It’s a Millennial World Now: Twelve Things to Know
Author Paul Taylor, formerly of the Pew Research Center, looks past the headlines to focus on the hard data and numbers about millennials, revealing a complex but dynamic generation that will leave a large imprint on the world.
Choose your truism. Millennials are the most diverse, tolerant, connected, educated, and idealistic generation ever. Or the most narcissistic, lazy, entitled, coddled, distrustful, and disconnected.
Or the most downwardly mobile, debt-ridden, unlaunched, unmarried, unchurched, and apolitical. Or a great bunch of kids who play nicely with others, love their parents, respect their elders, want to save the planet, and can’t catch a break.
Each of these clichés – and all their wondrous Jekyll-and-Hyde contradictions – have been around for a quite a while. So have millennials themselves. They’re not kids anymore; the oldest are 35.
Since the turn of the millennium, when they began what’s turned out to be a slow walk toward adulthood, they’ve been a big, shiny object of media hyperventilation, what with their tattoes, participation trophies, backward baseball caps, online mating rituals and selfies, selfies, selfies.
This year’s presidential campaign finds them in their familiar perch, right in the middle of the zeitgeist. After going big for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, they’re the most intriguing swing voters (or non-voters) of the fall campaign. At 77 million strong, they’re now the largest generation in the electorate, workforce and population, a distinction they’ll keep for decades.
At 77 million strong, they’re now the largest generation in the electorate, workforce and population, a distinction they’ll keep for decades.
What kind of citizens will they be? Employees? Spouses ? Parents? What kind of America will they build?
Here are 12 observations about what makes millennials tick, based on attitudinal surveys, voting data, and economic and demographic trend analysis, followed by a closing thought about what the generations can learn from one another.