In 2013, Time magazine published an article entitled “Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation,” which bemoaned millennials’ inability to live up to the gumption and sturdiness of baby boomers or the entrepreneurial spirit of Generation X. It had a laundry list of criticisms, but the one that stood out was that millennials were “stunted, having prolonged a life stage between teenager and adult.”

While the article ultimately shifted its tone toward optimistic ambiguity, it fanned the flames of an already rising media trend: bashing millennials for perceived reliance on technology and social media, inability to sustain conflict, and hitting adult benchmarks at later ages than previous generations.

The text reads: “The Me Me Me Generation. Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.”

In other words, that line about millennials being stunted between their teenage/college years and true adulthood has stuck in cultural memory and rears its ugly head in just about every article about millennials.

Six years ago — when the youngest millennials were 15 or 16 — it was easy to dismiss these articles as so much hand-wringing about “kids these days” — enough so that there’s a tongue-in-cheek Chrome extension that autocorrects “millennials” to “kids these days.”

But articles bemoaning the “snowflake millennial generation” in their “safe spaces” on college campuses have continued, and it’s time to think critically about what exactly is being expressed by this ideology.

Any article about millennials on college campuses in the last year or two is patently ridiculous: The youngest millennials are now 22, and there’s unlikely to be many of us on college campuses outside of graduate school. In fact, the whole millennial generation now spans from age 22 to 38, with the oldest of us about to crest into our forties. It’s time to stop pretending millennial-bashing is harmless yammering about “kids these days.”

If the reality is that millennials aren’t kids, and largely haven’t been in quite a while, what’s behind all these articles? It can be summed up as class warfare by those who have wealth against those who don’t.