23 Apr 2017

Mum, Dad, I have something to tell you.

You might have noticed that your child is part of the millennial generation. You know the one; we’re deemed to be politically apathetic, a group of avo-eating whingers with our eyes glued to our screens and our pants around our ankles. We’re meant to be socially inept and morally loose–totally unprepared for the ‘real world’ because we’re too busy hooking up and lazing around home.

Well, we are sick of copping criticism from people who don’t know how to use emojis or understand what a meme is. I’m here to tell you that the world has changed, and we are changing with it.

We are surviving in a school system that is a never-ending series of tests and examinations. We spend thirteen years of our lives clawing our way to the finish line, the whole time trying to scrape together enough marks to beat the person who grew up beside us. We are pitted against each other in a Hunger Games like arena that is the school yard, so it’s no wonder that our mental health suffers.

Stats show that Aussie students are super stressed. Exhaustion equates to success and we use our missed hours of sleep as badges of how important we are. We are being squeezed through a system that teaches us to see ourselves in numbers and percentages; our value is defined by how well we rank.

And then what? Once upon a time we could leave school, pick up a trade and settle into a stable job. Or we could go onto uni, graduate, degree in hand, and land ourselves a linear career path and a job we could probably stay in for most of our life. Today? We enter into an ever shrinking and competitive job market where stability is a foreign term and a secure job is something of the past. Once, our degrees would put us ahead, but today all they guarantee is a mountain of debt that will follow us around until we can land a full time job that might actually pay us more than peanuts (which will take approx. 4.7 years, if you were wondering).

Forget settling down and buying a home, we have been pretty much locked and bolted out of the housing market. We’re working casual jobs and side hustles with hours all over the place just to scrape in a bit of cash to cover the hundreds of hours we spend completing unpaid work. Entry level jobs demand experience and so we put our heads down and rack up the hours in the form of unpaid internships and placements in the hope that we can get a foot in the door. We are trying to figure out what we actually want to do in a landscape where more and more jobs are becoming redundant and we have to rapidly adapt to constant changes.

Our generation cops a lot of heat, but before you nod along to a rant about millennials from someone whose voice is aged from years of destroying the economy and denying climate change, think about that fact that we are looking to be the first generation worse off than our parents.

So please, just shut up, and let us enjoy our Netflix binges and our Hannah Baker memes. Leave us alone when we manage to scrape together enough cash to see some other part of the world and forget about the impossible reality of the housing market. Let us figure out the mess you’ll leave behind while we munch on our smashed avo on toast and take a million selfies in peace.