The Millennial Generation as a Lost Generation
EssayChat / Sep 15, 2017
This research paper will consider the issue of whether the so-called Millennial Generation is in fact a "Lost Generation" and decide in favor of this argument. The essay will look at the original Lost Generation, also known as the Generation of 1914, and see how the Millennial Generation shares certain similarities with this generation. An Aristotelean approach will be employed in advancing the central thesis of this essay (that the Millennial Generation is in fact a "lost" one), while at the same time adhering the Toulmein model of argumentation.
The claim of this paper is that the Millennial Generation is indeed a lost generation, and this claim will be proven on the grounds of not only the basic economic facts (i.e. this generation is left adrift after a prolonged period of wealth and plenty that abruptly dropped off with the current prolonged recession) but also with the general and pervasive sense of drift and purposelessness that is characteristic of this generation (and shared in some significant ways with that of the Lost Generation). Essentially what the claim of the paper presupposes is that there are a variety of factors at work in determining whether a generation can be considered a lost one, and this can be partly ascertained by looking at the original lost generation and seeing what factors made that generation "lost" in the eyes of those who considered it as such. Support for the claim will also come from current economic data about the Millennial Generation, as well as from sociological evidence that many Millennials consider themselves to be lost and are also considered as such by people of other generations.
However, this paper will also concede that there are uncertainties in this argument, the foremost of which being that there is no point of comparison between the two generations because of the tremendously different times in which they lived. Mainly these objection can be coalesced into the fact that the original Lost Generation found in a world war, then enjoyed a period of tremendous economic prosperity, and that this prosperity was only to be lost in a crash that resulted in the Great Depression, but after they came of age. The Millennials, this counterargument maintains, are just a whining shadow of the Lost Generation, in that their war (the War on Terror) was of limited impact on that generation in comparison to World War I, and that the period of prosperity did not rise as high nor fall as low as the did the American economy during the 1920s and 30, and that their generational trauma is more the result of economic insecurity rather than-collectively-combat-induced trauma.
But the rebuttal to these objection is simple: There is undoubtedly a difference between these two generations, but it is difference in degree rather than of kind. That is, the Lost Generation dealt with some salient yet similar issues that are faced by the Millennial Generation, but in most cases it dealt with these issues in a more exaggerated form, on the whole. But again, it must be remembered that there is nothing definite and totally certain about this entire debate, couched as it is in assumptions regarding how one defines and delineates a generation (for starters) as well as what adverse factors constitute a "lost generation." So there is a great deal of leeway here for argument to be made on either side of the issue. Nevertheless, it is the finding of this paper that the two generations being compared are both to be considered "lost," because of economic and sociological factors-factors that were similar in nature and effect, although they certainly differed in specific detail as well as with respect to the degree to which each of these generations was affected by them.
First, a consideration of the economic factors involved here. With respect to the Lost Generation of the 1920s, these men and women (including students) were coming of age in a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Those who fought in World War I were returning to an American horn of plenty. There were jobs and money seemingly everywhere. But that all changed in 1929, when most of these people were still fairly young, still in their 20s or 30s. And this is critical distinction for those who decry making comparisons between the two generations: That the Lost Generation experiences a profligate youth in a time of plenty, and that their malaise was mainly related to their experiences what many saw as a purposeless war. The Millennials, on the other hand, saw their economic prospects disappear while many of these were either still in college or in any case really too young to have established themselves on a career-path.
Millennials are also facing tough economic times which followed hard upon the boom years of the early 2000s, when the older generations were making a lot of money as the global economy surged on the housing market bubble. But many millennials were not far enough advanced up the food chain, so to speak, to establish themselves in any career or place of economic security. Many of them, indeed, had not yet graduated college (those of whom who went on to higher education) or completely their military service. Harper's writer Jeff Madrick makes the most convincing case in favor of labelling the Millennial Generation a lost generation, as he does explicitly in the title of his article on the subject.
