Millennials Kill Articles About Millennials Killing Things

There is a tired meme in financial articles these days and I’m f*cking through with it: Millennials are killing <insert literally anything>. Today I set aside the personal finance to put down, once and for all, the reasons why Millennials aren’t killing the thing you care about and what you can do to prevent your product or industry from dying.

If you’ve spent any time on the internet over the past five years you’ve seen an article that starts with a headline that goes something like, “Millennials are killing <insert the name of literally anything here>.” As a member of the oldest guard of Millennials I have f*cking had it with these misguided deadline beaters. This one is about how we’re killing Harley Davidson. In this installment we kill diamonds. Over here it’s Applebee’s and Buffalo Wild Wings. We’re redefiningTV by killing cable. Bar soap, napkins, vacations, you name it and we’ve threatened its life. I mean, Jesus at the rate we’re killing things it’s only a matter of time until we’ve undermined the entirety of the hitman industry. But that would just mean we’d have to deal with at least one more of these unbelievably lazy articles!

Here’s the dirty secret behind Millennials and our bloodthirsty ways: we’re not responsible for the death of anything, and the people saying we are, are lazy. Don’t believe me? Let’s dive right in…

Actually, It’s Not Me It’s You

The common thread through every single one of these articles is the notion that Millennials aren’t buying The Thing™ and it’s somehow a moral injustice to the makers of The Thing™. Baby Boomers are all about the free market when it comes to their kids getting loans to pay for college, the housing market collapsing on itself, or artists working for “exposure.” The second you’re not spending your meager paycheck on diamonds, Harleys, and cable television? All of a sudden YOU’RE the problem!

Here’s the thing about that: if your The Thing™ isn’t selling in the marketplace, it’s because your thing sucks. If Millennials are the first customers to tell you that then consider yourself lucky to have skated by on your coattails for this long. Diamonds? You’ve been a big f*cking scam for going on a century. Adam has explained this very well already (no surprise, he’s a Millennial!):

No industry is “owed” customers and Millennials aren’t responsible for ensuring your shitty product remains profitable to you. Cable industry? Sorry, it’s your time to die. You’ve been a miserable customer service experience for all of the time Millennials have been in the market, and I’m no exception! Comcast once literally tried to extort me by overcharging me, refusing to refund my money, and instead offering a “protection” plan for $5/month to not overcharge me in the future. Your monopoly has been busted up by disruptive companies like Netflix, and the overcharging you’ve gotten away with for decades has been brought out into the open by $10/month subscriptions to an infinite amount of television just in time for cash strapped Millennials to cut the cord forever.

At the end of the day it is the height of pomposity for a product or industry to say, “How DARE customers not flock to us as they SHOULD!” instead of looking inwardly at why their product sucks so much people don’t want to buy it any more. And if you’re a Baby Boomer reading this terrified of a brave new world in which Things Aren’t As They Always Have Been™, I assure you right around the 1920s the media was filled with articles featuring titles like, “Why Isn’t the Flapper Generation Buying Horse Carriages?” and America wound up stronger and better for it.

So relax; the sound of all those products and companies being killed off is the sound of the free market at work, not Millennials satisfying their murderous predilections.

We’re Not Damaged Goods

Read enough of these articles and you start to become real familiar with passages like this one from the “Millennials are killing Harley Davidson” piece:

"I think we have got a very significant psychological scar from this great recession," Morgan Stanley analyst Kimberly Greenberger told Business Insider. "One in every five households at the time were severely negatively impacted by that event. And, if you think about the children in that house and how the length and depth of that recession really impacted people, I think you have an entire generation with permanently changed spending habits."

Millennials are not f*cking scarred from the 2008 economic crash. You know what they are? Broke from being the most indebted generation to ever enter their 20s thanks to sky high student loans. THERE LITERALLY ISN’T THE MONEY TO SPEND ON STUPID SHIT LIKE HARLEYS AND EATING AT GODDAM APPLEBEE’S. If we’re going to scrape together a night out at a restaurant it’s not going to be for microwaved all-you-can-eat apps no matter how much jalamaplepeño sauce you slather on our mozzarella sticks. We’ll take an authentic experience at some place you can’t find in every Omaha, Des Moines, or Indianapolis you go to. Don’t even think about getting us to buy a vehicle, pay for insurance and registration, and then not be able to drive it in all weather conditions Harley! We’llkeep saving our pennies until the Model 3 comes out, thankyouverymuch.

