You may have seen a video making the rounds on your Facebook feed, sometime in the past six months. The video features a bespectacled man in his early forties, discussing his thoughts on millennials in the workplace, and millennials in the world. This man is Simon Sinek, a British-American author, motivational speaker, and market consultant. In this interview, which occurred in December of 2016, he identifies millennials as people born after 1984 and outlines four major causes of millennial dysfunction which are rooted in our upbringing: parenting, technology, impatience, and environment. Although Sinek makes some good points about mental health and technology, Sinek fails to recognize that this happens with people of all ages and uses generational thinking to justify his claims. At best, his views are a sympathetic attempt to understand a group of people with some unintentionally patronizing generalizations, and at worst are condescending misconceptions.

I disagree with generational thinking on a deep, personal level. Generations are a social construct created to be mean to young people. There is no official, established date of when each generation begins nor when each generation ends. In his interview, Sinek defines millennials as people born after 1984 but gives no specific end date. If you look up the millennial generation online, you’ll get all sorts of different start and end dates: some that span as much as twenty years (1980-2000), and others that start as late as the mid-eighties and end as early as the mid-nineties.

How can you possibly assume that people born in 1980 had anywhere near the same experience growing up as someone born in 2000? People born in 2000 haven’t even graduated high school yet, whereas people born in 1980 will be turning 37 this year. Most of them have jobs, families, and mortgages, yet some people would look at them with the same lens as someone who, only recently, could legally drive? Those same people will also then look at someone born in 1979 and declare them a Gen Xer, and not cast them with those same negative connotations associated with millennials, even though they most likely have much more in common with those born in 1980 than they would with someone born twenty-years before them.

Generations have no real start and end dates and every generation likes to complain about the generations that come after them. These complaints are always the same: young people are lazy, young people are self-obsessed and entitled, and their technology is difficult and annoying. Complaining about young people has been documented since the invention of documentation, which I’m sure, ironically, older people used to complain about young people. In my day, we had to tell all our stories by word of mouth and commit them to memory! Written language is turning our kids into forgetful idiots!

This sounds ridiculous, but complaints about young people span millennia. When the book was first introduced, people complained that young people would never know the struggles of rolling and unrolling scrolls, and it would make them impatient. (VCRs vs. streaming, anyone?) In Book III of Odes, written approximately in 20 BCE, Horace wrote, “Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn, we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.” This quote could have appeared just as easily in a journal in 1750 or an online thinkpiece in 2017.

If this were true, by now we would have a planet inhabited entirely of heathens and human dumpster-fires. Although we have our fair share of these kinds of people, you cannot deny all the good that exists in the world, including people, and all the improvements we’ve made as a society since 20 BCE.

Like our ancestors complained of the book, the film, and the computer, Sinek complains of smartphones. Sinek blames smartphones for the lack of patience in young people. Smartphones are the best machines for instant gratification, and young people use them all the time. This causes millennials to grow up and get jobs that they leave too soon because job satisfaction is not instant gratification. He fails to consider that this is a complaint that recurs with every generation and that there may be other factors that contribute to young people’s behavior.

The Great Recession of 2009 has had disastrous impacts on the job market, which persists to this day and will continue to persist. Among those most affected are young people, recent college grads from 2009 until, most likely 2019, if not longer, a.k.a, people born from 1984 to the late nineties: “Millennials”. Many jobs have been lost, especially in humanities-based fields, forcing young people with liberal-arts degrees to take office jobs out financial necessity rather than legitimate passion. Working a job you hate is exhausting, and can only be handled for so long.

Although Simon Sinek makes some good points about mental health and technology, his generational thinking forces him to put figurative blinders on himself. Generational thinking is a diminutive way to think of young people that leads misconstrued overgeneralizations that older people have done at the expense of younger people since the dawn of time. It would be best for Sinek, and the world, to ditch the idea of generations and see people for what they truly are- people.