[A Reblog] All Play and No Work: A Response

Despite my habit of regularly consuming video games, it has not stopped me from being an honor roll student with a schedule full of AP classes planned for the next school year or from working around twenty hours a week in addition to sports and other extracurricular activities.

With the older generation saying that millennials are too privileged and that we are lazy and conceited, I constantly feel the need to parade my achievements just to show them that we’re not the way they think. However, I am aware that this also throws a lot of my peers under the bus if they don’t manage to somehow fill in every hour of every day. We shouldn’t have to prove ourselves like this.

Furthermore, while this sort of attitude does affect me and people my age, the millennials who are older are getting it in a larger dose every day. While struggling with rent and student debt and the problems everyone has with first moving out, they are constantly being told that they are not good enough and that their troubles are of their own making because they were too coddled and naive. If people in the older generation are so eager to see millenials find their way in the world and be productive (which they really are not because they would have to find something else to criticise) then why would they make it so that the people they were supposed to be motivating are instead getting beaten down?

This is a post another millennial has written in response to one such attack on our work ethic and on what we decide to spend our leisure time on. She explains it much better than I did. Check it out.