It seems every day we’re inundated with stories about the woes of millennials. They’re stressed with their jobs and personal lives and living under economically precarious situations with large debt loads. Blame has been attributed to such causes of social media and the modern economic system. We’re constantly asked to question what in our society needs to change to alleviate the problems of millennials.

In my opinion, speaking as millennial, we as a generation were simply the first to experience the unrealistic expectations created by our culture and amplified by social media. We live in a society that glorifies hedonistic experiences that can only be fueled by exceptional economic success. Luxuries once limited to the wealthy have become common expectations with everyone expecting yearly exotic vacations, designer clothes, and weekends at trendy clubs and restaurants. We believe that the middle-class lifestyle of homeownership and economic security — a lifestyle that people once struggled intensely to achieve — is a given and we must instead focus on economic and personal achievement beyond that.

We as millennials were told such was well within our grasp as long as we got a college degree. Of course, little attention was paid to the knowledge we acquired in college and the skillsets we developed. It was simply good enough to get the diploma. Millions of hapless youth believed this lie and took on heavy debt to fund their college education. Unfortunately, many pursued low-economic-value degrees and further failed to pursue their education with the vigor and intensity necessary to develop an economically-valuable skill set. Instead, they simply spent years of their youth drifting through college while racking up debt.

Their economic woes were exacerbated by college administrators that focused less on the value of their education and more on the marketing of their “college experience”. Untold sums of money were spent on such luxuries as gourmet dining, lush dorms, and recreational facilities to entice students. This money, of course, came from massive increases in college tuition, which thereby increased the level of debt that students had to shoulder to complete their “college experience.”

Millennials discovered the myth of college diploma value as they entered the workforce. They found that employers were more focused on skill sets and ability to deliver economic value. Millennials who had failed to develop employable skills in college found themselves competing for low-economic value work and were dismayed to discover how little value their expensive “college experience” provided.

This left millions of millennials in the unfortunate economic position of having a high debt load and low income. Combined with their previous unrealistic economic expectations that our culture had given them led many to a state of cognitive dissonance. Their rich economic expectations were simply incompatible with their lack of economically valuable skills and worse they were tied to large college loans. It’s not surprising that millennials are stressed and unhappy with their situation.

We can only hope that future generations will learn from the mistakes of millennials. Like millions of smokers before them, they may, unfortunately, serve primarily as a warning sign about what to avoid. Hopefully the “college degree myth” will die and instead future generations will focus on developing economically valuable skills, possibly even by avoiding college and instead attending vocational schools.

Further, hopefully, our culture will adapt to give young people more realistic goals about what they can achieve financially so that expectations are appropriate. This will likely entail changes to how we consume media, particularly social media so that we’re all given a more realistic view of how people like ourselves can live.