We know this, because every few days there’s a story about how they are too overprotected to be police officers (they have been “wrapped in cotton wool”, are routinely shocked that police are expected to work nights and weekends and “do not like confrontation”, apparently). They’re “entitled, spoilt and molly-coddled snowflakes”, they’re “flaky”, “self-centred”, “narcissistic” and “oversensitive”.

But as far as I can tell, it’s all nonsense. For a start: millennials aren’t that young any more. The usual cut-off point, where Generation X becomes millennial, is 1981. (I miss out by less than six weeks; I’m gutted.) The oldest millennials are now 37 years old; some of them are grandparents; many of them will be taking their own children to university this September. Even the youngest (born 1996) are now approaching their mid-20s and have probably been in the workforce for a while now. Professors and medical consultants are millennials; quite a lot of those millennials who are too mollycoddled to be police officers will be detective chief superintendents by now, which must have come as a shock.

For another: all this dividing people up into generations (boomers, Gen X, millennials, iGen/Gen Z) is at best arbitrary and at worst meaningless. I’m apparently Gen X, but I obviously have more in common with a millennial born two months after me than I do with someone born in 1965.

Suggested reading

Could Generation X save the world?

By Peter Franklin

The sociologist Philip Cohen argues that the categories are essentially valueless and do not line up with any useful distinctions; they’re just “irregular categories without justification”, “marketing names that promote stereotyping and confirmation bias”. Most people, when asked to give their own “generation”, get it wrong.

That’s not to say that people haven’t changed: obviously they have. Younger people are more liberal on most issues, for instance, and they are less likely to smoke, drink and take drugs. But they don’t line up neatly with the generations: actual changes in social attitudes, such as attitudes towards divorce, are unconnected to these arbitrary categories.

Here are some of the differences. Younger people are more liberal on LGBT issues – about 80% of under-34s have “no objection” to same-sex marriage, compared to 62% of 55- to 75-year-olds – and race; young people are much more likely to think that it’s racist to dislike hearing UK residents speak other languages than English or to make jokes involving racial stereotypes. They’re less likely to be religious, although slightly more likely to be of a non-Christian faith, a change presumably driven by immigration. They’re more likely to identify as LGBT themselves.

And they’re more likely to be worried about climate change – although it’s not as dramatic a difference, at least in the UK, as I’d have expected, given the constant moaning by baby-boomer columnists about Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, 94% of 18- to 34-year-olds think climate change is definitely/probably happening, 46% think it’s definitely/probably caused by human activity, and 32% are extremely/very worried about it. For over-65s, those numbers are 90, 35 and 20 respectively. It’s not huge. In fact, since Britain saw its hottest ever recorded temperature last week, I would have been entirely happy if it were greater. If the younger generation is willing to make those sacrifices that we older ones are not, then perhaps the consequences might not be quite so severe.

Suggested reading

Is this the end of personal responsibility?

By Tom Chivers

What I find strange is the older generation complaining about this. Young people have always been more liberal than their parents; it’s as though the boomers have forgotten the Sixties. And being more open on sex and gender issues is hardly new either; about half of British teenagers in the Sixties and Nineties decided they were gay because David Bowie and him out of Suede were for a while. (I have this theory that most of the young men doing it are doing it to be more interesting to girls, just as lots of my contemporaries did back then, and that a large percentage of the male-bodied people who describe themselves as genderfluid now will be married to a woman and living in St Albans with two kids and a miniature schnauzer by the time they’re 40. But I have nothing to back that hypothesis up.)

And, of course, “young people are lazy and entitled” is a tale as old as — well, perhaps not the hills, but certainly as old as the United States of America. The younger generation was marvellously described as “a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles”, lacking the “manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers” in a letter to Town and Country magazine back in 1771. Their morals are “corrupted” by plays and romances (1790); their elocution is “wretched” (1780).

Incidentally, I put “millennials workplace meta-analysis” into Google Scholar, to see if there was any actual support for the idea that millennials are any more lazy and/or entitled than previous generations were when they were in their 20s. The short answer is: no.

Suggested reading

Why are Millennials so boring?

By Douglas Murray

The first relevant result I found, which is a meta-analysis from 2012 and claims to be the first systematic review of generational differences in the workplace, looked at job satisfaction, how committed to their employers they were, and how likely they were to stick around. It found that “the relationships between generational membership and work-related outcomes are moderate to small, essentially zero in many cases”.

Another review article, from 2018, found that there is “little solid empirical evidence supporting the existence of generationally based differences, almost no theory supporting any reason behind such differences, and plenty of viable alternate explanations for any differences that are observed”.

As far as I can tell, all this “millennial snowflakes” stuff is just the same “kids today are being damaged by social media and Fortnite, and this is different from how my parents thought I was being damaged by heavy metal and teen magazines for reasons I cannot fully articulate” wine in different bottles.

Suggested reading

The truth about Gen Z

By Eliza Filby

But, of course, there are some real differences between the younger generation and the older one. One is that very few of them can afford to buy their own homes; just 35% of 25- to 34-year-olds did in 2013/14, compared to more than 60% in 1981. Millennials and Gen-Zers look like they will be the first generation to have less disposable income than their parents (partly because of the increase in house prices, but partly because of stagnating incomes).

