Whatever future civilization picks over the ruins of our own will find a curious ritual preserved in the archaeological record of the late 2010s — an outlet, they may suspect, for the anxieties of a society in free-fall. First comes a report revealing that young people have abandoned and destroyed yet another cornerstone of postwar American life, like country clubs or breakfast cereal or mayonnaise. Then young people read the report, for all the same reasons you pick at a scab, and completely lose their minds.

This future archaeologist might note how apt it was that these young people were given such a portentous, end-of-days name: millennials. At this point, “millennials” stand accused of “killing” so many industries that there is a whole meta-genre of articles mocking the cliché: Mashable’s “R.I.P.: Here Are 70 Things Millennials Have Killed,” BuzzFeed’s “Here Are 28 Things Millennials Are Accused of Killing in Cold Blood,” Broadly’s “I Did All the Things Millennials Are Accused of Killing.” Business Insider keeps something like an authoritative list of the body count, which includes casual-dining chains, golf, “breastaurants” like Hooters, diamonds, starter homes, homeownership in general, designer handbags and banks.

Millennials, clearly, are not living the lives of easy abundance bestowed on generations past — no fighting over the check at Outback Steakhouse, no need (or budget) for a station wagon. What young people seem to find galling is the implication that they’ve had any choice in this. Structural shifts in the economy — stagnant wages, the skyrocketing cost of housing, colossal student debt — have put millennials on the path to a lower quality of life than their parents. So when some Australian guy claims that the reason they can’t buy homes is that they spend too much on avocado toast, as the millionaire developer Tim Gurner did last year, it’s easy to see why young people would explode.

But these claims to abject poverty might actually miss the point. Taken as a whole, millennials do wield an incredible amount of economic and cultural power. This is why they terrify moribund industries, and why those industries are so desperate to fit themselves into young people’s curious lifestyles. (It’s hard to remember, but just a few years ago you could not yet use your phone to hire a stranger to go to Chipotle for you and bring your burrito bowl to your door, all so you can watch a cartoon about a depressed horse without interruption.) By virtue of their sheer numbers, millennials are revealing that much of the American way of life is no more permanent than the baby boomers who codified it. If you were one of those geriatric businesses, you would rightly see millennials as an existential threat — even as they continued to see themselves as powerless, completely battered by the world their elders built for them. At the heart of every online dust-up about millennials is a possibly unanswerable question: To what extent does a generation shape history, and to what extent is it shaped by history?