You’ve probably heard by now, but millennials are a generation of entitled whiners who don’t understand that it’s historically been hard for every generation to make a living and there’s nothing special about millennials’ struggles and just because past generations didn’t have to deal with crippling, impossible to get rid of student loan debts, and didn’t live in a time with intractable wage stagnation and hiring freezes and stratospheric housing costs, doesn’t mean that there’s a single damn thing for millennials to complain about. God, can’t they just suck it up and move on with their lives? And if they can’t move on with their lives independently, can’t they just suck it up and move back in with their parents and then they can save money and then everything will be fine and the world is really not a bad place if you’re not a fucking whiny loser millennial.

[jump]

Well, so, that is the general tone of most pieces written about the financial and career struggles of the millennials, like in this horrible, patronizing article, titled “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy,” which employs fucking stick figures to demonstrate what the problem is with young people today. But perhaps the most tone-deaf, condescending advice that seems to be given to millennials who are struggling is that they move back in with their parents, spend a couple of years saving money, and then go back out into the world on their own. The latest place I read this problematic advice was in an exceptionally patronizing article by Megan McArdle called, “Hey Millennials, You Got a Raw Deal, Get Over It.” In the piece, McArdle advises millennials, to “let go” of the “ideas about what [they]’re entitled to.” She uses herself as an example of someone from an earlier generation who had faced a difficult hiring climate, but managed to survive anyway through a mix of ingenuity and, uh, pluckiness, and, oh yeah! moving back in with her parents.

McArdle, who grew up in Manhattan which is where her parents still reside, references another article she wrote for the benefit of millennials, “13 Tips for Jobless Grads on Surviving the Basement Years,” where she said, “Enjoy your time back with your parents. No, seriously. I moved back in with my parents when I was 29, and stayed there for three years. This is exactly as embarrassing as it sounds. But I also really enjoyed the conversations I struck up with my dad, or spending Saturday afternoons baking with my mom. Eventually, I promise, you will move out and get your own apartment and marry and all those other adult things. ” Well! Doesn’t that sound nice. I mean, sure it might be embarrassing to move back in with your parents, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, millennials. Stop your whining.

Except, of course, this is totally bullshit advice. What I hate most about this advice is that it’s pretending to be coming down hard on overly privileged millennials and yet it is itself coming from a place of unbelievable privilege. Telling millennials to move back home with their folks is shitty advice because it presupposes that this is even an option at all. Not everyone has a parental home that they are able to go back to, for reasons that range from financial to emotional. Some people have bad relationships with their families. Some people have parents who wouldn’t have an extra room for them. And, newsflash, Megan McArdle, some people don’t have parents at all. But let’s say you do have parents who can let you move back in? Well, not everyone’s parents live in New York City where, tough as it is, there’s at least a viable job market. What if your parents live in a rural area where you wouldn’t be able to find a job where you could earn enough money to hope to re-enter the work force? What then?

I think the thing about these “Advice to Millennials” articles that drives me absolutely insane is that they all operate under the assumption that things will be ok. Maybe you will have to settle for less, maybe you’ll have to spend some awkward time in your parents’ basement, but things will be ok. Well, things aren’t ok for a lot of people. Things aren’t ok for people who have tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debts with no hopes of paying them and paying rent and no one to turn to for help. This is part of the problem of only having privileged people like McArdle in a position where their voices and experiences are the only ones that are heard. McArdle can’t speak for the majority of young people in this country, and yet she tries to give advice to a segment of the population that she can’t relate to at all. So she dismisses them as whiners. And it’s not just media people, obviously. Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to slash the federal food stamp budget by $4 billion dollars. These lawmakers don’t know what it is to feel terror that you can’t feed your children, dread that your debit card will be declined when you go to buy cereal. Instead they feel that everyone is overly entitled to the basic human needs and should stop agitating for society to take care of its own, and just crawl back to their parents, I guess. Which, that’s a nice idea, if of course, our parents weren’t similarly struggling. Because, let’s face it, the kinds of people who usually have parents whose homes they can return to? They’re already the people who are probably going to be just fine anyway. It’s the people who don’t have private safety nets that need public support. And yet when they ask for it? They’re called whiners and losers and told to move back home. When did life become a nightmarish, Ayn Rand reality? I don’t know exactly, but here we are.

Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen