WELCOME TO THE TABLE. MILLENNIALS GET A BREAK

They Probably Won’t Notice.

via boomerpdx

Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, baby boomers rate millennials.

Some are too entitled, some are too worried they might not get ‘theirs’, and some are just right.

Even the NY Times comes out with an apology to millennials. Why?

Because America is too caught up tending to the passing generations than they are the rising generations.

The entitled youngsters are watching the entitled elders soak up money better spent elsewhere, like on them.

By the time millennials get their hands on the levers of power they’ll be old enough to see why so much attention goes to older citizens.

No one wants credit for pulling the plug on their parents and grandparents.

The Times aren’t alone.

Salon.com explains the millennial plight with “10 reasons millennials are screwed.”

Only ten? I see millennials everyday. They could give you ten and raise you ten more.

Most of the reasons they are screwed, according to Salon, is getting a grip on money. Everything costs too much, or seems to.

Portland baby boomers had the same feeling. That’s why we found cheap apartments and cruised the neighborhood on bikes. The hipster lifestyle didn’t start with hipsters, but they’ve adapted nicely.

It’s easy for a sixty-something to look at twenty-somethings and forget their own twenties. Is it hard finding the right partner, right job, right place to live? Of course it is.

A Marine Corps man, twenty four, who’s going through the sort of training you take to become an ‘operator’, said the key to doing well in his field is accepting that things will suck and still finding something to do with it.

Look at the new apartment buildings with tiny studios and no parking, the zip car with almost enough room to get in, and you might wonder what’s going on in America.

Is the country dialing expectations down so millennials won’t feel so bad for not living in a huge house that hogs valuable resources? Or is is a simple case of dealing with modern times? Like most hard questions, the right answer is what works for you.

For example, New York Magazine profiled thirty year old Sophia Amoruso, CEO of Nasty Gal in Los Angeles. One quote from the article pushes the rest aside.

“In another era, a CEO who conducted herself like Amoruso might have been assessed as peculiar or wayward or seditious. But start-ups nourish social deficiencies (“quirks” is the preferred term), and a person with good ideas can get away with murder as long as it doesn’t compromise her ability to work like an ox. Plus: There’s nothing more inspiring than a successful weirdo.”

Winning changes everything, and finding a way to keep on track is no secret.

Some things you bring forward, some things you leave behind.

In the best of all possible worlds a millennial writer on Salon.com goes after a baby boomer writer on the New York Times. They defend themselves quite well against the established older writer, calling out the work as more written for clicks and traffic than it is for substantial content.

A little secret: bloggers go after traffic and clicks when they post. They don’t do it for the good feeling of finishing something.

The inter-generational spat seems like the turf of boomers without kids going after orphan millennials. Let’s open it up now and say this: Millennials are baby boomers’ children. Knock one and you’re knocking us all. Why take the time to knock our kids when the world they live in hits them hard and often.

To all boomer parent who read boomer writers blasting their kids: The writer must have had vasectomy in high school, a heart transplanted to a piece of wood in college, and had the sort of mental treatment last used in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest in their thirties.

Tom Waits once growled, “I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.” Reading some of the screeds against millennials makes you wonder if the boomer writers are either loaded, or had their brain scrambled.

Which is it?