MATTSPLAINED [] MSP128 [] Middlennials: The New Middle Age
Mocked for their love of avocado toast and artisan everything, as the first Millennials get ready to embrace middle age and middle management, it’s time for them to settle into comfortable khakis and let Gen Z do the heavy lifting.
Photo by Unsplash. Glitching by Kulturpop.
Hosts: Matt Armitage & Jeff Sandhu
Produced: Jeff Sandhu for BFM89.9
TRANSCRIPT
Millennials. The generation that everyone loves to hate. But as the artisan food fanatics move towards Middle Age, MSP’s Matt Armitage thinks it’s time to reassess.
So no cheap jokes about avocado toast today?
I don’t know - you tell me.
Identifying the cut-off points for generations is = as we’ve remarked on previous shows - a bit of a fool’s errand.
In fact, we did a couple of show a few weeks ago about my Generation C…
Where you laid out the case that generation are meaningless and the coronavirus has put us all in the same ‘bucket’ as you like to say. Are they suddenly more meaningful?
In the sense that we’re heading back to some semblance of normality in a few lucky countries.
Economies reopening. People going back to work. Limited international travel.
Talk about schools reopening and in some countries they even have.
So that shared experience - hopefully - is at or is coming to an end for most of us.
It will be a shared memory - but it’s good that our experience diverges.
No one under the age of 30 wants to hear this covidiot go on about his doomscrolling or coronacation.
They’re too busy Zumping their latest Corona Bae.
That means dumping someone over zoom in case anyone has the wrong idea.
We’ve talked about this before. You’re barred from using what you call ‘Young People Talk’…
You can’t tell me to shut up any more.
And that’s the purpose of this episode.
When we talk about generations they are often quite loosely defined.
In terms of date range.
Were the first Millennials born in 79, 81, 83?
So we’re going to use the Pew Research model - because it’s widely respected and accepted.
Unlike you?
Gosh. Someone didn’t have his vanilla almond milk on his artisan granola this morning.
So Pew defined Millennials as people who were born from 1981 to the end of 1996.
Odd that - millennials were born in the last millennium.
1980 and under - you’re Gen X like me. Or Boomer if we roll back the mists of time.
97 - you’re Gen Z, digital native or whatever.
So, today is a bit of a briefing episode.
Essentially to welcome Millennials into the world of middle age.
Somehow that’s a very strange idea…
The idea that they should be middle aged or that I’m the one welcoming them in?
Neither of those scenarios is ideal…
Yeah - so over the last few months I’ve had various generational spats with people.
Mostly the kind of people who call Greta Thunberg a Millennial.
And that’s another reason for today’s show - as well as ushering Millennials into the world of khaki pants and beige blouses -
It’s to illustrate how irritated the Gen Z-ers are at being lumped in with a bunch of Millennials they see as old people.
Old people. They see me as old people?
Dude, the next gen, gen Alpha, the ones who are currently sitting at home not getting an education.
The ones who will be able to assemble a Minecraft city online but will be feral scavengers IRL like the kids in Mad Max 2 - that’s such a Gen X cultural reference by the way.
That gen, Gen Alpha thinks Gen Z is old. You and me, we’re just dinosaurs to them.
We’re just the blah blah blahing shadows that pay for their apps.
I guess it’s a bit like the relationship cats have with the people that think they own them.
So, let’s go back in time a bit…
To the early noughties?
Yeah. We all remember the horror stories.
About privileged, spoilt millennials coming into the workforce.
Expecting to be CEO after 2 weeks.
Sending irate email to the CFO because they couldn’t claim for the Cote et Ciel backpack they bought to keep their office laptop in.
And demanding said avocados and granary loaves in the break room.
I remember you saying things like that…
Some of us atrophy as we age.
Some of us grow.
I’m lucky - I seem to get more broad-minded the more remote I become to popular culture.
Is this where you tell us how into K-pop you are?
Nope. It’s an impenetrable void to me.
I think that’s become one of the most difficult things about pop culture.
When you look at the generation before mine - the Baby Boomers - they were definitely grown ups.
