Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico.

One summer in college, I found myself sharing a drink with a high school classmate named Dan, and Dan found himself sharing with me the most valuable fruits of his higher education: a method for picking up women in bars. As Dan explained it to me, he would approach the lucky lady, take her hand and offer to read her palm. Then he’d serve up a steaming pile of truisms: “You’re tough on the outside but when people get to know you you’ve got a heart of gold.” And “You’re known as a party girl, but sometimes you love nothing more than a quiet night at home.” And whatever other pabulum conjured the illusion that he knew them—like, really knew them. Dan’s approach might have been objectionable, but he claimed it was also foolproof (at least in Florida).

I haven’t run into Dan in a few years, but I’d like to think he’s out there somewhere writing about millennials. If he isn’t, the people who are penning nostrums about us—the “kids” born, roughly speaking, between 1980 and 2000—appear to be borrowing heavily from his playbook. When it comes to the subject of my generation, it’s as if America’s editors and pontificators have tacitly agreed to throw all standards of evidence, clarity and cohesion out the window. Collectively, they’ve produced a body of work that resembles nothing so much as a barroom palm-reading in Tampa: a mass of mutually contradictory generalizations that you just might confuse for genuine insight—at least if you’ve been drinking. For anyone seeking to understand the evolution of American demographics and values, that’s a problem. For most of the boomers and Gen Xers holding forth on kids these days, I suspect it’s beside the point. Either way, it’s a sorry sight to behold.


The problem, it turns out, goes back to the start. Neil Howe and the late William Strauss coined the term “millennials” in 1987. They made clear they had big plans for us in their 1991 book Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, a sort of great national palm reading ( Publishers Weekly called it, perhaps generously, “as woolly as a newspaper horoscope”). The book lays out a theory of history—continuously refined over the years in sequels like The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy—based on repeating generational archetypes. Each cohort is defined by a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling or a Crisis, and becomes a Prophet, Nomad, Hero or Artist generation. There are “saecula” and “turnings” and all the other hallmarks of good historical scholarship.

Non-millennials say we're self-centered, but they're the ones that seem to be obsessed with talking about us.

It should surprise no one that Strauss and Howe met in Washington (Strauss was a Senate staffer and co-founder of the Capitol Steps, a troupe of singing congressional staffers turned political satirists), and that politicians loved their vague, grandiose narrative of American history. Then-Senator Al Gore, a Harvard classmate of Strauss’s, sent Generations to every member of Congress when it came out. The pair also founded a consultancy, LifeCourse Associates, to peddle their theories about generations and their collective personalities to institutional clients. Based on their theories of repeating cycles in American history, Strauss and Howe predicted that millennials would become a “hero” generation like their grandparents’ (the “Greatest”) by confronting some great crisis and ushering in a new American golden age. We’ll have to wait to find out whether that comes to pass. In the meantime, if you want to learn more, I promise to beat any price that LifeCourse Associates quotes you for millennial insights.

Strauss and Howe might have set a sorry standard of rigor for all those who have followed in their footsteps, but at least they were fans of us. Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory and person you should avoid at cocktail parties, is not. His book, The Dumbest Generation, makes the predictable case that millennials, with their texting and their Facebook and their total disregard for the English Canon, represent a new low point for Western civilization. Harold Bloom called the book “urgent.” Never mind the rise of #LongForm on our watch. Never mind that thanks to the Flynn Effect, the well-documented improvement in average IQ scores over more than a century of testing, we’re more likely the smartest generation, and we’re certainly the best educated.

And never mind that members of every generation have had Bauerleins to tell them they were bringing Western civilization to new lows. “Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’,” wrote the Roman poet Horace in 23 BC. “We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.” Meanwhile, literacy, scientific knowledge and artistic output continue to stubbornly achieve new highs. But because millennials on laptops find videos of cats more interesting than pedantic lecturing, there must be something wrong with us.

This isn’t to say that Strauss, Howe, Brauerlein and the rest don’t bother to muster evidence. In the 2009 film In The Loop—a brilliant British satire of the fraught relationship between reality and bureaucracy in Bush-era Washington—an assistant secretary of state drops this shiny pearl of Rumsfeldian wisdom: “In the land of truth, the man with one fact is king.” Well, in the land of millennial quackery (which you can find at the intersection of political punditry and market research), it’s the man with one study finding who’s king. And boy do these guys have studies, scientific studies, full of hard data.

