It’s become some kind of trend thing, criticizing millennials. Members of our own generation are comparing us to our grandparents’ generation of war vets and women who managed to raise eight kids despite economic hardship.
Arguments against us say that we need to pull ourselves together. We are supposedly stupid and lazy because technology has made us this way. Selfies have made us egomaniacs, and we are antisocial because an easier way to reach our friends is through FaceTime rather than face time. Cut us a break, please.
Our minimum wage yields less buying power than ever before. Had the federal minimum wage increased according to inflation, it would currently be $9.76 with the same buying power that it had in 1964. The value of a dollar has decreased that much, while the cost of college tuition has increased a crippling twelve-fold (adjusted for inflation) over the previous 30 years.
The same adults who are telling us to buckle down and tell us how good we have it because we can afford iPhones were likely able to pay for college with a good summer job. A good summer job today might cover two semesters of books and an occasional coffee run had you managed not to spend a penny all summer.
This is the first generation in America’s history to be worse off than its parents. We come out of school burdened with student loans and their high interest rates, few options to relieve the pressure to pay that debt, and few prospects for jobs because there are so many other graduates in desirable jobs. We are overqualified for lower paying jobs, and the likelihood of finding a career in our field of study in a reasonable amount of time after graduation is sadly slim to none. Many of us feel that our only opportunity to be successful stems from continuing education all the way through graduate school, which often does not help to get ahead due to the ways colleges pay adjunct professors with PhDs.
Despite not having a head start, we have a lot of things going for us. We have more college graduates than ever before, most of whom are women. We are hailed as civilly oriented, more concerned with helping one another and doing the right things than previous generations. We put in more volunteer hours than the same groups, and have greater concern for the environment and other problems that will extend past our lifetimes. So, if taking a photograph of oneself, or live tweeting life, makes life just a little bit better for us, it is not the end of the world. We are a generation of good people with hard roads ahead of us. It is time we quit griping about "selfies", and social networking, and find solutions to the real problems that our generation faces.
