30 Millennials Share Stereotypes That They Hate To Be Associated With

Meanwhile, Eddy Ng, the James and Elizabeth Freeman Professor of Management at Bucknell University, explained to us that the oldest millennials are 40 years old at this time, having been born in 1980/1981. "Much of the stereotypes about them largely remain—raised with high self-esteem, entitled, unrealistic work expectations, even though most are actually settled into their careers and have taken on managerial and leadership roles."

Professor Ng said that millennials were reported to emphasize work/life balance, and were a lot less focused on work than other generations, preferring more leisure time. You can do a small check-in with yourself to see if that's true for you (it's pretty accurate for me).

"Gen Zs on the other hand show signs of greater work centrality, taking on work whenever they can. This may be due to a structural shift in the economy, where quality work is less available. As a result, Gen Z are more likely to have 'side hustles' in addition to regular work."

NukeEnergy’s thread was the top awarded post on Reddit recently. It got over 200 awards and more than 42.6k upvotes on the r/AskReddit subreddit at the time of writing. It’s not just baby boomers and Gen Xers that sometimes look down on millennials, it’s zoomers, too (though for different reasons, of course).

NukeEnergy revealed that they're a millennial, right at the Gen X cutoff (so around 1980), and shared their thoughts that people their age might not be as loyal to the companies they work for the generations that went before them. "My parents both got pensions from their companies, but they had to work there for 20 years to be fully vested. Nobody gets that anymore, so company-hopping is more common for people my age."

Redditor NukeEnergy told Bored Panda that they had no idea that the thread would be so popular. "I went to bed when it had about 100 upvotes and woke up to 20k."

They pointed out that everyone should read through the thread and draw their own conclusions about whether or not any of the stereotypes about millennials, aka Gen Y, are true. However, in their opinion, any kind of stereotyping is wrong. "Stereotypes about race and sexual orientation are harmful, why wouldn't lumping a huge age group together and labeling them as lazy, self-serving snowflakes?" they said. NukeEnergy also wanted to give a shout-out to "the 'K' family pool house crew" and suggested that people consider supporting the Philabundance charity.

While stereotypes can be harmful, researchers do tend to find a lot of similarities among members of the same generations, in terms of their values, as well as how they perceive work and life. Generalizations might tend to gloss over what makes individual members of each generation unique, but they do highlight what tends to unite them.

The BBC has a very handy guide for telling all the different generations apart. However, different researchers have different ways of categorizing these very same generations, so one scientist’s millennial might be someone else’s Generation Xer.

NukeEnergy acknowledged that there's a slight overlap between Gen Y and the other generations, however, they added that they don't have an opinion about the exact definition of millennials.

"We are all people, the only difference is our age," the original poster shared their opinion that there are more things that unite all the generations than divide them.

It’s all so tiring when you realize you’re being blamed by everyone for not meeting their vastly different standards. And it’s also making us think about how some of us really don’t identify with any of the main generations, even if we might technically be part of them. (Depending on which researcher you ask, I’m personally also a millennial, but I tend to poke fun at them, and by extension myself, in a lighthearted way, too.)

For the BBC, millennials, aka Generation Y, were born anywhere between 1980 and 1995 and are described as lazy, confident, curious, and constantly questioning authority. I don’t know about you, but that describes me about as well as my horoscope (unironically, and I’m a Cancer, by the way). Even though I don’t feel like I’m part of Gen Y, there’s no denying that some general characteristics noticed by researchers overlap with how I view the world.