2010s: Millennials Hurting
December 9, 2019
By AHNZ
The Millennial Generation now outnumbers even their Baby Boomer predecessors as the largest generational population group.¹ By force of numbers and by the attitude they were raised on they dominate the rest of the West. Same goes for us here in New Zealand.
Strauss-Howe Generational Theory puts the American Millennial within the bracket of being born 1984-2008. As always, New Zealand lags behind about 5 years and it remains for someone else to estimate a time bracket for our local crop of Kiwi Millennials.² This Vanity Fair cover from August 1991 [image left] featuring a nude and pregnant Demi Moore is a rough marker for the start of our Millennial Babies on Board. At the time it was a risque poster; Pregnancy was a private and reserved institution. Boomer Moore’s shoot publicly sexualised what had been sacred and led the way forward for Boomers to be showy and self-entitled and reproduce at the same time.
Growing up Millennial
Boomers were late in having children, preferring to lavish their great fortune upon themselves.³ In c.1982 Boomers were now, at last, themselves interested in creating families too. This was punctuated culturally the Cabbage Patch Kids craze (1983) and the appearance of Baby On Board! signs (1984.) All of a sudden children became the new must-have status item and the Boomers were a generation that coddled and pampered their little Millennial spawn to levels hitherto unimagined..
“Former real estate investor Michael Lerner came up with the idea for the signs in 1984 during a car trip on the motorway with his nephew who was a toddler. ”
“Only a month after launching the signs on the market, his company was selling 500,000 signs per month.”- What those ‘Baby on Board’ signs are really for; Stuff
When Bart Simpson fell down the well in an episode of The Simpsons⁴ it blew up into a town-wide then nation-wide celebrity telethon event. This was satire only but based on a real life situation (Jessica McClure trapped down the well, Texas, 1987.) The show’s plot and the event inspiring it went to show how much fuss was made over the new crop of kids. If a Gen X kid (or earlier) fell down few would give a damn let alone deploy a rescue drive of Band Aid proportions!
“From conception to graduation, this 1982 cohort has marked a watershed in adult attitudes toward, treatment of, and expectations for children. Over that eighteen year span, whatever age bracket those 1982-born children have inhabited has been the target of intense hope, worry, and wonder from parents, pollsters, pundits, and politicians.”- Millennials Rising; Neil Howe and William Strauss (2000)
And so it went on, the examples legion of the stuff and privilege heaped on the Millennial with nary a thought to what sort of adult this spoiling would create later in life. Boomers (who lacked serotonin growing up) couldn’t Attach personally to the Millennial children so expressed their substitute love (including grandparenting) by over-doing it with health and safety.
“The Victimhood Power is Yours!” the Millennials were told each week day. They were bring primed for what has become our contemporary Victimhood Culture and misandristic mainstream.”- 1990s: Captain Planet and the Planeteers; AHNZ
Despite efforts by Life Education Trust (est. 1988) the Millennials were bombarded with pampering from their teachers and parents and media. Scares about food safety and medicine were legion. Overseas, and at home in New Zealand, Satanic Panic Victimhood Culture dominated the mainstream. Like the Boomers at the same age (ref. Mazengarb; AHNZ) conspiracies floated up that children were being molested or abused, as documented by Lynley Hood in A City Possessed (2001.)
The Era of the Protected Child was upon us which also included the creation of the child-proofing industry. Dangers in the home that nobody cared about before were mitigated by a slew of consumer products leaving the likes of Generation X wondering why their little brother’s or cousin’s lives counted for so much more!?
“The Child Protection Movement pampered the young Millennial Generation, handing them unprecidented ‘support’ at each of their developmental milestones. In the 1990s, the first Millennials were up and cycling. It was OK for Gen X to have exciting Adventure Playgrounds, no helmets, and even cycle pedals made of spikes, but Millennials were entitled to privileged treatment or so their Boomer parents insisted.”- The Stackhat Deception; AHNZ
As much as Gen X kids were left gaping at the new privileged “Heroic/Civic” class leapfrogging over them the Gen Z kids suffered too. “The most defining thing about Gen Z is that they grew up in the wake of Millennials as their finger-wagging older brothers, prefects, tutors, teachers, media priests, policemen, and politicians.” (Ref. Generation Z; AHNZ.) They’ve been in charge since they were born but today they are also in the majority over all others.
Millennials Hurting
When Strauss and Howe wrote Millennials Rising (2000) they were in awe of what this new generation would become. The authors foresaw the principles but not the expression that would be taken. In fact the strong Millennial ‘values’ and ‘drive’ have gone toward expanding entitlement and a new era of Identitiy Protective Cognition, Outrage Industrial Complex, Political Correctness.
The ‘Heroic’ and ‘Civic’ energy created monsters who went from being “the most clean cut generation in history” to slummy Hipsters who tattoo, colour their hair, and do all sorts of exotic expressive stuff that if out-groups did would be called by themselves ‘Cultural Appropriation.’ They occupy themselves looking for things to be offended by so they can find their identity in resisting those things. They create “safe spaces” and Kraggle up the world as the greatest Victimhood Culture the world has ever known. And, they’re suffering.
“One young adult in every five has sought mental health treatment in the past year, as New Zealand’s first online generation struggles…19 per cent of them “thought about or attempted suicide” in the year before they were last interviewed in 2014-15, aged 26″
“Auckland psychologist Dr Joe Guse said the astounding figures revealed the pressures that the “millennial” generation is living under..”
“Fifteen per cent of the Dunedin cohort had engaged in “self-harmful behaviours such as self-battery and self-biting””- Anxious online millennials reach out for help; NZ Herald
Rather than Millennials Rising, it’s Millennials Hurting. The astounding figures reveal poor quality of life for this now adult generation. In my opinion many of them are able to mitigate their suffering by offloading it onto others, causing the world to suffer and walk on eggshells so as not to “trigger” their delicate and pampered constitutions. The Victimhood Culture Millennials look to The State to provide a giant stack hat to protect them from contact with reality. Unfortunately they have been raised to be children not to be adults.
“You wouldn’t expect to live your life and not have a time of some level of physical unwellness, and it’s the same with mental health.”
“A quarter (24 per cent) of the Dunedin cohort at 26 had experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year and 16.5 per cent had experienced depression – similar to the 28 per cent of Competent Learners who felt anxious, and 18 per cent who felt “sad for no reason”, “quite often” or “lots of times” in the past year.”
“Times of mental health challenges are a normal part of human experience,” he said.”- Mental Health Foundation CEO Shaun Robinson; ibid
Demi Moore’s kids and their generation have a problem but also a problem problem, if you know what I mean? As Robinson shows above, these horrific problems are received in this Millennial Clown World as perfectly normal. Instead of identifying where the over-protective parenting of the Millennials has led them, our presiding professional is normalising their symptoms to the media.
Given that Robinson is Gen X I think he’s being very cruel, perhaps punishing the up-start Millennials by killing them with kindness and sycophancy. Maybe he’s one of those big brother Generation X kids who fell down a well or stuck a knife in a wall socket and nobody cared until his little sister did it in the 80s? Sooner or later the Millennial will face a hard reality because Victimhood Culture is never sustainable. The Enormous Millennial SJW Turnip must come out. We can do it the easy way or the hard way.
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1 The Big Number: Millennials to overtake boomers in 2019 as largest U.S. population group; Washington Post
2 Sounds like a job for AHNZ
3. Ref. The So-Called Nest Egg; AHNZ
4 Radio Bart (1992)
Image ref. Baby on board – where did it all start?; NRMA
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