Madrick marshals a number of critical economic facts to justify his conclusion. He looks at summer employment levels for 18-24 year olds, and finds it at the lowest level since the end of World War II-30 percent. This is much, much lower than-half the rate of-the peak of 58 percent in 1978. He finds that it's even worse for blacks (20 percent) and Hispanics (25 percent). He also finds that steady employment for Millennials has dropped 11 percentage points (down to 61 from 72) since 2000 and that their wages for those who do have steady work is 30 percent lower than in 1973. He also points out there are far fewer aggregate jobs to go around for job seekers, and that the Millennials are being hurt the most by this trend. He observes that "18 million people joined the workforce" between 1992 and 2000, but only 2.2 million between 2000 and 2010. The problems also go beyond this, as reported by Bloomberg: Not only is unemployment for the young double the national rate, but only 44 percent of college graduates have employment "commensurate with their education" (Dorning).
Madrick's data clearly indicates that the Millennial Generation is being hit hard by the current recession, and that many American of this generation simply have no opportunity to engage themselves meaningfully in a career-track job as several generations before them have taken for granted, as if it were their birth-right. In an even more telling comparison to the Lost Generation, Madrick's suggestions for providing help to the Millennials (launching and augmenting various federal social and employment programs) are obviously modelled on the kind of social programs that Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed forward as part of the New Deal in his effort to alleviate the economic devastation of the Great Depression.
This economic effect is surely to produce a pervasive malaise which will effect the entire generation at a fundamental level, such that it becomes a mass psychological and sociological phenomenon. But the naysayers here are quick to wonder if this chiefly economic malaise can be comparable to the generational shell-shock experienced by a generation that came of age during a world war that involved the use of chemical weapons and was fought for reasons that few young people believed in.
Consider it a form of post-traumatic stress disorder that affected an entire generation: How could this possible be considered on the same level as the financial and economic difficulties faced by today's Millenials? Perhaps in that these two types of experience lead to hopelessness. Both generations were robbed of meaning in their lives by being robbed of what they thought America was supposed to stand for. They became disillusioned at a very young age, before they even had a chance to grow up. Cynicism came early, and poisoned the well of life for both of them before they could even really get started in the world-the adult world, on the terms adults are supposed to engage the world.
And the Millennials are undoubtedly being robbed of what previous generations regarded as a birth right. As Steurle, McKernan, Ratcliffe, and Zhang point out in an Urban Institute report, younger Americans are increasingly less able to accumulate wealth and their economic prospects-currently and in projection-are dwindling (2-3). This trend, they find, was in the works even before the Great Recession, combined together of factors such as "reduced job prospects, lower employment rates, and lack of educational attainment" (2). This economic state of affairs coincides with government priorities that are shifting away from investing in the future well-being of this generation, demonstrated by "reduced status of education in federal and state budgets, limited private and state government pension contributions to the young, and a post-recession subsidy system with a great deal of ambiguity toward new homeowners" (3).
Yet another indicatory of being a Lost Generation is the general social zeitgeist at the time. For instance, in the 1920s many of the Lost Generation writers were preoccupied with the disillusionment they experienced both in and after the war, finding life and politics equally meaningless and reduced to caricature. The reaction to all of this was the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties, including drinking alcohol to excess despite the illegality of alcohol at the time thanks to Prohibition.
Smith, Christoffersen, and Davidson see this as partly the product of a larger cultural and social failing-that the Millennials have also been abandoned by those who should have taught them moral values, but instead taught them moral relativism. "But if these emerging adults are lost, it is because the larger culture and society into which they are being inducted is also lost" (61). The authors further assert that this brings this generation as a whole dangerously close to total moral nihilism, in which nothing has meaning and there is no real value distinction to be made between right and wrong (62). But this kind of extreme rejection of all previous values can be seen, too, in the attitudes of the original Lost Generation.
This kind of generational mood can be judged, in part, from the literature of the time, and it can be seen, for instance, in the novel the Great Gatsby, where the most important events in the lives of these characters seem to be social events that revolve around drinking excessively and attempting to become familiar with the opposite sex. It is the contention of this paper that the literature of the Millennial generation also betrays the mood of this generation, and this, even more so than the economic data, shows how lost this generation in fact is.
One novel that makes the generational hopelessness of the Millennials so clear is Rontel by Sam Pink. The novel, though comic in tone, portrays the life of the slacker narrator as he bumbles about his life of poverty in Chicago, bouncing from one dead-end job to another, and having no real or lasting connection to the world of what was traditionally considered to be adulthood. At one point, the narrator visits a library where he once half-applied to work (in other words, he never bothered to complete the application, yet resents the library for ignoring his half-assed effort). He spends the afternoon on the free public internet connection writing clever fake reviews for various products, such as earplugs and paper towels (Pink, 60-1). The tone of the novel is distant and remote, and it is composed is short declarative sentences. Pink mainly relies on irony to convey his sense of humor. There is no plot to speak of, and the life lived by the narrator, his brother, and most of the characters in the novel seems to have no direction or purpose at all.
