Sarcasm alert: Bad news, everyone: Those pesky millennials have killed another industry. I know, just when you thought those bloodthirsty market-murderers couldn’t top topping the marmalade industry, the motorcycle industry, and the “restaurants where you get to stare at the waitresses’ industry, they’ve struck again, like the serial killer in the movie Se7en (and we can’t even name the actor in that now because snowflake millennials have killed the “abusers in Hollywood” industry).
This time, in a slightly left field move, they’re killing recycling — an area long assumed to be a pillar of the tedious millennial stereotype, along with quinoa, talking about inclusivity and not wanting to be shot at school. According to a British Science Association survey, a fifth of all millennials find recycling too time-consuming, compared with just 6 per cnet of over-55s. It’s one of those facts that makes you do a double take, like the fact that French President Emmanuel Macron is just three years older than Macaulay Culkin. Have we got it wrong all these years? Are millennials killing ... the planet?
It’s tempting to create a narrative about disenfranchised and apathetic millennials, losing faith in the world around them, to the point that they can’t even be bothered to recycle. Brexit is looming, no one can afford a house, the biggest film of 2018 is probably going to be Ready Player One — there’s a lot of terrible news about. Who cares whether or not this tuna can is totally clean when you’ve got the threat of nuclear war, the chance of a terrorist attack or the prospect of watching Piers Morgan interview Jim Davidson?
On the flip side, there’s the argument that millennials are too socially conscious to bother with recycling any more — when you have to think about whether you’re destroying the rainforest by buying chocolate bars with palm oil in them, whether or not you’re funding Murdoch-owned propaganda by buying a Now TV subscription package, do you really have the energy to sort the papers from the plastics?
But before tabloids start frothing at the mouth and writing pieces such as ‘Hero pensioners protect Mother Earth from heartless millennials and also it’s Lily Allen’s fault probably somehow’, we need a few caveats. First, the word “millennials” is not a synonym for “young people”. This survey defined them as 25 to 34-year-olds, which is accurate, but in most representations in the (mostly middle-aged) media, they’re university students or young adults, albeit ones still listening to music that the (mostly middle-aged) media considers “young”, like Dizzee Rascal and Rizzle Kicks. The real “young people” (16-24) are technically called Generation Z (or the “iGeneration” if you work for Apple and/or are Just Terrible), and I couldn’t find any information in the survey about how they recycled — unless we’re talking about how they’re recycling fashion trends from the 1990s (that’s right, Generation Z, season one of Friends called and it wants its high waistlines and baggy shirts back).
Second, is it really useful to lump together everyone born between 1984 and 1993 into one group? I was born in 1989 (yes, yes, I am peak millennial, I came out of the womb holding an avocado trying to get a discount on a train ticket). I tried to talk to a colleague born in 1993 recently about Snapchat, and before she finished explaining how the new update had ruined the “story” function, my bones had turned to dust like the Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I don’t necessarily feel a sense of “millennial solidarity”, except when millennials are being attacked by tabloids for being too sensitive (ie showing a level of compassion for people who don’t look like them).
The cynic in me thinks that that’s why these news stories about recycling are framed that way — people are more likely to pay attention to a survey about whether plastics can go in the blue bin if you can stoke up some inter-generational warfare between boomers and millennials at the same time.
“Millennials” are not a singular group — the people who aren’t recycling probably aren’t the same people who are protesting about palm oil, who probably aren’t the same people who are killing the marmalade industry. We’re encouraged to see disparate groups of people as a monolith, to lump them all together and blame them for society’s ills, because that’s easier than actually tackling issues. I know I do it subconsciously with older people, and I’m sure older people do it with millennials.
So if this news story doesn’t work with your understanding of the millennial stereotype, maybe we don’t need to invent a narrative to make it fit. Maybe we just need a more nuanced stereotype — or, better, no stereotype at all.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer and occasional performer.