They did their weird, freaky thing in the 60s and then they became more sensible and sober.
My generation - the Xers - we were the first ones that never really grew up.
I still prefer sneakers to shoes.
If I can get away with wearing shorts on formal occasions, I will.
It’s a superhuman battle just to get some of my fellow forty-somethings to abandon their cargo shorts let alone get them into long pants.
Having said that, you will not get a tie around my neck.
Shame. A tie might shut you up…
My generation didn’t grow-up.
We still have all the toys. The skateboards. The games consoles.
We convince ourselves we can still make it as DJs.
That somehow, despite the bald spots and the muffin tops, we’re still cool.
And we still check in to see what’s dropped at vice.com twice a day to prove it.
I mean, I don’t,
I spend my days on Alt TikTok, making super-slurred cuts of Dolly Parton tracks which I shoot myself dancing to in a glitched octopus costume.
There’s a lot to unpack in that last sentence…
Leave it in the box. The fam knows where I am.
And to show how juvenile Gen Xers are, the reference points I’ve given are all very male centric.
Because our pop culture was about equality in name only,
The girls were still expected to ooh and aah at the boys on skateboards or spinning behind the decks.
That’s probably why Gen X women are a lot more grown up than us, and less likely to spend the kids college fund on a vintage sports car because, you know, it’s a really great investment.
What’s odd is that those cultural reference points and lazy stereotypes seem to have gotten stuck in a time loop.
In our imagination or in practice?
A little of both, I guess.
The start of this millennium has been a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.
In twenty years we’ve gone from dial up Internet to watching any movie on demand on a device in your hand.
Having practically all of humankind’s information at our fingertips - though some have argued that we’re dumber for it.
Self-driving cars are real.
We’ve gone from the age of cheap air travel and weekends away in other countries to a pandemic initiated hard stop on everything but the most essential travel.
Yet we’re still obsessed with the idea of supposedly feckless millennials and their avocado toast.
I’m a Millennial!
And that’s my point.
The weirdest thing has been listening to friends who are Millennials dismissing the behaviour of people younger than them with one of those - ‘lazy, entitled millennials’ type comments.
Completely missing the fact that the person or persons they were criticising were really Gen Z.
And that they’re basically criticising them for doing stuff and not being apathetic.
Way to go to reinforce a stereotype.
One of my friends - one of the ones who is most attached to his cargo shorts - mentioned that he hadn’t even realised he was a Gen Xer.
Again, way to go to reinforce the slacker stereotype.
So, Millennial has become a catch-all term for anyone who is younger than you and whose behaviour is irritating?
Precisely. At least for my generation it was true.
Which is why I’m running this audio preparation course for what i’m calling Middlennials - the Gen Yers about to embrace middle age.
So, this entire show is just another excuse for one of your Dad puns?
I don’t need an excuse or a platform to justify lame jokes.
I’ve already referenced Mad Max 2 and Dolly Parton and we haven’t even made it to the break.
But I do feel that we have to unstick these generations.
Not because it makes life easier for sluggish cultural commentators like me if we have that clear delineation.
But because - as we noted on a previous show about generations - those changes are set to keep accelerating.
Generally we’ve kept to those markers of about 15 years separating generations.
But when you look at the pace of social and cultural changes, even within those generations, that cohesion that we expect, that sense of shared experience and upbringing,
It may not be there.
We have yet to feel the real social impact of Gen Alpha. Which is essentially anyone born in the 2010s and onwards.
Yet, in terms of the date range it spans, we’re already towards the tail end of that generation being born.
Generation Beta is already in, well, beat development.
We’re yet to see how thing like coronavirus will act as a cultural marker for Alphas and Betas for example.
In terms of the 2021 baby boom?
That’s an aspect from a numbers POV.
We may see Gen Alpha weighted towards its younger members.
But what will their lived experience be, to sound horribly new agey?
How different will the lives of a Gen Zer in the process of finishing their education be to that of a Gen Alpha born after coronavirus.
Or more importantly - those of Gen Alphas brought up in the early part of their generation and those born in the latter part.
