify our lives.
I am one of the many millennials who has experienced being pushed aside because of the stereotypes about my generation. My thoughts and opinions have been discredited time and time again because I know nothing about the “real world” or because I “live my life behind a screen.” I have been overlooked and underestimated as a part of the millennial generation, and all because of our supposed “obsession” with technology. But what others see as “obsessed,” I see as “expertise.” After all, you didn’t call us obsessed when you needed help fixing a problem on your laptop, did you?
All jokes aside, I refuse to let my generation be reduced to a superficial group of self-obsessed people when I know that we are the promising future of the world. Millennials are people who, through the self-love and confidence of taking selfies and tweeting updates about our lives, have learned that our thoughts and feelings are valid and that we matter as individuals. Why must older generations mock us for that?
In true Twitter fashion, the #HowToConfuseAMillennial hashtag exposed not millennials, but baby boomers as being the ones who are actually “unaware” of the real world. The sooner they accept the fact that millennials have grown up in an extremely different and technologically advanced environment from them, the sooner they will realize that our differences are only negative if we allow them to be. And if older generations would actually take us seriously, instead of undermining all that we do, I wouldn’t have to tell you that the real way to confuse millennials is to vilify their use of social media on a social media platform dominated by millennials.
Ironic, right?
