THE BAY LIFE JOURNAL
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OPINION PIECE: DANI LEE: First published in The Bay Life Journal, edition 13
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OPINION: Millenials, my pet peeve word, lost in translation Danielle Lee
Everyone has a word they hate. Be that a word that leaves a bad taste, or a word that brings up bad memories. My pet peeve word is Millennial.
For those of you that don’t know this word, it is a phrase coined to describe anyone that grew up around the turn of the century, roughly born between late 80’s and early 90’s.
To me, as someone who fits into this bracket, a millennial is someone who doesn’t care about your skin colour, your sexual preferences, or how you grew up.
We accept people as they are and do not care about things that others may use to define you.
However this all got lost in translation, and millennials are now viewed merely as people that just don’t care.
We are seen as egotistical, and serial complainers, arguing how the world is unfair to us because everything is not handed to us on a plate.
I would like to pause here and state that I do understand the irony of writing an article complaining about how people think all we do is complain.
It is not lost on me.
But what I would like people to do, is rather than compare us to how you grew up yesteryear, take away that comparison because we live in completely different times.
It is harder than ever to be a young adult trying to kick start life.
Prices are ever on the increase, with the wage increase rate no where near matching this. The retirement age is getting further away, meaning not only will we be working for longer, but the tops of the totem poles aren’t changing, and we are stuck on the bottom with no way of moving up.
The job market is influxed with qualifications, meaning that even people such as myself who are educated to a degree level, are stuck in jobs outside of our fields of study and on minimum wage.
House prices in the 60’s averaged three times a yearly wage, but nowadays they are typically 7-10x our yearly income.
We are going to be a generation of renters, never owning our own property and with nothing to see us into our retirement, when we eventually get there.
It’s not all doom and gloom for my generation, even though it is portrayed that way, both in the sense of our futures and us as people.
We are the generation of the technologically adept, who are mastering fields that weren’t around when our grandparents were our age.
We have lived more of our lives with technology than we have without, and we are utilising this to make strides in our day to day lives.
But rather than embracing that we are intelligent in this manner, we are portrayed as zombies, staring at our smartphones and not living our lives as we should.
So all I ask, and this is food for thought rather than an instruction, is before you start a sentence with ‘Back in my day’ or begin to make a comment suggesting that our lives are easier now than they were back then, take a step back and look at my generation for what our struggles are, instead of comparing them to the struggles that were faced during your childhoods.
My Generation is a monthly column written for the Journal by Danielle Lee, her first journalist assignment since completing a degree in media at the University of Chichester
See also letters page 10:
Diana Terry FRSA: RESPONSE TO DANI LEE: It’s all too easy to talk about the symptoms, but think about the cure.
In edition 14 of the Journal, Danielle Lee tells the story of the inspirational woman she met at the St. Wilfrid’s bus stop in Pevensey Bay.
