Elspeth Reeve is also peeved at Joel Stein’s piece:
Sometimes you get the sense that these magazines’ cultural writers have very little experience with the entire American culture, and prefer to make their grand analyses based on what people they know in the gentrified parts of cities like New York and Los Angeles were talking about at brunch last weekend. The type of young person that magazine writers come across most frequently are magazine interns. Because the media industry is high-status, but, at least early on, very low pay in a very expensive city, it attracts a lot of rich kids. Entitled, arrogant, spoiled, preening — those are the alleged signature traits of Millennials, as diagnosed by countless magazine writers. Those traits curiously align perfectly with the signature traits of a rich kid. Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram? If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you.
Reeve goes on to feature a series of magazine covers representing “a century or so of culture writers declaring the youth to be self-obsessed little monsters.” For what it’s worth, my own impression of the next generation – derived indeed from working with the non-rich ones – is that they are the best I’ve yet seen: pragmatic, unillusioned, often well-intentioned and extremely hardworking. I get gloomy about our culture at times, about the collision of more and more powerful technology with our primate impulses, but the one bright thing I see are the twentysomethings.
They seem sane before their time. Because, perhaps, they have had to confront a far harder world than their parents and simply have to get on with it. I have to say I prefer their generation to my own.
The Dish 