Jude, What I hate when people talk about “Millennials” (via annaetc)

Er, do I have to be this person? If the piece in question is this, I believe the “nobody understands them yet” paraphrase-ation was The Atlantic’s writers quoting a executive who was trying to figure out how to market cars to people in my age range—who aren’t buying what he’s selling. (“‘I don’t believe that young buyers don’t care about owning a car,’ says John McFarland, GM’s 31-year-old manager of global strategic marketing. ‘We just think nobody truly understands them yet.’”) So it’s not quite fair to shake fists at the guys who put that statement to print.

Most of the shit written about my peer group is onerous and worthy of righteous anger, and I generally find The Atlantic’s cultural commentary tiresome. But I didn’t read “The Cheapest Generation” as calling Millenials cheap. (I know you all are very, very smart and understand that print headlines are not literal interpretations of pieces. The latter is often referred to as an SEO headline and is as onerous as coverage of Millenials.) Rather, the piece is a regurgitation of statistics/conclusions that have floated around before: Young people want to live in walkable areas, whether those are creepy New Urbanist suburban developments or historic urban cores! They don’t really want to pay for cars, because they’ve chosen to live where public transit is accessible! Zipcar is a really big deal!

Here’s, to me, the nut graf of “The Cheapest Generation,” on the second page:

Nobody is suggesting that the American consumer has bought her last house or car—only that houses and cars may lose some of the outsize importance they’ve had to the economy for the past 10 or 20 years or more.

A better take on this trend was a sidebar I read in a copy of Wired that was stationed in my ex-boyfriend’s bathroom nearly three years ago. It was, maybe, 400 words, and I can’t Google it, because it was a fucking sidebar. But it pretty succinctly said that we’re moving toward a rentership, or at least less-obsessive-about-ownership, society: apartments are rented, bikes are shared, cars are shared, ebooks are loaned, movies are watched on Netflix; consider also housing and food co-ops and farm shares. The Wired blurb postulated that this has to do with the economy, sure, but that it’s a fundamental psychological and economic (as in spending power) shift. “The Cheapest Generation” call this the “sharing economy”:

The emergence of the “sharing economy”—services that use the Web to let companies and families share otherwise idle goods—is headlined by Zipcar, but it also involves companies such as Airbnb, a shared market­place for bedrooms and other accommodations for travelers; and thred­UP, a site where parents can buy and sell kids’ used clothing.

People are, more and more, seeking to share or rent in order to overcome the burdens—whether financial, as in a mortgage payment, or physical, as in sheer stuff—of ownership. There will always be people who will want to own a house; shit, there better be, at least for the next few decades, because my dad’s a mortgage banker and I’d like him to have a decent end to his career. But maybe the economy, or the Internet, or living in a time where we’re forced to think critically about our desires because of the debts we’ve been saddled with (thanks to the previous generation) has legitimately shifted our views on ownership of everything from cars to DVDs.

Another thing: Jude writes in her Tumblr post that Millenials should be commended, not shamed, for seeking jobs that are fulfilling, well-paying, and flexible. She’s right. Emily Matchar, a Gen Y-er, agrees, in a piece for the Washington Post that I thought I was going to find insufferable but actually don’t. Matchar argues that Millenials, in pushing for higher-quality workplaces that keep step with the kind of temporary, rentership society we’re living in, will improve office conditions for everyone.

Jude and I are saying a lot of the same things. But I ain’t even mad at The Atlantic piece because, whereas Jude thinks the “sharing economy” is the “smart and the right thing to do” on the way to saving for a house and kids, I want it to be the economy I trade in. I saw “The Cheapest Generation” as not another exhausted condemnation of Millenials but an exhausted, strung-together collection of shit that Atlantic Cities has published over the past few months. It’s a lazy piece of journalism (though the insights from the car-company execs were LOL), but it highlights a world, or at least an America, I want to live in. Just as Matchar thinks a tide of Millenials in the workplace can lift all boats, I’m happy to see my parents buying fewer DVDs and sharing my Netflix password instead—in exchange, of course, for their HBOGO log-in.

So, no shade. I can’t summon it. Back to the job that may or may not ever let me take two weeks off to ride a bike around Eastern Europe ever again.