Dear Stefanie,

Like many others who trawl the Internet, I read your Medium post about Talia Jane, the now infamous Yelp employee who penned an open letter to Jeremy Stoppelman demanding a pay raise. I’m a fellow Millennial whose story holds some parallels to your own. I too found myself unemployed in the post-recession economy, I worked various odd jobs to make ends meet, and I’m now a freelance writer. Both of us are Millennial success stories, and we understand the importance of hard work, determination, and luck.

The way I see it, you and I are exceptionally lucky. We both have parents who have allowed us to live at home, rent-free, at one time or another. When you were down and out in the depths of the recession, a family friend hooked you up with a bar job that allowed you to pay your bills while blogging and eventually getting an agent. When I was toiling away in a succession of hourly gigs, struggling to sell a story to magazine, an editor I knew gave me a break and published a first-person travel essay of mine, which proved instrumental to getting my editorial career off the ground.

Talia Jane is lucky too. Or at least, she appears to be, working for one of the most famous tech companies in the Bay Area. I suppose that’s what made it easy for you to tear apart her long letter of grievances: the presumption that because Jane works at Yelp, her grievances are the result of poor financial planning and a deficit of personal responsibility. I‘ll admit, as someone who has never been employed by a corporation as famous and illustrious as Yelp, a small part of me was inclined to share your disdain. I agree with your assertion that living alone in San Francisco, right now, is not a realistic option for the average entry-level worker in any industry. If Talia Jane does, in fact, live alone — something that remains unclear in her original letter — finding roommates would be a useful thing to do in the short-term future.

However…

Jane’s letter, for all its relative privilege, reflects documented economic issues that continue to hold millions of Millennials back from starting their lives. One of the most significant issues here is stagnant wages that are woefully insufficient for the escalating cost of living in cities that offer Millennials the broadest job markets. When one considers this, it doesn’t seem remotely unreasonable for someone in Jane’s position to ask her boss for a higher wage that’s in line with the exorbitant expenses of San Francisco, especially since Jane also cites the fiscal struggles of several of her coworkers. This is far from an isolated problem.

There’s a lot of anger in your letter to Talia Jane. Hell, there’s a lot of anger in America right now about everything from jobs to immigration to the existence of Kanye West. But I have to ask, Stefanie, when it comes to the issue of Talia Jane, what’s the bigger outrage here?

A somewhat privileged young woman asking her boss for more money?

Or an economy in which millions of Americans — even those working at successful corporations like Yelp — are increasingly underpaid?

If the online reaction to your letter is any evidence, most people are angrier about Talia Jane’s audacity to publish her letter to the Yelp CEO. But what I find disturbing about this mob response is that it contains the same sentiment I hear expressed whenever any underpaid people — say, your former colleagues in the food and beverage service industry — publicly ask their employers for better wages. Almost every time this happens, those demands are decried as gestures of entitlement, and the workers who make these demands are then derided as unskilled losers who don’t deserve a raise because they misunderstand the meaning of hard work.

I’m sure you’re well aware of the persisting notion that Millennials, like food service workers, are also a bunch of entitled crybabies who don’t know the meaning of hard work. Obviously, that’s nonsense. Your success story dispels the myth of the Millennial layabout, as does mine. When I began my freelance writing career, I bounced around New England from one cheap sublet to another and supplemented my income with odd jobs that would make Mitt Romney’s palms sweat. Do you want to know what one of them involved? Shoveling shit! That’s right: putting on a hazmat suit, grabbing a steel rake, and stirring the fecal contents of a Clivus composting toilet system. That I managed to ride this wave of undignified labor and occasional writing gigs to a career as a full-time scribe is a testament to my lack of laziness or entitlement, just as your journey from bartending to screenwriting displays your work ethic and willingness to make sacrifices.

But here’s the thing, Stefanie. When I look back at the worst chapters of my career — the shit-raking, the drafty apartments, the monthly panic attacks over whether or not I’d be able to pay my rent — I wouldn’t wish them upon anyone. Clearly, you’re more than happy to take Talia James to the woodshed for trying to improve her situation at Yelp and thereby avoid these indignities, but I say, good for her! So what if she hasn’t “suffered” in the same ways that you or I have? A young person doesn’t have to suffer to learn the value of a strong work ethic or the importance of standing up for oneself and one’s coworkers. Some of the brightest, most compassionate, humble, and enterprising Millennials I know come from far cushier backgrounds than I did. Likewise, I’m sure that plenty of the Millennial-aged men and women who are currently bagging burgers at Wendy’s would kick my ass if I ever found myself competing against them on an episode of Shark Tank. You and I both know that there are countless exceptions to the narrative that Millennials are spoiled and ungrateful brats.

And yet, that’s the narrative that your letter to Talia James propagates.

Suppose in a week or two, another letter were to go viral on Medium. Let’s say this one is written by a 25 year-old Haitian woman working as a cafeteria attendant on the Facebook campus. (This hypothetical example is inspired from real data on diversity in the tech industry, and it’s also a nod to the opening paragraph of your letter.) We’ll assume that this young Haitian woman doesn’t have the option of moving in with her parents to save money, as you did, and that she commutes to work from a cheaper neighborhood, far beyond the splendor of Menlo Park. If this woman wrote a desperate letter to Mark Zuckerbeg, citing her fiscal tribulations and demanding a raise, how do you think the people who celebrated your letter to Talia James might react? The logical response would be for those readers to embrace this new letter and rally behind its considerably less-privileged writer. But realistically, I think your new fans would callously dismiss the author’s struggles as more Millennial drivel, worthy of the waste bin.

Do you see what happens whenever someone breathes new life into the myth of the insufferable, entitled Millennial? That myth erases the experiences of hard-working Millennials who have endured modest misfortune as you and I have, or have suffered in ways that neither of us can comprehend. When that myth is used to deflect attention and anger from the economic trends that are crushing countless young adults, it hampers the efforts of Millennials who are on front lines of the wealth gap crisis, fighting for living wages that are commensurate with the cost of living in America. Letters like the one you wrote to Talia Jane inspire nothing but resentment and self-righteousness. At a time when so many Americans — especially our Millennial brethren — are down on their luck, taking their lives, and even attacking others whom they perceive to be the cause of their misery, I can’t imagine two worse sentiments to promote.

Your letter made me angry. But the last thing I want to do is close this letter on an angrier note that discourages further dialogue, so how about this? The next time you’re in Boston, send me a Tweet and I’ll buy you a beer at the Yard House. We can invite friends and get a good, rowdy debate going. It could be fun, and fruitful. Maybe Talia Jane could even join us on Skype!

You might laugh, but I’m serious. Let’s get out of our respective foxholes and talk. If nothing else, this would demonstrate that Millennials of mixed persuasions are capable of coming together and working towards something substantive, like a real conversation about privilege and enterprise.

I’d like to see that happen. Within this lifetime.

Sincerely,

Miles Howard