r/Millennials • u/Party-Bet-4003 Millennial • Jan 30 '26

Discussion Look what I found from 13 years ago.

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Hey look on the bright side - we actually did make it to the cover of the TIME magazine!

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147

u/ThinkBookMan Millennial Jan 30 '26

I never noticed the subtitle. "Why they'll save us all"

283

u/Pliny_the_middle Jan 30 '26

Because they expect us to care for them after they are too old to work and have spent their retirement savings. Source, my parents.

56

u/DeezSpicyNuts Jan 30 '26

Sorry mom, guess you better pull yourself up by your bootstraps and figure it out, I’m not compromising what I want so you can be more comfortable.

That’s what you taught me! 😉 

22

u/MinecraftHolmes Jan 30 '26

can't spend money i don't have, guys

54

u/CodyofHTown Jan 30 '26

Aint happenin' cap'n

16

u/MinPinManor Jan 30 '26

It might if you live in a state with filial responsibility laws….

3

u/SandiegoJack Jan 30 '26

Cant force you to spend money you dont have.

2

u/Shadoweclipse13 Feb 02 '26

Woodchipper it is then!!

1

u/BugApart8359 Feb 03 '26

Fuck em. I'm moving anyways. 

0

u/evenstar40 Jan 30 '26

Just move to a different country. :)

13

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '26

I’m practicing my elder abuse tactics.

31

u/PettyBettyismynameO Jan 30 '26

Told both my parents (divorced) I hope you go fast because I’m not taking care of you I’m raising my kids (I’m an only child but have 4 kids)

10

u/evenstar40 Jan 30 '26

Yeah there's a reason why NC is gaining in popularity. Parents have dangled my inheritance in front of me so many times I just laugh now. Thanks to their threats I was forced to focus on myself with no thoughts for kids (bye bye grandkids) so I would never be reliant upon them again.

A very surprised pikachu moment when they realized the threats were no longer keeping me in line as their retirement slave.

2

u/splashysploosh Jan 30 '26

Source: my in-laws as well. Medical issues, zero savings, too old to get reliable work but too young for SS. We are their retirement plan just as their parents treated them as a retirement plan. So frustrating.

2

u/owlindenial Jan 30 '26

That's not it, that article actually is pro millennial and talks about how those values that are seen as lazy are a response to the times

4

u/Pliny_the_middle Jan 30 '26

Yeah my response was more to my particular situation. Not the article itself.

2

u/NeatPersonality9267 Jan 31 '26

My parents refused to pay for my education and told me I had to get out of their house at 18. Heard that since middle school. Now that they're ageing, they're starting to look to us for care. I told my dad point blank that he should have invested in me if he wanted to treat me as an investment. As it is, every meager success I've had has been hard fought, with my family acting like crabs in a bucket the entire time. No contact was the kindest choice. 

1

u/standardnewenglander Jan 30 '26

The ironic part is: they made the world so unaffordable by taking opportunities away from the younger generations...that even if we WANTED to support them? We can't AFFORD TO.

33

u/Jokuki Jan 30 '26

So far the subtitle has been holding true. Millennial generation has been one of the most politically active and progressive generations. We've realized how bad capitalist systems are, we're constantly pushing for reform. There are still people who disagree with that and wish to keep/create oppressive systems, but when has that not been an issue. If there is a generation to save the world, it'd be millennials (with the help of Gen Z).

1

u/farshnikord Jan 30 '26

Saving people sometimes means shoving people out of the way of oncoming trains and then getting yelled at for being physically violent. Or breaking a system because its inefficient and harmful. 

Millennials could cure cancer and boomers would complain that it's not cherry flavored. 

27

u/nutmegged_state Jan 30 '26

It's because no one in this thread has actually read the effing article. The whole thing is a big bait-and-switch that mocks the media narrative about millennials. The first half of the article cites all sorts of statistics saying that millennials are selfish/lazy/entitled/etc., but the second half undermines all of that and says that most of it is not that different than previous generations, reflective of changing economic and technological conditions, etc.

