I’m tired of the new rage to put people in categories such as “millennial”, “Generation Z” and so on. To me, it seems like once people were banned from discriminating against people for age, race, gender and so on that they didn’t give up one other important thing, which was labeling or categorizing others by a particular age group or segment.
When I hear some of the descriptors of this new “millennial” age group, I find that most of the qualities described pretty much describe the typical workplace a#%hole who doesn’t do their job and expects recognition despite not working very hard. These people described as millennials just don’t exist in one age bracket – they seem to exist in every generation. As a person in the “millennial” age bracket, I’d actually take offense to being called a millennial.
A passage from Wikipedia seems to support my assertion that anyone put in this category should be ashamed to be called a millennial
“In 2008, author Ron Alsop called the Millennials “Trophy Kids,”[35] a term that reflects the trend in competitive sports, as well as many other aspects of life, where mere participation is frequently enough for a reward. It has been reported that this is an issue in corporate environments.[35] Some employers are concerned that Millennials have too great expectations from the workplace.[36] Studies predict that Millennials will switch jobs frequently, holding many more jobs than Generation Xers due to their great expectations.”
To me, you can substitute the word “workplace malcontent” where Millennial appears and the meaning would stay the same.
Lessons – don’t lump people into labels and categories. I know very few people born in the 80’s to 2000’s who fall into this description, and actually find many of these workplace malcontents fall within every age bracket.
We don’t need labels. We already have them on our birth certificates. I’m Robert James Braathe, not a member of Generation X.