Millennials Have Killed the Final Boss in the Generation Wars

Good news, millennials, we’ve reached the pinnacle. We’ve been killing things off ever since the weirdos who run angry clickbait articles discovered we existed in the mid-2000s. Collectively, we as a generation have been blamed for killing basically everything (except for the environment, everyone agrees that’s the Boomers’ fault). Here’s by no means a comprehensive list from Business Insider:

Millennials murdered napkins. They killed cereal. Buffalo Wild Wings and TGI Fridays? Found dead in a ditch, thanks to millennials.

…

One headline in The Christian Science Monitor in 2012: “Millennial generation could kill the NFL.” Forbes, the same year: “Is Gen Y’s Live-At-Home Lifestyle Killing The Housing Market?” By 2014, things had really heated up, with “promiscuous” millennials killing McDonald’s because they apparently lacked fast-food loyalty.

We’ve also killed the diamond trade:

This one is a mixed bag because apparently, we were singularly supporting the sandwich trade at the detriment of the mortgage industry (our bad, sorry!)

In the same vein, according to these people, if the economy were avocado-based (rather than the current, equally imaginary system), we’d be sitting pretty at the top. Instead, we’re once again murdering our own dreams of home ownership.

We’ve even been accused of killing the Republican Party (by me!) but honestly, everyone should be thanking us for that one.

However, it seems like our long reign of terror is over with our most recent, and in retrospect, final kill. The Pew Research Institute has announced that it will no longer frame research and polling questions in terms of generations. That’s right; millennials have killed the final boss: we’ve killed off the entire concept of what we’ve killed off. You’re welcome, Gen Z. You won’t have to endure decades of angry clickbait because your embarrassing predecessors did it for you. Now can you teach us one of your cool Tiktok dances so we can impress you, please? (JK. That app baffles me; enjoy your fun. I’ll enjoy my avocado toast.)

Per Yahoo! News:

Now one of America’s oldest research organizations, Pew Research Center, an arm of the venerable 75-year-old Pew Charitable Trust, says it will no longer provide the ammunition. It says it will largely stop putting a generational framework on its well-known polls and surveys that highlight the thinking and lifestyles of different U.S. demographic groups.

“Our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens,” Pew’s social trends director Kim Parker wrote in a blog post last month. “We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.”

Let us take a moment and give a moment of silence to angry Facebook posters who type in all caps and who like to share these articles without ever wondering why millennials can’t afford homes. (Hint: it’s the economy!) Or, honestly, we should be giving a moment of silence to the harangued service workers who the aforementioned posters are about to take their frustration out on because clearly someone has to be the metaphorical punching bag for people like that. It just won’t be millennials as a generation because you’ve been cut off at the source, but it will probably be a millennial because we all work like three jobs just to afford our avocado toast.

This may just be a temporary win, however, because I have bad news for you that bodes ominously for everyone who’s not pale, male, and stale. Per the above source:

John Quiggin, who writes the leftist economics blog Crooked Timber, celebrated the decision by Pew, writing that he had campaigned against the use of generational framing “since the beginning of the millennium.” He reminded readers that he had lobbied against them in an opinion piece for The New York Times in 2018, saying, “Dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender.”

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? We’re about to see articles with headlines like “Women are killing the avocado toast industry.” (Not me, I’m doing my part.) Millennials may have collectively killed the final boss in the generational wars, but given how these things go, we may have ultimately lost the battle.

(featured image: Alessandro Biascioli/Getty Images)