Of course, generational thinking always creates monoliths where there is in fact difference: each group rendered as a pleasing rectangle in an infographic, cohort names themselves a form of shorthand more suited for clickbait than nuance. The most common traits attributed to millennials have to do with their digital habits: cell phone–addicted (as Ridley Scott complained), but also tech-savvy, social media–obsessed, and hooked on the continuous feedback and instant gratification they have found online. Does a generational cohort really exist if only a minority feel they belong to it? One reason for this weak affinity is that popular discourse about millennials tends to paint them, whether sympathetically or not, with a broad and flattening brush. But a Pew Research Center poll from 2015 found that, regardless of the parameters, only 40 percent of millennials say they identify with their generation’s label (compared with 58 percent of Gen Xers and 79 percent of baby boomers). The two most commonly cited ranges are from 1980 to 2000 and the narrower window of 1981 to 1996. The research and popular media can’t really agree when millennials were born. Beyond the quality of being readily blamed for many things, what makes a millennial? I don’t ask this because I think my own cohort is self-loathing I ask it because I’m not sure we exist. As these wars heat up and millennials receive ire from baby boomers like Scott and from Gen Z commentators who casually roast their neighboring cohort all over the internet, I’ve found myself wondering if there are any millennials who would actually fight on their own side. The millenian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on a cellphone.” Scott’s comment is just one recent entry in the ongoing generation wars, a quip in the blame game destined to elicit clapbacks and meme drops. Scott claimed that The Last Duel bombed because “what we’ve got today the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cellphones. This past Christmas, director Ridley Scott set social media aflame when he blamed millennials for his latest film’s box office failure. The popular image of the millennial, as Jia Tolentino put it in The New Yorker, is that of “a twitchy and phone-addicted pest who eats away at beloved American institutions the way boll weevils feed on crops.” In addition to supposedly killing beloved institutions like marriage, home ownership, and the American dream, the cohort dubbed “the dumbest generation” has also debased culture and ruined the arts. Bobby Duffy opens The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think (2021) with an ominous diagnosis: “We are teetering on the brink of a generational war.” Although it’s difficult to map all the allegiances and antipathies in this so-called generational war, it’s clear that millennials are everyone’s favorite enemy. Generational antagonism is nothing new, but in the past few years, the conflict has escalated dramatically.
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