Those middle-era and younger millennials who graduated after the financial crisis will probably earn less for much of their careers than those of us who graduate before. None of this is their fault; this is the fault of governments voted in by Boomers and Gen-Xers who refused to build housing stock, who stripped back government spending and stalled the economy, and who failed to keep a grip on financial markets.

I’m pretty sceptical of stories about how the younger generations are crippled by mental health problems or how we have a suicidal generation. Generally the evidence doesn’t stack up and it’s just an excuse for someone to whine about social media or smartphones. But, actually, younger generations really do face problems that the older ones didn’t; on some really crucial issues, it is harder to be 25 now than it was 25 years ago. And yet as far as I can tell, they aren’t any lazier, any more entitled or whiny, or significantly more depressed than their parents were at the same age. To be honest, since we’re the ones who’ve screwed it all up for them, we should be more grateful that they’re not rising up to overthrow us.

We all know this happens, because we’ve see it in others – even if we’re too young to have experienced even twinges of it ourselves. I was reminded of the process as I watched the further descent into grumpy old-manness of Bret Easton Ellis.

The author of American Psycho has been giving interviews to publicise his first non-fiction book, White. This is a full-throated assault on the culture that Millennials have brought into the world. It’s an account of the world of snowflake censoriousness that makes all discussion of almost anything almost impossible. The world of feelings over facts. The world of ‘cancelling’ people if they have ever emitted the wrong view.

But there’s a problem. While we might recognise Ellis’s descent into curmudgeonliness, it cannot be allowed to pass without censure.

Further reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

Let’s not forget that Ellis did not make his name by writing a succession of polite social comedies. Nobody would have called him the EF Benson of his day. On the contrary, right from one of his earliest novels, The Rules of Attraction, Ellis’s shtick was to give no-holds-barred portrayals of drug-fuelled, empty, hedonist and indeed nihilistic culture, force it between the covers and then shove the results down his readers’ throats.

His commercial success suggests that people loved it. There is, after all, a great market in American literature for a particular form of nihilism, perhaps that form the late Allan Bloom once described as ‘American nihilism’, that is nihilism with a happy ending.

As it happens, Ellis’s career only really hit the stratosphere when he was able to marry precisely this sort of nihilism with a plot. In American Psycho the nihilism was at least propelling the narrative somewhere. The moment someone kills someone, the reader wants to know if that murderer is going to be brought to justice. They want to know if they will kill again. And it is in the nature of violent murder fiction that there is some reward each time for the writer who is willing to take the violence to the next level.

Further reading

It's no crime to come late to Dostoyevsky

By Douglas Murray

In its day and for its time Ellis did that. He dragged the corpses to places beyond where they would normally be. And with it, was an unmistakeable note of something, which if it wasn’t misogynistic, then was certainly something that enjoyed dancing close to that line.

His audience lapped it up. Indeed, the extremity and the pornography of the violence in American Psycho paved the way for depictions of it elsewhere – on television and film. As a result, people’s attitudes towards it were dulled. And each subsequent iteration had to break a new taboo. Thus did a writer enrich himself as he soiled his audience.

But what, precisely, did Ellis think would follow? Did he presume that the next generation would perform variations on his theme: more novels about sex and drugs with a little meaningless violence occasionally thrown into the mix? Did he think they’d find increasingly imaginative ways to pervert his genre?

No wonder he was disappointed with how they turned out, as he mistakenly failed to note that periods of extreme debauchery and free licence are inevitably followed by counter-movements of puritanism.

Further reading

The righteous anger of youth

By Gerard de Groot

Hence Ellis’s general mood as he does the rounds with his book, busily bemoaning a whole slew of things about the Millennial generation. In her superb interview with him in The Times last weekend, Decca Aitkenhead got him to make a number of excellently perceptive comments, in one of which he pointed out that Millennial culture is really an oxymoron.

“What is it?” He asked. “There’s no writing. None of them read books.”

Some will hold such statements to be useless – because they are too sweeping. But there is a kernel of truth, as well as a grandiosity, to his claim. It’s not that Millennials don’t read books, nor that Millennials don’t write them. But it is true that anyone who believes they are right have no especial need of books. Given that books are – to date – perhaps the most reliable transportation device our species has come up, then Millennials with their clear sense of direction will, therefore, have less need of them.

This generation, destined to rebel against libertinism and nihilism, must develop a very clear sense of purpose. It cannot adopt the luxurious and decadent position of going wherever words and ideas take it. Rather it can go on journeys only if those journeys are likely to take it to the places it has already decided to be the correct destinations.

Further reading

Why does everyone have it in for the Puritans?

By Giles Fraser

Which brings me back to puritanism. Millennial culture is nothing if not puritanical. It finds people on tracks that they should not be on and castigates them. Conversely, it identifies the true and correct paths that people should be on and praises them for staying there.

I have an enormous amount of sympathy with Ellis’s criticisms of this new generation, its hypersensitivity and boringness. I can stay for these criticisms, and many more. But along the way, a question has to be asked. What is it the younger generation has rebelled against? And who are the cultural figures who have set the stage for precisely this sort of backlash?

Criticism of the new generation is fine and good – and probably quite necessary. But this does have to start with a degree of self-reflection from that generation who – and this is particularly woeful for those of us who thought of them as enfants terribles – we must now describe as the old.