A little over a decade ago, I had a member of the baby boomer generation sit me down and tell me the world didn’t owe me a living and that I should stop being such a whiny, entitled crybaby.

Unsurprisingly, at the time I didn’t appreciate it and, equally unsurprisingly, I later realised he was right.

So, as a member of Generation X, I now feel it’s time to pass the baton on. Millennials, Generation Y: many of you are now in your 30s and it’s time to grow up and stop whining.

This hasn’t come entirely out of the blue. Rather it was “triggered” (to use a very millennial word) by reading a blog by a woman in her early 30s. She was talking about wanting children and how she didn’t feel financially secure enough and couldn’t buy a house.

Regular readers of this column will know that generally I have a great deal of sympathy for those priced out of the housing market and indeed, in the first few paragraphs, I felt pretty sorry for her.

But as I read on my sympathy started to ebb. The woman, you see, wanted to be an author of hipsterish Brooklynite novels. Her bloke wanted to be a musician or an artist or something.

She kept contrasting her life situation with her parents’ relative good fortune. And pretty soon, I was thinking, “The reason you don’t have everything your parents did is because you and Mr Blogger want to be artistes whereas your dad was probably a middle manager at IBM.”

University students tend to stand in front of - rather than behind - the bar Credit: Fresh Meat

Of course, we’ve all been here. My Generation-X contemporaries thought for a while that we could make a living telling each other stories of groovy modern alienation and ennui. In the end, it turned out only Douglas Coupland could do this. Personally, I thought I could run photography galleries.

This was a really cool lifestyle (I met a lot of celebrities) but it was a truly terrible job (I earned less than a trainee accountant). So, eventually, most of us grew up, stopped feeling sorry for ourselves and found proper jobs. We found fulfilment via screaming children, overpriced exotic holidays and new Farrow & Ball colours. We made our peace with the man and realised that, if you substitute Vietnam for Italy, we’re basically OurParents2.0.

The boomers worked hard to enjoy their time Credit: BBC

Millennials are now at peak moan. Yes, we've been here before - but I do think that millennials are moaning louder and longer than Gen X or the boomers.

Whether it’s jobs, property, or just the sheer towering unfairness of the world, millennial complainants are everywhere, ready to give you a rundown of everything their generation has been stiffed on. In the way that we once had The Greatest Generation, we now have The Whiniest Generation.

But really, the only place they’ve been short-changed compared to us Xers or even the Boomers is property. And even that isn’t nearly as black and white as they’d like to think it is.

OK, let’s start with jobs. Many millennials are weirdly perfectionist about work in a way that we Gen-Xers just don’t get. There’s a role at my clubs which involves booking bands. If you want to get into the music industry it’s a great job. You can do it straight from university and it’s a proper position with a salary, not an internship.

You get to deal with people in music every single day. And yet, I’ve seen people leave it time and time again. It’s not like they have to speak to me on a day to day basis and deal with my inconsistency as a boss, so what gives?

They’ll usually say that it’s not what they expected. But what they did expect? And then you realise: they expected it to be like Almost Famous and they’re really pissed off when it isn’t. They expected the job to be some fabulous groovy extension of their Shoreditchy lifestyle, but actually it’s work.

To many millennials, this seems to come as a genuine surprise. It shouldn’t: the clue is in the name. This isn’t just my experience either: there’s plenty of research that suggests millennials think that jobs should suit them, rather than the businesses that pay their salary. One such study from the university of New Hampshire found “these employees have unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback.”

I sometimes wonder if the millennial belief that your job has to be some great passion or calling or lifestyle accessory comes from never having known a real recession. Yes, I appreciate we are still living with the affects of the global financial crisis but I’m talking about a recession with proper, massive unemployment. The kind of recession that made you glad to have any job at all, like the one my generation graduated into, which came hard on the heels of an even tougher one.

We Xers may be associated with slacking but we’re actually pretty tolerant of non-dream jobs. Working in Waterstones for two years while dreaming of a graduate position at Unilever will do that to you.

Anyway, let’s move on. Property. The big one, if you live in London or the South East. Yes, I agree that the property market sucks for you. But while those of us born before 1975 had it pretty good, we didn’t have it quite as good as you think.

