This is the most technologically connected generation in modern history ... but also the least trusting.

This just barely makes any sense. Here is a generation that trusts peers enough to meet random strangers in bars on Tinder, ride in cars with strangers on Uber X and Lyft, visit strangers' apartments through Craigslist, sleep on their beds through Airbnb, and we're also the least likely to say "most people can be trusted"? Put your theories in the comment section; I don't know what to believe anymore.

This generation has record numbers of single parents ... but it also has the most negative attitudes toward single parents.

The American institution of marriage is changing as more women go to school and out-earn their partners, and as couples get married later or don't get married at all. Millennials have historically high numbers of out-of-wedlock births: 47 percent of newborns to Gen-Y women came outside of marriage, more than double the rate for older adults. But even though Millennials are twice as likely to be single parents, they're just as likely to disapprove of single parenthood. One possible explanation is that, as Richard Reeves wrote in The Atlantic, young married couples are just as conservative on the institution of marriage and child-rearing as generations before them. They're just rarer, since more of their peers aren't getting hitched.

Millennials are famously "the most diverse generation ever" ... but we don't even deserve the label.

About 43 percent of Millennials are non-white, higher than any American generation on record. But since the slim majority of newborns in America are non-white too, it's much more fair to say that Millennials are the most diverse generation of adults. We're only the most diverse generation in the country if you decide not to consider people under 14 a generation.

This is the most educated generation ever ... and the deepest in student loan debt.

This one isn't a contradiction so much as a qualifier—a reminder that this generation's achievements have already come at a cost. One third of Millennials over 25 have a four-year college degree or better, which makes us the best-educated group in the history of the country. It's a proud superlative to hold, since education tends to correlate with (if not lead to) all sorts of things like happier marriages, more fulfilling jobs, better earnings, and a better life for our children. This superlative, however, comes a price. "Two-thirds of recent bachelor’s degree recipients have outstanding student loans," Pew reports, with an average debt of about $27,000 and median debt of about $13,000.

The U.S. economy has never been bigger ... but it's never been harder to live better than our parents did.

This from Pew is a whopper: Millennials are the first generation "in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations (Gen Xers and Boomers) had at the same stage of their life cycles." In other words, the American Dream as defined as "living better than our parents did" is harder than ever to obtain for the generation at large. But reality isn't so even. Cast your eye across the country, and you'll see pockets where upward mobility is higher than anywhere in the world, but also areas where it's practically impossible for low-income kids to get ahead. This graph, from a recent Harvard paper on intergenerational mobility, gives a rough look at where it's easier to move ahead relative to your folks (lighter colors) and where it's harder (darker hues):