Here, however, critics of the conflation of the Millennial generation with the same type of Lostness as the Lost Generation would object to say that the attitude and circumstances of the narrator of Rontel bear little resemblance to the attitude of, say, characters in Hemingway's or Fitzgerald's novels. Those works of literature, it might be argued, have some notion that life has some meaning, and there is more of a sense of a loss and disappointment on display there than a blanket indictment of existence itself as being totally meaningless. Also, as literature, the novels of these and other Lost Generation novels tend to go somewhere and have plots, and not bog down in meaningless details. These novelists also grappled with serious issues-like war and death-and had a much more tragic view of life in general. Those writers didn't merely think of life as a huge joke, like today's Millennial writers.
But the rebuttal to this view is that the Millennials' sense of hopelessness and despair has gone behind even that of the Lost Generation. They, after all, had something to believe in, even if it was a sense of tragic loss. At least something had been lost. But Millennial writers such as Pink seem to be suggesting that there is nothing left to lose, that all meaning has bee sucked out of modern American existence, along with the possibility of even making any real money. Now there is just scrounging around in the cultural and materialistic wasteland of other people's junk. Playing video games as meaningful as life can get sometimes for Millennials, is what Pink seems to ironically suggest, in that the characters seem to reach their maximum levels of personal satisfaction when playing video games, as if very few other events in their lives can compare.
In conclusion, while there are obvious and serious differences between the problems faced by the original Lost Generation and the Millennial Generation, the Millennial Generation can be considered a lost generation because of the economic circumstances in which it finds itself, combined with a general social mood of meaninglessness that tends towards nihilism.
Works Cited
Dorning, Mike. "Lost Generations: A Long Recession's Long Shadow." Bloomberg.
Madrick, Jeff. "The Real Lost Generation." Harper's Magazine.
Pink, Sam. Rontel. Lazy Facist Press: Portland. Print.
Steurle, E., McKernan, S., Ratcliffe, C., and Zhang, S. "Lost Generations? Wealth Building among Young Americans." The Urban Institute.
Smith, Christian, Christoffersen, Kari, and Davidson, Hilary. Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood Hardcover." Oxford University Press: London.
The claim of this paper is that the Millennial Generation is indeed a lost generation, and this claim will be proven on the grounds of not only the basic economic facts (i.e. this generation is left adrift after a prolonged period of wealth and plenty that abruptly dropped off with the current prolonged recession) but also with the general and pervasive sense of drift and purposelessness that is characteristic of this generation (and shared in some significant ways with that of the Lost Generation). Essentially what the claim of the paper presupposes is that there are a variety of factors at work in determining whether a generation can be considered a lost one, and this can be partly ascertained by looking at the original lost generation and seeing what factors made that generation "lost" in the eyes of those who considered it as such. Support for the claim will also come from current economic data about the Millennial Generation, as well as from sociological evidence that many Millennials consider themselves to be lost and are also considered as such by people of other generations.
However, this paper will also concede that there are uncertainties in this argument, the foremost of which being that there is no point of comparison between the two generations because of the tremendously different times in which they lived. Mainly these objection can be coalesced into the fact that the original Lost Generation found in a world war, then enjoyed a period of tremendous economic prosperity, and that this prosperity was only to be lost in a crash that resulted in the Great Depression, but after they came of age. The Millennials, this counterargument maintains, are just a whining shadow of the Lost Generation, in that their war (the War on Terror) was of limited impact on that generation in comparison to World War I, and that the period of prosperity did not rise as high nor fall as low as the did the American economy during the 1920s and 30, and that their generational trauma is more the result of economic insecurity rather than-collectively-combat-induced trauma.But the rebuttal to these objection is simple: There is undoubtedly a difference between these two generations, but it is difference in degree rather than of kind. That is, the Lost Generation dealt with some salient yet similar issues that are faced by the Millennial Generation, but in most cases it dealt with these issues in a more exaggerated form, on the whole. But again, it must be remembered that there is nothing definite and totally certain about this entire debate, couched as it is in assumptions regarding how one defines and delineates a generation (for starters) as well as what adverse factors constitute a "lost generation." So there is a great deal of leeway here for argument to be made on either side of the issue. Nevertheless, it is the finding of this paper that the two generations being compared are both to be considered "lost," because of economic and sociological factors-factors that were similar in nature and effect, although they certainly differed in specific detail as well as with respect to the degree to which each of these generations was affected by them.