Young people “are more materialistic and less interested in working hard than the baby boomers were in their teens,” CNBC reports, citing one study. “ Millennials are Selfish and Entitled” blares one Time headline, taking as its evidence a Reason-Rupe poll that finds large majorities of Americans think millennials are selfish and entitled. We’re also “more likely to ditch work friends for the sake of a promotion” Time reports, on the strength of a survey conducted by … LinkedIn. We may be “more likely to take credit for others’ work,” warns NBC News, before consoling readers with a brand strategist’s observation that “young American adults may have finally learned humility from the current economic climate.” Yes, there’s nothing like having our elders bring about economic calamity to finally teach us a little humility.

Findings and expert opinions like these might threaten to lower our inflated self-esteem, until we find that studies and experts have also reached all of the opposite conclusions. “In the future, most Americans, taking their cue from Millennials, will demonstrate a greater desire to advance the welfare of the group and be less concerned with individual success,” predicts one Brookings white paper. A majority of Americans view millennials as “hard-working,” according to the same Rupe-Reason poll that found they view us as entitled and selfish. As for our apathetic materialism? “64% of Millennials would rather make $40,000 per year at a job they love than $100,000 a year at a job they think is boring,” according to a study cited by the Wall Street Journal. In sum, when it comes to our approach to work, “There’s no evidence millennials are different,” as one refreshingly honest expert told the New York Times in May. “They’re just younger.”

At least Strauss-Howe and Braurlein use their research findings and survey results to weave a consistent narrative. Much of the rest of millennial divining consists of the single study finding that contradicts other single study findings (see above) or the grand summation of findings and anecdotes that does little more than trip over its own feet.

Last year’s Time cover story by Joel Stein, “The Me Me Me Generation,” is a prime example of the latter. It starts with a data dump of inconsistent findings, presented as a coherent picture of general generational crappiness. In the space of one muddled paragraph, Stein bemoans the fact that too many millennials believe they should regularly receive promotions regardless of job performance and that too few millennials desire a job with greater responsibility, without stopping to contend with the blaring contradiction between those two characterizations. “They are the most threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution,” Stein goes on to tell us by way of justifying a 4,000-word cover story. That’s right, we are the most exciting generation since … our parent’s generation. “They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group,” Stein complains, without bothering to cite any evidence whatsoever. (In reality, youth voter turnout bottomed out in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, when the youth voters were Stein and his Gen X cohort.)

The most consistent thrust in Stein’s story is that we are narcissistic, an assertion he backs up with original reporting by quoting a narcissistic-sounding reality show casting director. We then learn the guy is 41, the exact same age as Stein was when the piece was published, “but he has clearly spent a lot of time around millennials.” Next.

Even the Gray Lady, which usually only loses its mind for Brooklyn, goes all soft in the brain when it comes to millennials. It’s not even clear what its latest stab—“ Generation Nice,” on the front page of a Sunday Styles section in August—is about. It’s essentially a long string of anecdotes, some of which are indeed about millennials being nice (“Humans of New York” is nicer than Gawker, it reveals), but many of which are about other things. It tells us that millennials are “not an entitled generation but a complex and introspective one.” Later, it says of Lebron James, “In common with other millennials, he has made social media, with its many opportunities for ‘oversharing’ self-display, a means of communication that pushes outward, instead of turning inward.” I guess we’re over-sharing, outward-pushing introverts? In an editor’s note at the bottom, we learn that “an article last Sunday about the millennial generation’s civic-mindedness included several errors.” So the piece was about civic-mindedness, at least until all the erroneous stats about civic-mindedness had to be taken out. Turns out millennials aren’t actually signing up for the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps in droves.

