To The Generations Who Criticize Millennials;

Lazy. Entitled. Self-centered. Those are the words we hear you use to describe us.

You criticize us for the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, and the technology we use. You judge us, but you never really hear us. You ask for a perfection that even you couldn’t achieve and wonder why we’re stressed. You say that you were working hard by the time you were in college and didn’t have so many problems. We hear you say it over and over: “Back in my day…”

Well, back in your day, things were a lot different. You can’t buy hot dogs at baseball games for fifty cents anymore. For one semester of college, you’d have to work more than 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job in Minnesota ($9.50 for large employers) to afford it out of pocket; textbooks not included. If you turn on the news, all you see is hatred, death, and a broken, desperate world. Oppression has split our country into chaos. Fear shrouds the lives of millions living in an area where the threat of death is very real, because their house could be bombed at any second or they could be shot at point-blank range by the time you finish reading this. In 2015 alone, a total of at least 40 lives were lost from mass shootings, and in one single event 50 more lives were lost in 2016. The End It Movement website says that around the globe, an estimated 20 – 45.8 million people are trapped in slavery, many of them young girls who have been forced into sex trafficking because of poverty. According to the National Institute of Mental Health website, in 2014, suicide was the second leading cause of death for those aged 10-34.

Don’t tell us we’re lazy, because there are millennials more ambitious than you’d even dream of. I know of an entrepreneur who, by the time she was 24, racked up over $650,000 on Kickstarter (only 2% of all campaigns on Kickstarter manage to hit $100,000). As a now 26 year old, she is the CEO of a growing company that has been featured on Forbes, TedX, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, and many other well-known media platforms.

Don’t tell us we’re self-centered because I know of a seventeen year old who works three jobs to sponsor sixteen kids through Compassion International (one sponsorship is $38 a month). Sixteen. There are plenty more millennials who, on a minimum-wage, part-time job salary, sponsor kids in extreme poverty.

Instead of judging us, can you learn to walk with us? Instead of calling us lazy, self-centered, and entitled, can you understand that we are living in a world more damaged than you ever thought possible? Because truth is, we’re not any of the negative words you say. Sure, there may be some self-centered, lazy, entitled millennials, but you can’t stereotype our generation.

So instead of judging us, can you at least try to understand what we feel?
To let us know you’re on our side because we’ve got our problems just like you.
And maybe we’ve messed up, but you were once young.

I hope you understand that this is our life.

So with all due respect,

A Millennial