Millennials experienced their formative years in the shadow of uncertainties dominated by global recession, quantitative easing, and bailouts. As much as baby boomers would like to point their fingers at someone else for causing these catastrophes, I'm afraid there is really no possible way to put these on another generation. Self made tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, theorized that the baby boomers must be the dumbest generation, whom were in charge during and are responsible for two of the greatest speculative bubbles in human history. This being quite a feat considering massive bubbles usually happen once a generation. Which makes sense; who really needs to learn this lesson twice? Yet the housing bubble happened less than 7 years after the dot com bubble!
Many Millennials entered the workforce during these times, in the environment created by their predecessors. Millennials did not enjoy the luxury of having plentiful jobs waiting for them after graduation. This is the generation that had to engage in knife fights to win unpaid internships; working 80-90 hours a week, while their bosses tell them to work harder and not expect anything in return.
After all of this, Millennials are getting bashed for being entitled or for allegedly receiving participation trophies during their youth. This is quite hilarious actually; I have never met anyone who has one of these legendary trophies, but apparently they have the hurculean power of transforming one's development, world view, and personal identity.
But perhaps it may be something else. I myself have worked in a firm with a "prestigious name" run by baby boomer partners and every week I would log my 80-90 hours to be billed to our clients. However, my paychecks clearly state I am only being compensated for 37.5 hours of work per week. So where does that difference go to? Who gets to monetize that time that I would otherwise spend with family, friends, and loved ones? Has the picture gotten clearer?
A large amount of Millennials want to change the world but most organizations today want to maintain the status quo and run bureaucracies built to perpetuate itself. Baby boomers use these entities to enrich themselves and therefore have a vested interest in the status quo and the perpetuation stagnant bureaucracies. Millennials take pay cuts to work longer hours at Tesla and SpaceX and they are happy to do so. But most baby boomers are not innovators; most have spent their careers in bureaucracies in order to become the top troll who's only job is to collect a ransom at a bridge. This is very troubling for Millennials to witness, as they realize their bosses and managers are road blocks that must be dispatched in order for innovation to occur.
Many of my Millennials colleagues, at the firm I mentioned above, soon realized that their managers and bosses are not knowledgeable of current methods and models; and the only reason they are in their position is because they have "put in the time" aka been around longer. Perhaps that is why baby boomers are becoming more and more insecure; they realize that they are no longer necessary to modern organizations and any innovation threatens their livelihoods. Why pay their bloated salaries to only sit through meetings and maybe type a few emails? And here we are, it was fear that was driving all these lash outs all along.
Millennials are the life blood of companies like Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, and Google. These are the companies holding up our markets and economy. These companies are creating new catagories of markets and jobs but also putting many baby boomer led organizations out of business. The greatest innovation by the baby boomer generation was the introduction of sweat shops in developing nations; their vision for stateside Millennials does stray much further than the exploited foreign laborers they employ.
Millennials chose Tesla over coal plants, so to speak. Perhaps this is why if only Millennials voted, Hilary would have been the US president and the UK would still be a part of the EU. But for the time being, we live in a world controlled by baby boomers with president Trump touting "clean coal!"