First, a consideration of the economic factors involved here. With respect to the Lost Generation of the 1920s, these men and women (including students) were coming of age in a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Those who fought in World War I were returning to an American horn of plenty. There were jobs and money seemingly everywhere. But that all changed in 1929, when most of these people were still fairly young, still in their 20s or 30s. And this is critical distinction for those who decry making comparisons between the two generations: That the Lost Generation experiences a profligate youth in a time of plenty, and that their malaise was mainly related to their experiences what many saw as a purposeless war. The Millennials, on the other hand, saw their economic prospects disappear while many of these were either still in college or in any case really too young to have established themselves on a career-path.
Millennials are also facing tough economic times which followed hard upon the boom years of the early 2000s, when the older generations were making a lot of money as the global economy surged on the housing market bubble. But many millennials were not far enough advanced up the food chain, so to speak, to establish themselves in any career or place of economic security. Many of them, indeed, had not yet graduated college (those of whom who went on to higher education) or completely their military service. Harper's writer Jeff Madrick makes the most convincing case in favor of labelling the Millennial Generation a lost generation, as he does explicitly in the title of his article on the subject.
Madrick marshals a number of critical economic facts to justify his conclusion. He looks at summer employment levels for 18-24 year olds, and finds it at the lowest level since the end of World War II-30 percent. This is much, much lower than-half the rate of-the peak of 58 percent in 1978. He finds that it's even worse for blacks (20 percent) and Hispanics (25 percent). He also finds that steady employment for Millennials has dropped 11 percentage points (down to 61 from 72) since 2000 and that their wages for those who do have steady work is 30 percent lower than in 1973. He also points out there are far fewer aggregate jobs to go around for job seekers, and that the Millennials are being hurt the most by this trend. He observes that "18 million people joined the workforce" between 1992 and 2000, but only 2.2 million between 2000 and 2010. The problems also go beyond this, as reported by Bloomberg: Not only is unemployment for the young double the national rate, but only 44 percent of college graduates have employment "commensurate with their education" (Dorning).
Madrick's data clearly indicates that the Millennial Generation is being hit hard by the current recession, and that many American of this generation simply have no opportunity to engage themselves meaningfully in a career-track job as several generations before them have taken for granted, as if it were their birth-right. In an even more telling comparison to the Lost Generation, Madrick's suggestions for providing help to the Millennials (launching and augmenting various federal social and employment programs) are obviously modelled on the kind of social programs that Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed forward as part of the New Deal in his effort to alleviate the economic devastation of the Great Depression.
This economic effect is surely to produce a pervasive malaise which will effect the entire generation at a fundamental level, such that it becomes a mass psychological and sociological phenomenon. But the naysayers here are quick to wonder if this chiefly economic malaise can be comparable to the generational shell-shock experienced by a generation that came of age during a world war that involved the use of chemical weapons and was fought for reasons that few young people believed in.
Consider it a form of post-traumatic stress disorder that affected an entire generation: How could this possible be considered on the same level as the financial and economic difficulties faced by today's Millenials? Perhaps in that these two types of experience lead to hopelessness. Both generations were robbed of meaning in their lives by being robbed of what they thought America was supposed to stand for. They became disillusioned at a very young age, before they even had a chance to grow up. Cynicism came early, and poisoned the well of life for both of them before they could even really get started in the world-the adult world, on the terms adults are supposed to engage the world.
And the Millennials are undoubtedly being robbed of what previous generations regarded as a birth right. As Steurle, McKernan, Ratcliffe, and Zhang point out in an Urban Institute report, younger Americans are increasingly less able to accumulate wealth and their economic prospects-currently and in projection-are dwindling (2-3). This trend, they find, was in the works even before the Great Recession, combined together of factors such as "reduced job prospects, lower employment rates, and lack of educational attainment" (2). This economic state of affairs coincides with government priorities that are shifting away from investing in the future well-being of this generation, demonstrated by "reduced status of education in federal and state budgets, limited private and state government pension contributions to the young, and a post-recession subsidy system with a great deal of ambiguity toward new homeowners" (3).