My Generation has skateboards and cargo shorts to unify them. What will this generation have?
When we come back - Middlennials save the world. Yes, really.
BREAK
Before the break we talked way too much about skateboards and 80s culture. Which I’m beginning to think is the only reason we’re talking about this topic this week.
Actually that gives me an idea.
Next week we’ll do a show on 80s culture and why it’s cool.
Because that’s the weird thing - I was there and I did not think it was cool.
For me, the 80s was the decade that pop culture went to die.
It’s weird to me that we’re resurrecting it.
For me, the 70s and the 90s were far more influential.
Should we do an MSP mini-series on decades? It seems like that’s something we should have done a long time ago.
Here’s the question: 2020, end of a decade or start?
We’ve had to cover that before, haven’t we?
For me, logically, it’s the number ten, so it’s actually the end.
But celebrating the millennium in 2001 would have been pretty sad, even to satisfy an old pedant like me.
So, I think I have to move with the crowd and accept the Zero Year, as opposed to the Year Zero, as being the starting point.
That puts us firmly into the Roasting Twenties.
Which in a way is sad - because it means that COVID-19 defines the start of a new decade rather than the end of one.
And in some ways it does feel like the end of a lot of things.
I think there was a survey in the UK recently where only 13% of the respondents said that they wanted their lives - particularly the way they work - to go back to the way things were before.
In terms of flexible hours and WFH?
Yeah - btw we did an episode essentially on the way work will change a couple of weeks ago.
That’s MSP126. Called WFH: our secret superpower.
So, I’m not going to go over it too much.
But that survey showed that British workers appreciate the flexibility that WFH over the last few months has brought them and want to retain some of that.
We’ve also seen countries like NZ announce that they want to experiment with a 4-day working week.
Will we see that as a way of extending employment?
Yeah - I think it’s something we’ll come back to in the future when it’s clearer what the longer term implications of coronavirus on employment are.
But we may find that countries or governments introduce policies that favour job sharing.
And one way to do that is to have shorter working weeks but with larger bodies of staff.
So, 50 people working 4 days a week instead of 40 ppl working 5 days a week.
That’s a simplistic summary of something that’s way too complex to get into now.
But it does relate to the theme of generations - because it leans into working expectations.
And how they differ from generation to generation.
And that brings us back to Middlennials.
Let me ask you a question - what do you expect from a job and the company that you work for?
Sorry big question to put you on the spot for…
[Jeff Replies…]
[Back to Matt].
But that may not be the case for people at the other end of the Millennial spectrum.
As we’ve pointed out on numerous occasions, you’re at the older end of the Millennial curve.
So, a lot of your tastes kind of dovetail with mine.
We like a lot of the same music - we share a lot of the same pop culture references and films.
Films that you watched in your teens and that I should have probably outgrown, already.
But, as I said, Gen X has never quite grown up.
We’ve seen surveys over the past few years that have indicated that younger Millennials and the older Gen Zers have quite different attitudes to work.
We’ve seen that - I guess it’s not a convention as such - trend, maybe - of people agreeing to take a better job title rather than a pay rise.
And I see that a lot more now.
In terms of hiring practises?
Yes. Companies - especially SMEs - are now more likely to ask their new hires what title they want.
Within limits, of course. Because they know that they’re hiring people who have an expectation of staying in the job for a while before trading up.
What they forget is that the HR of the company they want to head to next already speaks bullfrog titles…
Bullfrog?
I’m doing my best not to be crude.
But also because a lot of the titles are quite obviously over-inflated and noisy.
Much like bullfrogs.
An HR knows that a Marketing Wizard is someone who schedules the social media posts somebody more senior writes.
So, it’s ultimately a bit self-defeating.
A bit like those US companies in the 1990s that made everyone a Vice President.
Don’t you call yourself a Founder?
Only when forced, and for want of anything better.
My email sign off now doesn’t have any kind of title at all.
Because you’re above such things?
There’s only me. I can call myself CEO or MD or any of those things.
But I’m the janitor and the payroll clerk as well.
It’s not a secret…
Also, because it’s not something I have to worry about as much.