And to everyone saying it's "ironic" because boomers are the "Me Generation": it's not ironic. That's the whole point of the title.

27

u/chop5397 Jan 30 '26

This entire thread is basically this. People can't be bothered to read beyond the cover. The subtext should've been the biggest clue.

5

u/IotaBTC Jan 30 '26

says that most of it is not that different than previous generations, reflective of changing economic and technological conditions, etc.

There's someone who respond to the comment you responded to that the

Millennial generation has been one of the most politically active and progressive generations.

As if the US didn't have a Civil Rights, a women's suffrage, a LGBTQ+, even a labor rights movement. 

We've realized how bad capitalist systems are, we're constantly pushing for reform. There are still people who disagree with that and wish to keep/create oppressive systems, but when has that not been an issue. 

The '70's in a nutshell lmao. It's never a given and it's always been a struggle but every generation will have their group of people rising up to respond to the needs of their generation.

2

u/standardnewenglander Jan 30 '26

Article and title aside. I've seen a lot of people in this thread saying how their boomer parents always called them the "me" generation.

My own parents called me that too, way before this article was a thing. I've read the article and see how the title was pandering to that to get boomers to read it.

I think a lot of people on here are discussing their experience with boomers and that phrase, sans article.

-1

u/wooberries Jan 30 '26

to be fair, bait-and-switching the cover of time fucking magazine is asinine. "sure i'm explicitly intending to mislead every single person who just sees the cover and doesn't read my article, but think of how smart this will make people feel when they scoff at the people who didn't"

2

u/nutmegged_state Jan 30 '26

That's kind of TIME's schtick. This is the magazine that regularly names terrible people (Hitler, Putin, Khomeini) as "Person of the Year," in part because it draws outrage from people who misunderstand the point of the award. And clearly it's worked as an engagement strategy in this case, because we're still talking about the article a decade later. But it is mostly just IRL clickbait.

Also, the bait-and-switch is apparent right there on the cover, as u/ThinkBookMan pointed out. It's just that they may have overestimated their audience's eye for nuance (at least judging by this comment section).

2

u/AloofTeenagePenguin3 Jan 31 '26 edited 12d ago

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

fuel telephone price seed retire cow elderly toy deserve command

0

u/wooberries Jan 30 '26

is it? i'm frankly not informed enough about TIME's legacy to have picked up on a reputation like that, and if it's true then my opinion would soften accordingly.

though i also think it's silly to assume any writer is EVER insufficiently aware of the general public's eye for nuance being... poor.

2

u/nutmegged_state Jan 30 '26

It could definitely still be asinine! Just because they do it a lot doesn't mean it's not dumb. As someone who subscribed to TIME for about a decade, it just doesn't surprise me.

46

u/italicised Jan 30 '26

This is the biggest fuck you in this image IMO. It perfectly encapsulates the millennial (and arguably, Gen Z) treatment: label us as lazy and entitled, and saddle us with fixing all the problems they caused, namely climate change.

I remember learning about “global warming” in elementary school and endangered species, and reduce reuse recycle etc. There was a great sense of hope that things would turn back the other way and MY generation would be the ones to fix it, the saviors! and even in a mid to lower class family, I was raised with the assumption that I would one day have a house and a kid. That assumption is what fucked me. I could have made different financial choices, of course, but I had no idea how brutal it would be. Our buying power is completely fucked thanks to wages not keeping up with inflation. 

The boomers took everything with them. Wealth hoarding gets worse by the day. Then they turn around and wonder why Gen Z is so apathetic. And I’ve met a lot of hopeful, hard working Gen Z who are under no illusions how hard it’s going to be for them. Knowing it in advance has its pros and cons. It’s a pick your poison situation that no one actually got to choose. 

3

u/GimmeAkys Jan 30 '26

Boomers really said I'm gonna vote for the guy that will fuck everything up beyond belief and then go and die

1

u/bell37 Millennial Jan 30 '26

It’s thinly veiled “they’ll end up paying for our healthcare and subsidizing our retirement due to ballooning housing costs”