Yet another indicatory of being a Lost Generation is the general social zeitgeist at the time. For instance, in the 1920s many of the Lost Generation writers were preoccupied with the disillusionment they experienced both in and after the war, finding life and politics equally meaningless and reduced to caricature. The reaction to all of this was the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties, including drinking alcohol to excess despite the illegality of alcohol at the time thanks to Prohibition.
Smith, Christoffersen, and Davidson see this as partly the product of a larger cultural and social failing-that the Millennials have also been abandoned by those who should have taught them moral values, but instead taught them moral relativism. "But if these emerging adults are lost, it is because the larger culture and society into which they are being inducted is also lost" (61). The authors further assert that this brings this generation as a whole dangerously close to total moral nihilism, in which nothing has meaning and there is no real value distinction to be made between right and wrong (62). But this kind of extreme rejection of all previous values can be seen, too, in the attitudes of the original Lost Generation.
This kind of generational mood can be judged, in part, from the literature of the time, and it can be seen, for instance, in the novel the Great Gatsby, where the most important events in the lives of these characters seem to be social events that revolve around drinking excessively and attempting to become familiar with the opposite sex. It is the contention of this paper that the literature of the Millennial generation also betrays the mood of this generation, and this, even more so than the economic data, shows how lost this generation in fact is.
One novel that makes the generational hopelessness of the Millennials so clear is Rontel by Sam Pink. The novel, though comic in tone, portrays the life of the slacker narrator as he bumbles about his life of poverty in Chicago, bouncing from one dead-end job to another, and having no real or lasting connection to the world of what was traditionally considered to be adulthood. At one point, the narrator visits a library where he once half-applied to work (in other words, he never bothered to complete the application, yet resents the library for ignoring his half-assed effort). He spends the afternoon on the free public internet connection writing clever fake reviews for various products, such as earplugs and paper towels (Pink, 60-1). The tone of the novel is distant and remote, and it is composed is short declarative sentences. Pink mainly relies on irony to convey his sense of humor. There is no plot to speak of, and the life lived by the narrator, his brother, and most of the characters in the novel seems to have no direction or purpose at all.
Here, however, critics of the conflation of the Millennial generation with the same type of Lostness as the Lost Generation would object to say that the attitude and circumstances of the narrator of Rontel bear little resemblance to the attitude of, say, characters in Hemingway's or Fitzgerald's novels. Those works of literature, it might be argued, have some notion that life has some meaning, and there is more of a sense of a loss and disappointment on display there than a blanket indictment of existence itself as being totally meaningless. Also, as literature, the novels of these and other Lost Generation novels tend to go somewhere and have plots, and not bog down in meaningless details. These novelists also grappled with serious issues-like war and death-and had a much more tragic view of life in general. Those writers didn't merely think of life as a huge joke, like today's Millennial writers.
But the rebuttal to this view is that the Millennials' sense of hopelessness and despair has gone behind even that of the Lost Generation. They, after all, had something to believe in, even if it was a sense of tragic loss. At least something had been lost. But Millennial writers such as Pink seem to be suggesting that there is nothing left to lose, that all meaning has bee sucked out of modern American existence, along with the possibility of even making any real money. Now there is just scrounging around in the cultural and materialistic wasteland of other people's junk. Playing video games as meaningful as life can get sometimes for Millennials, is what Pink seems to ironically suggest, in that the characters seem to reach their maximum levels of personal satisfaction when playing video games, as if very few other events in their lives can compare.
In conclusion, while there are obvious and serious differences between the problems faced by the original Lost Generation and the Millennial Generation, the Millennial Generation can be considered a lost generation because of the economic circumstances in which it finds itself, combined with a general social mood of meaninglessness that tends towards nihilism.
Works Cited
Dorning, Mike. "Lost Generations: A Long Recession's Long Shadow." Bloomberg.
Madrick, Jeff. "The Real Lost Generation." Harper's Magazine.
Pink, Sam. Rontel. Lazy Facist Press: Portland. Print.
Steurle, E., McKernan, S., Ratcliffe, C., and Zhang, S. "Lost Generations? Wealth Building among Young Americans." The Urban Institute.
Smith, Christian, Christoffersen, Kari, and Davidson, Hilary. Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood Hardcover." Oxford University Press: London.