Yet Another Post on Why Millennials Are Unhappy

A certain blogger has suggested that they are privy to some great insight onto why apparently people born from 1977 to 1995 or so are unhappy with life, and for reasons that I do not fully understand, it seems to be being accepted across the internet as some sort of profound truth. Despite the lack of any real evidence backing up their thesis, people seem to trust Microsoft Paint drawings of stick figures to explain large sociological phenomena, so I am gonna take a shot at it.  And as a bonus, I am going to throw in graphs, because that's kind of my thing.  So without further ado: here is why us Gen Y kids just hate life

This is Sam. He or she is a Gen Y kid/adult. And he/she is unhappy.  Why? Well turns out in a market economy, you kind of need money to survive and do anything. So Sam is gonna get a job now:

Turns out job market isn't great, and for whatever reason (lack of cash inflow into companies, ability to hire cheaper labor because other people are just more desperate, or the fact that the modern internship system is a huge catch-22 based on the idea that you need to waste a year of your life working so you are given the opportunity to apply to paid positions) Sam can't get a paying job.  Well, Sam still needs money and decides based on the 1950s explanation of US capitalism to start his or her own business.  Because venture capitalism, start-ups, Steve Jobs, and the American Dream. Still you need some initial capital, because the whole not eating thing is detrimental to the entrepreneurial spirit.  So Sam goes to a bank for a loan/asks investors for money:

Yeah, it turns out, unless you know people who are willing to spring you some cash or who can recommend you to other people to spring you some cash, you probably aren't going to get any money to do start-up things. Because in the real world, banks and investors don't throw cash at random college grads.  So Sam is pretty hungry at this point so decides to do what he or she is biologically programmed to do: go ask his or her parents for food and board until one of those magical job trees grow next door.

All the while, Sam feels guilty because now his/her parents retirement money is being dwindled away, Sam is not living the independent lifestyle he or she had hoped for/been promised, and some asshole on a website is telling him/her that it is his/her own fault for not being a hard enough worker that all this is happening.

So to recap:

Also, in case other people didn't realize, generational name calling is some really vile bullshit, but it is also incredibly unoriginal.  Let's look at how the "Greatest Generation" felt about the baby-boomers:

 So around 1970, the older people began complaining of a "generational gap" which was a nice way of saying how the 60s kids were all lazy bums who were horrible amoral idiots ruining America.  In the 1990s, the media was much more blunt about how it felt regarding Generation X:

Around 1995, suddenly the kids who had gone through college in the 80s were terrible wastes of space who were just stealing our precious oxygen and water while not contributing to society enough.  A "Slacker Generation" if you will.

Why does this keep happening? Well a quick look at the unemployment rate for 20-25 year olds over the past few decades gives a good clue:

Yeah it turns out during the formative young adult years of those generations, there were economic issues and many of them (greater than 10%) could not find jobs.  Granted usually the reason they could not find jobs were due to the fact major economic shifts were occurring during those time periods, but hey structural economic shifts are hard to explain to the public and no one wants to read that unless you are writing for... The Economist or Financial Times.  So, what does a lazy journalist or editor do for social commentary regarding the mass unemployment of those years? Blame the stupid kids for being lazy.