This week, Chelsea breaks down some myths about millennials, and explains how they became so popular in our culture without ever being true. Want to learn how Erin of Broke Millennial stopped being broke? Check out this video:
Hey guys it’s chelsea from the financial diet and this week’s video is brought to you by curiosity stream and this week i wanted to talk to you about something that frankly deeply pisses me off and that is pervasive shame driven myths about millennials referred to by one if so’s mor i study as the most derided generation millennials are basically an easy punching
Bag for the media and older generations it’s easy to put the shortcomings of bigger systemic failures on our backs then to look at the bigger reasons why a lot of these trends are happening millenials happen to come of age at a time where a lot of other bad things were happening things like the great recession the student debt bubble slashed employment benefits
Etc things that made for a much harsher and scarier world and which can make our generations decisions on the surface look like they’re motivated by laziness or narcissism when they’re usually just motivated by limited choices and for most of us it’s hard not to feel resentful of all this blaming and shaming so this video is not just meant to make us all feel a
Little bit less crazy but to serve as a shorthand if you ever need to correct someone when they spout off one of these completely toxic millennial myths number one we are synonymous with kids first let’s just get this out of the way people talk about millennials like we’re children or overgrown teenagers but we are quite literally adults in fact millennials are as
Old as 38 now so the framing of us is if we’re all still petulant teenagers is pretty ridiculous but it starts to make sense when you realize just who is creating a lot of these media narratives and who the traditional media is speaking to here’s a fun fact according to nielsen the median age for cnn viewers is 60 years old and for fox news and msnbc they’re tied
At 65 years old so when you consider who is actually watching these stories about how millennials are destroying the world that they’re mostly people our parents and grandparents ages it makes a lot more sense that we’re basically framed as america’s children because that’s how these demographics see us and relate to us but it’s important that we understand that
That framing is just biased and stupid we’re adults number two is we are lazy this is probably the most pervasive and damaged about millennials and that it impacts so many people’s perceptions about us that we don’t work hard that we want everything handed to us etc but a 2016 study by the manpower group found that 73 percent of millennials work 40 hours a week
Or more and that the average millennial workweek is 45 hours but there are two very real things that feed into this perception of us one millennials are generally much better at using technology to their advantage to streamline or automate some of their work or to help ease some of the tedious repetitive elements of it which comes as no surprise when you consider
That we grew up with much of this technology i think we’ve all met the highly-paid corner office executive who can’t figure out how to convert something to pdf but – they don’t tend to judge their value by the raw amount of time they are physically present at their desk often because they’re already so used to using the internet to facilitate much of their work on
Communication but working differently and in some cases more intelligently and more adaptively does not mean we are lazy and this perception that millennials are lazy is further contradicted by how competitive we are when it comes to work especially compared to our peers see be a consulting firm pulls 90,000 americans each quarter and it finds that the millennials
Among them are in fact the most competitive 59% of them in the latest poll said competition is what gets them up in the morning compared with just 50% of baby boomers and some 58% of millennials said they compare their performance with their peers as against 48% for other generations long story short millennials aren’t lazy we just have a different definition of what
It means to work intelligently number three we can’t buy homes because we drink too much coffee if i never have to hear from another financial expert who grew up in an era where everything from higher education to home buying to secure retirement was vastly more accessible to the average american suze orman and dave ramsey it will be too soon the tired stereotypes
About how much millennials love fancy breakfast foods are just a very convenient way to obscure all of the real systemic reasons why so many of these big traditional adult milestones like homeownership are not so accessible to us first of all the average millennial student debt balance is around $40,000 which is hard enough on your day a financial decisions let
Alone longer-term financial planning like buying a home but combined with that huge debt burden that previous generations didn’t have to deal with at least not anywhere near the same rates as we do with the fact that millennials are underemployed for recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 the underemployment numbers have been rising steadily with the unemployment
Rate rising to 44% in 2012 compared to the unemployment rate which fluctuated anywhere from between 4 and 10 percent during the same time period these numbers are alarmingly high employers are also offering less and less stability with the past 20 years and especially since the great recession seeing a rise and things like temp workers contracted workers so-called
Thermal answers the gig economy etc along with decreases in benefits offered for these same positions it’s no surprise why an employer would rather keep you an illegal full-time contractor they don’t have to offer you anything in return for that such as health care they also don’t have to pay employment tax on you so combine underemployment with crushing debt and
Rising home costs in these densely populated urban areas where millennials tend to live and you get a very obvious formula why millennials aren’t buying homes which has nothing to do with how much we love cold brew number four we are destroying insert industry here so i don’t know if you’ve read the news lately but millennials are on a bit of a killing spree