I’ve been in the workplace for a long time.
My employment history stretches further than a couple of titles, so when I chat to people about work, it’s more about that history.
I understand why people coming into the work force now are more concerned about their title and any seeming advantage they can confer on themselves to make the next jump.
What has any of this got to do with Millennials?
Because we still have these stereotype ideas.
But the reality is that the HR Manager you apply to is a Millennial.
The person interviewing you and managing you is probably a Millennial.
And Millennials have become a source of economic stability for some countries during the pandemic.
We’ve said for a long time that Millennials and Gen Z and presumably Gen Alpha
I should point out that most of the parents of Gen Alpha are themselves Millennials.
Just to reiterate how dumb and lazy it is for us to lump all the post Gen Xers in with one another.
Gen X wanted or want to be as cool as their kids.
… We’ve said for a long time that Millennials and Gen Z and presumably Gen Alpha live at home with parents longer.
A lot of economic factors - more than we have time for here - but mostly to do with job stability, wage stagnation, rising property and living costs.
All perfect subjects to search the BFM archive for…
Exactly.
One of the markers of the last recession was the collapse of the property market.
We saw a lot of credit, easy mortgages with variable rates which quickly became unaffordable once central banks put up interest rates to control inflation.
A rise in foreclosures at the same time that demand slowed to a trickle.
A sharp drop in prices, negative equity and reduced mobility for people who now faced moving in order to look for work.
It was pretty harrowing.
And Millennials have somehow stopped all that from happening again?
Overall, millennials are still a relatively small part of the housing market in many countries.
Too many are still locked out by those same economic factors.
But they are playing a crucial part in the current situation.
What we’re seeing on the whole is that house prices have’t collapsed.
The number of new listings has decreased in a lot of countries during a period where there is usually a spike.
But we haven’t seen that precipitous rise in foreclosures - so far - governments in many countries have jumped in with stimulus packages.
Low interest loans, repayment holidays. Wage support schemes. A lot of fiscal measures to ensure that liquidity doesn’t dry up.
But millennials are still buying?
Despite their reputation for impulse buying and instant gratification…
…studies tend to indicate that millennials actually spend a year or more looking for the right property.
Partly I guess because they’ve spent a lot time saving and scraping the down-payments together and getting to a point where they feel their lives are stable enough to buy a house and fill it with Gen Alphas.
So their plans to buy haven’t been derailed or suspended by the current crisis.
They’ve ploughed ahead.
Which explains why Gen Z hates Millennials, why?
Well, if you want the really lazy, ‘done in 20 seconds’ version.
Boomers are responsible for most of the bad stuff going on in the world and Gen X enables them, by recognising it and doing nothing.
But we’re old - so we’re more like objects to them than people and toppling us is like knocking over a statue
Millennials know what they should be doing to change things, but they missed the demo because they were waiting in line for a gluten free donut with stevia sprinkles and a Bolivian hand-ground espresso.
And the police had closed the street by the time the barista had pulled made them a second coffee because it turned out that the first one had beard oil around the edge of the cup.
Which leaves the Gen Zers to actually go out there and make some noise and fix stuff.
So, it’s a passive versus active thing?
All of these things are horrible generalisations.
In a lot of ways Millennials are still a pre-Internet generation.
They grew up with the first wave of digital technology but they weren’t part of the tablet in the crib generation.
They had MySpace accounts. I know you had a MS account, Jeff.
MySpace is to Gen Z what cassette tape is to Millennials.
Weird and analogue, ugly and unfathomable.
Have we learned anything at all over the last half hour?
That is a very Millennial question.
What we’ve learned is that Millennials need to let go and let the Zs and the Alphas do their thing and not worry that they don’t understand it.
Go ahead. Take your family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter but admit that it means more to you than it does to your kids,
They’re probably more concerned that the environmental impact of the Forbidden Journey exceeds the utility of the fun they’ll get from it.
What I want to say most of all is: Welcome Middlennials.
Welcome to the world of beige business wear, roomy underwear and horrifying indigestion.
You’ve earned it.