I'm sure you've heard it before — Millennials are all nostalgia and disenfranchisement. Now, I don't know about you, but hearing that from some old man writing for Time drives me up the wall. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's old people telling younger generations exactly what we look like, and they think we look self-absorbed idiots.

Funny thing is, if you think about it, it's true, but not for the reason that old guy throwing out buzzwords thinks it is.

As a generation, we are nostalgic. We grew up in a time when the Internet age was merging with the Playing Outside age, and this isn't to say younger kids don't play outside. Older folks might say they don't play outside as much as they used to, but that's because they just want something to complain about, as older people like to do. But we Millennials were really in the thick of it: growing up between games of hopscotch no one ever really knew how to play and Tamagotchi and games of flashlight tag and Freddi Fish. We're not the last generation to roll around in the grass pretending we're bugs, but we were the first generation to start playing Disney Channel games online, to start sending emails to our friends (i.e., their parents' emails), to start logging phone numbers into our personal cellphones instead of memorizing a seven or ten digit number.

But that's not why we're nostalgic. We're nostalgic because when we were growing up, everything seemed so simple: you grow up, find someone you like, maybe get married to them, get a job, get a house, and have a couple kids. We grew up on these expectations, and then all of a sudden the housing market collapses. We experience 9/11 and watch our parents and friends go to war. We hear about the devastation overseas, not from our news broadcasters, but from Twitter and Tumblr, from the people who are watching it happen in front of them. Student loan debt reaches a whopping $1.2 trillion, and our parents complain to us about how in their day they could just pay it off with a minimum wage job for one summer, even though minimum wage now working 40 hours a week couldn't cover a one-bedroom apartment split between two people in any state in America, let alone the cost of my tuition.

But I can't possibly have a reason for why we're so "self-absorbed," right? Maybe my point is that I don't need a reason. Maybe I just want to take selfies because I can. Maybe I want my friends to Instagram what they're eating for dinner in a nice filter or Snapchat me when they think they're looking great, because you know what? I'm happy for them, and I'm proud of them. There's no reason to put people down for doing the things they like or for thinking they look good in that moment. If you think you look good, hell yeah you should Snapchat me! Personally speaking, I'm very happy with selfie culture, especially in this society that consistently remarks about how you always have to be looking good. Especially for women. Yet whenever we think we do look good, suddenly we're narcissists because of it? Seems like a somewhat flawed deduction to me.

Have you noticed the pattern yet? Somewhere, in all our disenfranchisement, there's always this one connection between all of our reasons: an older member of an older generation, sticking their noses up and turning their faces away without so much as an attempt to get to know our generation as a whole. So, really, next time you hear some older generation rant and rave about how all Millennials are just egotistical know-it-alls who need to start investing in the housing marketing with all this money we don't have, look them directly in the eye ask them who made today's market exactly how it is. That'll really get them talking.