Everything from diamonds to the suburbs to suvs to breakfast cereals have been in our warpath of industries we are mercilessly choking out of life so let’s break this down because generally speaking when you hear a story about how millennials are killing x or y industry or product there are two possible underlying issues either these are things that are really
Bad for the environment slash society slash our mental or physical health and they absolutely should be destroyed things like water guzzling lawns huge unnecessary mcmansions isolating suburbs enormous suvs for three-person homes in fact we did a whole video on how the suburban lifestyle is not only terrible for the environment it’s terrible for your brain will
Link you to that in the description or if the industry in question slash product in question was not actively harmful to its consumers or the world at large it’s usually something that’s simply too expensive and the reason for millennials opting out is pretty similar to why they’re opting out of buying starter homes it’s a question of available funds things like
Big fancy diamonds although that could also probably go under the bad for the world and should be going away anyway category or the golf industry or the motorcycle industry basically frivolous luxuries that most millennials can’t afford the broader point though is that it’s not for an industry to point their finger and cry and be like consumers why aren’t you
Buying my product anymore this is your fault i’m really mad at you by these conflict diamonds it’s up to the industry to provide a better product which adapts to the needs and desires of changing generations which is always going to happen all that said here at tfd we are actually dedicated to killing the i’m going to make you rich quick financial advice industry
Because that needs to die number five we only care about ourselves there’s a really pervasive myth whether about commitment to a long-term partner or even just to an employer that millennials are simply not very loyal and it’s pretty hard to shake because there’s some evidence on the surface that these myths are true but when you dig a little deeper you realize
That the answer is much more complicated for example millennials generally are getting married later which might make sense for someone to superficially then say oh they’re just afraid of commitment but getting married at these later ages actually makes us less likely to divorce rates of which have been steadily decreasing over the past 10 years so while we do
Take our time and are sometimes delayed in being able to pay for things like a wedding because of some of these reasons i described earlier we’re actually ending up more loyal to the person that we’re ending up with and when it comes to employers while some of us may be caught up in contracted or temp work cycles that make it hard to build a career on the longer
Term at a national level our average duration with employers is pretty on par with previous generations the average job tenure for someone in the 1980s is actually almost exactly the same as it is today in 1983 it was about three years per employer now it’s 2.8 but speaking of work number six is we all want to be entrepreneurs slash self-employed there’s this
Myth that our whole generation wants to be these hard hustling self-employed entrepreneurial people and while it is true that we’re doing these things at higher rates than previous generation what is often overlooked is how much we’re having to do this out of necessity slash adaptation versus actual desire in fact most millennials actually look at creating their
Own job as a better path to long-term security than keeping a traditional job sixty-one percent of millennials expressed belief that they could find more job security by owning their own business as opposed to working for someone else on the contrary 64% of baby boomers felt working for someone else provided greater job security there is a big difference between
Pursuing something because it is your true passion and doing it because you’re so weary of the long term stability that your career could provide what most millennials want is what most human beings want a fair wage a financially secure future a reasonable work-life balance and being treated with dignity in the workplace unfortunately for many of us it feels that
Self-employment is probably the most sure way to get those things number seven we want a trophy for everything so the trophy thing kills me because let’s say it even is true that we are super affected as adults because the whole participation trophy phenomenon flourished while we were kids if that were even true wouldn’t that say more about our parents who actually
Implemented all of this than it inherently does about us but being more importantly i can assure you that no millennial wants a trophy more than they want the things that i listed in that previous point like a fair wage and work-life balance most of us have experienced jobs where our employers thought that a ping-pong table in the break room or frequent employee
Retreats where you got things like yes participation trophies was a viable substitute for things like health insurance or retirement and the answer is no no millennial gives a about a trophy we just want to be treated like the full-grown hard-working adults we are give us what we deserve and you won’t have to worry about also coming up with a cute little certificate
Covered in glitter and if you want to learn more about the world around you no matter what generation you should check out curiosity stream curiosity stream is a subscription streaming service founded by the creator of the discovery channel and made for those of you with no shame in your nerd game with over 2400 documentary and nonfiction titles from some of the
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Thank you for watching and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and to come back every tuesday thursday and friday for new and awesome videos bye you
Transcribed from video
7 Toxic Millennial Myths That Need To Die By The Financial Diet