The reason this narrative is SO important to all of these writers, and particularly to analysts from places like Morgan Stanley (who, by the way, had a plenty big hand in CAUSING that 2008 economic crash lest they think we’ve forgotten!) is because the American economy has, for thirty or more years, been built on cheap credit and Americans out spending their earnings year after year. These people can’t stand the possibility that that period of out-sized spending is over and a smarter consumer class has wised up to high interest debt and buying stupid shit just because their neighbors did. Even if we didn’t have giant student loan debts to pay off Millennials are the first ones to look at the generation in front of them and say, “Wait a second, not saving for retirement and putting yourself into thousands in debt just to have things isn’t a good idea.” We’ve experienced debt, we know how harmful it is, and we’re choosing a different path for ourselves. And that terrifies the class of bankers who need us to spend more than we earn just to keep their fat bonus checks coming in.

Sorry bub, it’s not the recession that scarred us. It’s the crock of shit you and your kind bilked our parents with and we’re going to take a hard pass on repeating their mistakes. You can keep peddling this bullshit narrative but you’re going to find as the years go by Millennials weren’t afraid of 2008 after all; we were afraid of repeating the financial failures of the generations before us that bought your nonsense.

We Really Are That Broke

It’s no secret that Millennials have the highest debt burden of any generation entering adulthood. The average student loan burden for a Millennial has far surpassed our parents’ loads withthe current student taking on about $30,000 in student loans in order to get their college degree. When we graduate? Those loans demand payment regardless of our job situation meaning steep obligations that curtail our ability to build wealth and debt so pernicious we can’t even discharge it in bankruptcy.

The dirty secret isn’t that Millennials aren’t spending our money it’s that we spend almost all of it but on debt repayment, not the dumb stuff the folks who make The Thing™ want us to buy. We took on debt to better ourselves with educations while Baby Boomers took on debt to buy boats and new cars. Now they’re realizing they need to work into their 80s to make up for the fact they saved nothing for retirement and overspent their salary for decades just as we’re trying to get a career started to pay off our loans for bettering ourselves. That’s tough to do when all the jobs are occupied by those same Boomers with maxed out credit cards hoping to undo the decades of harm they’ve done to themselves.

So you’ll have to forgive us if we aren’t battering the doors down to make that easy by buying stupid shit; that part of our budget got spent on Sallie Mae.

Actually NOBODY Needs to Buy The Thing™

Every single one of these articles, without fail, is about a luxury item that literally no human being needs to buy. Diamonds? Cable? Harley Davidsons? Eating out at restaurants? These are incredibly luxurious items for anyone’s budget and they’re certainly not critical to one’s subsistence. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Millenial, a Baby Boomer, a Generation X’er, a Generation Y’er, or whatever comes after us: buying frivolities are a matter of taste and priorities. Let it be said, then, that Millennials simply have better priorities than buying disposable paper you wipe your face with.

Not once has the article ever asked why Millennials aren’t buying underwear, or water, or groceries. It’s always an expensive “nice to have” that just isn’t in our budget. What happens if people stop wearing rings made of incredibly hard pieces of carbon? Absolutely nothing. The world keeps on spinning right along and the money that we would have spent on those rocks goes to something else. Sure that’s a dark reality if you’re a diamond salesperson but you won’t find many Millennials losing sleep over the diamond folks taking a turn on the unemployment line.

Millennials Aren’t Coming for You

Listen, the moral of the story is that Millennials aren’t perniciously coming to get The Thing™ you love because you love it. We’re focused on the things we’re focused on and if that doesn’t meet the needs of certain products, industries, or companies then they’ll need to adjust to the changing market, not the other way around. At the end of the day there’s no concerted effort amongst Millennials to put an end to The Thing™. There isn’t a Millennial newsletter or weekly meeting where we plot what we’re going to kill next. (Well, if there is no one has invited me. Can I get that invite? Anyone? I got a lot cooler after high school I swear.)

The world could do with fewer hacky faux hit pieces that excuses lazy businesspeople and spreads a false narrative about a battle damaged generation so scared of a recession that happened a decade ago that we can’t bear the thought of opening our wallets for a second. So when you see those articles, give them a link to this one and remind people: Millennials aren’t trying to kill ANYTHING. It’s just that The Thing™ happens to suck independently on its own and we don’t have a hand in that.

And if you’re a Millennial struggling to get by financially and have some downtime in between your murdering sprees, check out my 10Step Plan to Your Financial Future. “Millennials kill not being financially savvy,” is an article that I’d be delighted to write.

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