The hard truth about 'lazy millennials'

We’re a lazy generation who expects everything we want in life to come easily. Hell, some may even say that we lack dedication, patience and effort and are just on the hunt for something that makes us special, a “schizophrenia of significance” if you will.

However, what a lot of the people claiming that millennials are freeloading losers don’t seem to realise, is that we’re in an economy that has been chewed up and spat out by our predecessors. Ironically, the ones that continue to call us out for our disinterest in putting in hard work.

But, hard work IS exhausting and going to school is dull and boring. Let’s just stay at home and play our video games all day. No. We don’t do that either.

In fact, we’re actually better educated than the generations before us. Pew Research Centre conducted a study which found that “(39%) of those ages 25 to 37 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with just 15% of the Silent Generation, roughly a quarter of Baby Boomers and about three-in-ten Gen Xers (29%) when they were the same age.” Why is our value of education so high? Because it has to be. With unemployment rates at an all-time high, having a degree no longer sets you above other job candidates, it merely gives you a chance to be considered. According to Georgetown University, “35 percent of the job openings will require at least a bachelor’s degree, 30 percent of the job openings will require some college or an associate’s degree and 36 percent of the job openings will not require education beyond high school.”

So, having an education is great, right? Well, only if you can afford it. And, if you can’t, there are plenty of student loan offerings that will help you. You’ll just be spending a significant amount of your adult life trying to pay it back with pitiful wages that are growing eight times slower than the cost of your education. In fact, whilst the cost of education has increase, in the past 30 years, the average wage has gone up by a mere 0.3% (between January 1989 and January 2016.)

Terrifyingly, just 78 percent of men aged 25-54 without a college education were employed in 2016, the latest year for which data are available in the American Community Survey. Whereas 90 percent of men with one year of a college education were employed. In the 1950s employment rates for college and non-college men were the same. Whether you dished out an excruciating amount of money on an education did not determine whether you were going to be able to feed yourself, imagine that.

With wages increasing pathetically over the past few decades, you’d expect our basic necessities to reflect that – if we’re not paid much we’d expect not to have to pay much, right? Wrong. In the US, the average housing prices since 1970 are 7 times more expensive now than they were.

However, with our fleeting attention spans and our desperation to be stars, even when we’ve secured a job, we’re probably not going to hang around for long. Again, false. According to a study by Deloitte, we’re pretty damn loyal, to the right things: “millennials and Gen Zs show deeper loyalty to employers who boldly tackle the issues that resonate with them most, such as protecting the environment and unemployment,” – essentially, we want to work with people who care about rectifying the economic damage handed down to us by generations before us.

Yes, it’s true that we live in a digital age so the majority of our work lives don’t include manual labour. But, millennials might not have dirty hands but we’re working just as hard, if not harder, to fuel our own economy. Because of this wonderful digital age, it’s very easy to access accurate information to fuel opinions, so, if there is ever any confusion about whether millennials are just lazy, unambitious sloths, there’s always Google.