I was born in 1995 and I would consider myself on the front-end of the new adaptive generation. I don't have substantive memories of the pre-9/11 world and my views on society have been largely shaped by events that have happened since the global financial crisis. To me, the world of today is not "in crisis" as it is the world that I have always known and to which I have accustomed.
I think that's a good place to end the definition for Generation Y. I personally do feel that the world is in a crisis and I think a lot of the alleged pathos afflicting people born in the '80s stems from the fact that the world our parents prepared us to live in and inherit did not materialize at all and instead we got something completely different.
I still remember how in eighth grade, my history teacher more or less gloated about how the Cold War was over and we won and the world had discovered that liberal democratic capitalism was what "worked" and we were just going to live in this boring world of an all-powerful America, a super-integrated Europe and a Russia that was an irrelevant joke. And he said we would probably never experience a prolonged war in our lifetimes. This was less than a month before September 11, 2001.
When you combine that with the bursting of the Dot Com bubble and then the bursting of the Real Estate bubble, which more or less put nails in the coffin of hoping to have the sort of middle class stability that our parents had been able to give us with not much more than a high school education, the result is a sense that we were told to attend a lavish dinner party that was going to be wonderful and by the time we got there, all the lobster and steak had been eaten, a fight had broken out, the police had been called and all that was left was warm beer and chips.
I don't take for granted that tomorrow is automatically going to be "better" than today.
I understand that poor people can be poor through no fault of their own.
I know what it's like to be afraid in a way I'm not sure an American child of any other generation in the history of this country has had to be afraid. I'd have to travel to Britain and find someone old enough to remember World War II and fearing the Germans burning them up in their sleep (or a German who feared the British doing likewise) to be able to talk to someone who actually knows how that feels.
And I manage expectations. There is something rather defeatist inherent in the fact that when I buy a cup of coffee at McDonald's in the morning, there are many other countries in the world today where the man or woman serving it would have better opportunities and more security and dignity in their life than they do here. A century ago, it would have been safe to say they were likely better off in America than anyplace else and today that is no longer the case.
Do you really feel that you have more to be afraid of than someone born in America in 1840 or 1920? That's a huge stretch IMO. I get that Millennials are generally facing worse odds than anyone under 85, but I still think these generations would envy them, even after accounting for pure technological progress. 2008-present looks a lot like we are reenacting the Great Depression, but with the New Deal having already been in place from day one.
However, most existing social programs target the elderly, who already had the benefit of living through more of the 20th century good economy, so these programs start to look regressive to the young. Their first reaction was to try to extend as many of these programs as possible to include them. But congress saw fit to drag its feet and what did pass is highly controversial. And the 5% growth and 6% unemployment that would wipe out their debts remains elusive. I sense increasing bitterness about social security/medicare/corporate welfare among the youngest of the young, but because of progressive views on social issues, they are content to leave the Dems in power for 1-2 more terms.