It’s no wonder that “millennials aren’t listening to you,” as the cover of the libertarian Reason magazine’s October issue, out in August, proclaims. Reason’s master take on millennial politics starts with an extended discourse on the 2013 Grammy Awards and the pop anthem “We Are Young,” in which the article’s authors Nick Gillespie, 51, and Emily Ekins, 30-ish, find the real crux of what sets millennials apart:

“We Are Young” is a smart variation on that enduring theme of pop music, the booty call. “We are young,” croons the singer to a lost or near-lost love, “So let's set the world on fire/We can burn brighter/than the sun.” But then comes the generational twist: After vaguely alluding to “scarring” his lover through some unspecified failure, the protagonist sings: “If by the time the bar closes/And you feel like falling down/I'll carry you home./I know that I’m not/All that you got.”

What matter of musical strangeness is this, actually acknowledging that your drunken, staggering bedmate could do better than you? “We Are Young” is a song in which the singer is a decent human being and penitent lover, an emotional designated driver rather than the standard-issue letch that has dominated the charts from your grandparents’ “Baby It’s Cold Outside” to your parents’ “Under My Thumb” to the entire hair-metal genre of the ‘80s.

Clearly these people haven’t met Dan. Nor, apparently, have they listened to the Beatles’ “I’m a Loser” (“She was a girl in a million, my friend/I should have known she would win in the end”) or Radiohead’s “Creep” (“I wish I was special/You’re so fucking special”), proof, in case you needed it, that people born before 1980 could be self-deprecating in song. Cherry-picking pop song lyrics might not be the standard of evidence you’d expect from a magazine called Reason (as I write this, the number two song in America features the lyrics “I’m bringing booty back/Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that,” though I haven’t yet decided what that means for Democrats’ chances of keeping the Senate), but then much of the article belongs in Wishful Thinking.

It goes on: “The long-term, slow-moving failures of nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq and of massive stimulus spending (first under Bush in 2008, then Obama in 2009 and 2010) cast a long shadow over the efficacy of broad-based government intervention into foreign and domestic affairs,” painting a picture of the millennial worldview. Only a publication funded by Charles Koch would have the audacity to slip the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as sources of millennial disillusionment. “What will happen in 2016,” it asks, “if the GOP fields a candidate who is younger than the Democratic nominee, and perhaps even more aligned with millennials’ civil libertarian concerns?” practically salivating at the prospect of a Rand Paul-Hillary Clinton matchup.

Nodding to the generational strife of the 1960s, Gillespie and Ekins claim, for some reason, that today “an equally massive generation gap is at work, this time with boomers playing the role of angry, uncomprehending parents who rarely miss an opportunity to hector or grossly miscomprehend their children.” Really, the same baby boomers who launched a thousand trend stories about being best friends with their kids? All I know is that my friends’ moms are still liking their photos on Facebook. Reason does offer up a tour of its polling of millennial political views and makes a compelling case that neither Democrats nor Republicans are well positioned to turn young peoples’ sensibilities into enduring brand loyalty. But its millennial issue also includes a long feature trumpeting the “Rise of the Hipster Capitalist,” which sounds like the only thing more insufferable than a poor hipster, so you’re probably better off reading their polling top lines and then navigating over to Pew’s research.

To be fair, many of these pieces do offer some useful nuggets—you just to have to read them like you’re sifting for gold in a river of sludge. There is some value in understanding how the shared experiences of different age cohorts shape intergenerational dynamics and the social fabric of their times. Teenagers with cell phones and social media accounts are annoying (but so are parents with cell phones and social media accounts). Every politician and consultant over 40 should be forced to read Reason’s passages on communicating with people who don’t remember the Cold War: It is insane to tell us that politics boils down to a choice between Ronald Reagan’s version of American capitalism and Soviet-style communism.

But it’s hard to tease out useful generalizations about a diverse group of 80 million people, and much easier to shoot from the hip while cherry-picking the findings of PR-hungry market research firms. After all, it doesn’t seem to matter what you serve up, if you put “millennial” in the title, people will keep on clicking. So perhaps it’s not surprising that people over 40 have badly failed to decode America’s youth. Much like Dan, older pundits don’t really want to understand us anyways; they want to tell us who we are, and receive validation in return—in the form of votes, or book sales or acknowledgement of their moral superiority. Does this make them feel better about the world and where it’s headed?

I’ll refrain from holding forth on what older Americans do need to understand to, like, really know us, but I will say this much: Gen Xers and baby boomers better hope we’re smart and civic-minded and hard-working, because we’re going to be in charge sooner or later, and they’re creating a hell of a mess for us.