When you look at that older friend who has a four-storey townhouse in East London or a loft in Hoxton that they bought for peanuts in 1995, what you’re forgetting is that they had to live there between 1995 and 2005. And my God, sometimes these were pretty horrible places to live.

My generation tend to trot out war stories about living in rough neighbourhoods in the 90s with a dash of bravado, but often it really wasn’t very nice at all.

"The modern equivalent of picking up a loft in Old Street circa 1996 would probably be going to buy a big house in some run-down part of Manchester or Hastings" Alex Proud

Quite a few of them couldn’t take it. I have friends who got in too early in the gentrification cycle and had to move out again. The reasons? Little things like gangland executions a few doors down (trendy Hoxton); having your car burnt when you complained about the noise (hip Brixton); being burgled multiple times while you slept (groovy Clapton); or just deciding that a rape in your street doesn’t have much cachet (cool Bethnal Green). As someone said to me the other day, “Yes, this house cost peanuts in 1997, but for years you had to take a cab to the train station, which is a three minute walk away.” (newly fashionable Lewisham)

These areas were a far and very bleak cry from the spruced-up adult playgrounds that you see today and the people who moved in back then were real pioneers.

They didn’t protest against Tescos opening - they prayed for them. The modern equivalent of picking up a loft in Old Street circa 1996 would probably be going to buy a big house in some run-down part of Manchester or Hastings. And I don’t see many of you queuing up to do that.

What about the rest? Well? It’s not just jobs and property. There’s plenty of lifestyle whining too. There’s your newfound PC-on-steroids which leads you to rail against free speech at universities, demand safe spaces and airbrush the parts of history that upset you.

I’m afraid us oldsters just don’t get this. We had exactly the same history as you and I don’t think it ever occurred to us that walking past a statue of someone who’d been dead for hundreds of years created a threatening atmosphere. History’s full of bad stuff: stop moaning, get over it and be glad you’re not a peasant in 1400 or a soldier in 1915. Or, for that matter, a Syrian today.

Then there’s the inability to take criticism that has led my fellow X-er, Bret Easton Ellis to brand you “Generation Wuss.” Ellis’s theory is that, even more than our generation, Gen Y have been coddled and showered in praise and given stars for just showing up. “What we have is a generation who are super-confident and super-positive about things, but when the least bit of darkness enters their lives, they’re paralysed,” he told Vice.

I’m with Ellis here. I used to think many of my contemporaries were spoiled, but millennials seem to have elevated First World Problems to an art form. And yes, I do think they’ve been wrapped in cotton wool in a way previous generations weren’t.

We grew up in the 80s which were kind of horrible. There was a sense of class hatred, a sense of decline and the UK felt like a failed country. The only places that recapture that feeling these days are the bits of Eastern Europe that still haven’t got over communism.

"The second you let go of the idea of having a perfect job or a loft in Shoreditch or the idea that the oppressive statue at uni is ruining your safe space, you can start living" Alex Proud

Ellis notes that he struggles to process being bullied online. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but I can tell you that being sent away to boarding school and bullied in real life is probably worse. And doubly so when all the adults around you think getting a good kicking is character-building.

On a more positive note, look at all the great stuff you have. I loved the 90s, but you found them insufferably boring. The internet barely existed. When we went travelling we took pictures using film and kept notes in diaries. We spent long stretches of time alone with our thoughts, unrelieved by tweets or posts.

Perhaps the reason we spent so much time in the pub (drinking filthy mass-produced lager, not craft ale) was because there was no Netflix. Burgers were only ever dirty in a literal sense. There was no coffee culture. No Amazon. Maps not apps... Honestly, you’d think it was like living in boozy version of the Third World.

Anyway, as I say, I didn’t thank my boomer friend when he gave me talk, but in the long term, I know he was right. And the main reason he was right is actually a really positive one. This is because the second you let go of the idea of having a perfect job or a loft in Shoreditch or the idea that the oppressive statue at uni is ruining your safe space, you can start living.

You quickly realise that you can be happy, despite not having everything you want. In fact, you realise that learning to put up with imperfections is what makes you happy.

I’m sure that in ten or 15 years time some of you will be having these thoughts about Generation Z. But that’s the future.

This is now. And right now, you need to toughen up, grow up and stop being Generation Whine. You’ll be a lot happier for it.