We've all heard it before, "millennials are ungrateful, have a horrible work ethic, waste their time doing frivolous things and think they are entitled to whatever they want." Millennials or "Generation Y" (which sounds way cooler) are the generation mainly associated with the increased use of technology, often considered a problem to earlier generations. While their allegations are sometimes true, the reasons behind our "lifestyle" often go unexplained. The society in which we live has changed rapidly in the last 15 years and millennials have (more or less) managed to keep up with it.

The most common comment I hear is that millennials think they are entitled to live lives they want, rather than lives that are financially feasible. The generation in question (which includes me) aspires to have fulfilling careers, rather than those that are going to help them "get rich quick." Personally, I'd rather be living pay-check-to-pay-check having the time of my life than make hundreds of thousands of dollars and sit in a cubicle I secretly wished would catch fire.

I have experienced this in my own life when I expressed my interest in art: "You don't get to be happy, you need to make money." Why can't I have both? Is that greedy?

I think what has gone unnoticed to older generations that make this accusation is that there has been some sense of "enlightenment" for our generation. People used to just go to work to make money so that they could do the things they want like travel, buy a nice house, a car they love and eventually settle down permanently in their old age. What they didn't realize, though, is that they were always working too much. They would put off that vacation to Switzerland because they needed to stay at work. They watched their lives pass them by and now criticize the younger members of society who are refusing to let that happen. Maybe it's jealousy or anger, but regardless, it's not the fault of "Generation Y."

Another thing we hear too often is that "millennials don't care about education." Do the people who say this even realize what they are suggesting? If it were true that we didn't care about education, we would all be on different paths, pursuing far different careers. If these accusers are referring to traditional secondary and higher education, then their claims would be unequivocally true for most of us. Here's the kicker: school isn't real education. School is the process through which kids age 5 - 22 regurgitate facts that the system has deemed important.

Do you want to know what real education is? It's going out into the world and having experiences, learning and seeing cultures that are unfamiliar, communicating with others who doesn't speak your language and still finding a way to understand each other. Millennials are doing this more than ever. Some people get paid to travel the world and write about their experiences, or they take road trips through desolate areas and work on a video blog.

Millennials are discovering that real education is waiting for them out there in the world, not printed on a screen in a classroom.

Looking at our generation, we often seem so self-obsessed that we've been called the "selfie generation." Is this a bad thing, though? Imagine if you could look back into the early 1900s at pictures people were taking every day. How amusing would that be? Future generations will get to look at the photos taken now and see how we lived, what we wore and what interested us as a generation. I'd say that's pretty cool.

So should millennials be criticized as much as they are? Maybe not. Our generation is judged on the poor behavior of a small percentage of lazy individuals, not overall. So, if you hear someone talking critically about millennials and want to chime in, don't be afraid to stand up for yourself and your fellow millennials. There's nothing wrong with being proud of who you are.