Inventing the whiny, entitled Millennial

How avocado toast became a weapon of generational warfare that stripped Millennials of the autonomy and capacity to resist.

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If you write about free trade, you will discover that, officially, the verdict is that free trade has been a success for Canada. The proof is in the pudding: the economy improved immensely, the catastrophes that activists warned against never came to pass and we now can purchase everything we’ve ever imagined purchasing at Dollarama or Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire or whatever.

The economy indeed is good. The TSX is at record highs. Profits are at record highs. The rich are recordly rich. The guy who made the most money in Canada last year is the CEO of a garbage company, stealing the honour of turning shit into solid gold away from Radio Shack. And despite all the fear that people are whipping up around Trump, the reality is that he’s a businessman who wants to make the economy bend even closer towards businessmen like him. Ultimately, even Trump will be good news for the people who sit atop the economy.

Consider this from the website Wealthsimple: From Ken Grewal who is a “wealth management” guy: “I think the Canadian voter is demanding bold, structural changes. Which means whether you’re Trudeau or Poilievre, you have to actually effectuate those structural changes,” Grewal says. “In English, that means deregulation. The market loves deregulation and I think this has lit a fire under Canadian pride and our understanding of the economy. In a strange way I think this moment could potentially be unifying.”

Deregulation. AKA the same thing we’ve tried over and over since 1980. Bold to suggest that Canadians are clamouring for more of it.

Grewal goes on to explain that Trump’s tariff rhetoric will push Canadian decisionmakers even further into staples — oil, gas, uranium especially — and that these low-investment generating, high-profits industries will be what save us. Industries that are notoriously low employment creators, terrible for the environment, displace and cause harm to Indigenous communities, etc. etc. etc.

Canadian oil supplemets American supply, allowing them to fuel their economy off of Canadian crude (which is a shittier grade) at $12 per barrel less than the market price, while they save their finest slop to ship out to other countries. Indeed, free trade has been a success.

In the 1980s, a veritable revolution was launched to transform Canada’s economy into what we have today — a neoliberal, capitalist economy. The effort it took from Canada’s elites was enormous but ultimately, successful. They won and they tell us that we won, too.

But this column isn’t about free trade. I have enough to say about free trade that I have written two books about its impact that you really should read. This column is about infantillization as a tool of political control — the way in which Canadians under the age of 45 have been transformed into children — and how this political device has been used to depoliticize, disenfranchise and create a pacified population that has no idea where to start to change anything, let alone collectively fight back. The lazy, entitled millennial: too childish to adult, too whiny to stop eating avocado toast; victims of the economic transformation that we have been told was a success.

Besides, the economy is going so well, Canada isn’t broken. Canada has never been better.

2

You’re 8 years old. Your father has just lost his job at Nortel. Your mother works at the local grocery store. The uncertainty in the household is unbearable and your parents fight about money all the time. Your mother cuts back on necessities. She picks up more hours at work and you see her less. Dad, you see all the time now. He thinks he might have something in a month or so — there is an opening at the company his brother works for and he might be able to put in a good word. But there are lots of folks who are in the same boat and you will have to fight them to get this job. And then oops, your mother goes on strike.

You’re 10 years old. Your father has just lost his job at a furniture plant. Operations are being moved to Indiana or to Mexico, you’re not sure and it doesn’t matter. Your mother has worked part-time at Zellers and thank god, they have been giving her more hours. The food bank gives her too many chickens in a single trip so she asks your neighbour if they can store three for you in their deep freeze.

You’re 7 years old. You have just moved across Canada and most of the toys you remember having are still tightly secured inside of a box. Your dad’s job dried up but the company offered him a new job somewhere else. You’re excited about the move but your older brother put his foot through the wall of his bedroom when your parents told you both about the move. He’s 13 and while he doesn’t know it then, the trauma of changing schools at that age will forever mark him. He’s finally in therapy now and he’s realizing how much of it all goes back to the year that you abruptly had to relocate.

You’re 9 years old. The cod fishery has collapsed. Your father should be getting some money through unemployment insurance but just in case, your mom is going to rent out your basement to someone. You’ll miss playing down there.

You’re 5 years old. Your parents have struggled to find full-time work. They fight about money constantly until one day, you dad just takes off. He can’t handle the stress of it all any longer.

Instability abounds. Instability. The economic revolution, like all revolutions in Canada, was silent, but your family felt the ground shift. The era of free trade may have created a clown parade of winners but the quiet losers will find themselves being called losers for the rest of their adult lives.

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Coming to age amid a global financial crisis could explain why millennials can’t seem to get ahead but our arrested development wasn’t just triggered by the events of 2008. Our generation grew up amid incredible uncertainty and the rebirth of unmitigated wealth accumulation. One of the big impacts of the incertainty of the era is that it stole from our generation the designation of adult, a process that didn’t end with us: it has been passed along down through to newer generations too.

The incertainty of the late 1980s and the early 1990s is the garden in which our generation has grown. Here was the first post-Keynesian generation. The first post-war generation where economic conditions weren’t going to improve as a matter of course. The first post-war generation that was not allowed to grow up. Good entry-level jobs vanished. Boomers sat in positions that a few decades earlier, would have been opened up to us. We were forced into higher education but then told to pay enormous sums of money for it. Don’t worry we were told by politicians who paid for their educations off the money they made in the summer it will pay off.

Union density dropped and with that went benefits packages and stable employment.

We became the butt of very irritating jokes all intended to distract from the real reason we were actively disenfranchised: to stop political organizing dead in its heels by crushing the aspirations of an entire generation.

There is a radicalism that comes with youth. Radicalism combined with energy and free time is an explosive combination. Ontario’s college administrators knew this and in the early 1980s, crushed autonomous student organizing lest Ontario college students ever followed in the footsteps of their Quebec counterparts (and now look where the college administrators have lead these diploma/visa mills). There is radicalism that comes with youth, whether that radicalism is a spirit of defiance, of new horizons creating new possibilities or just the freedom that one has when children are a distant idea, your body still functions well off of 4 hours of sleep and debt hasn’t yet locked you up in chains.

Previous generations of radical action have always had a strong youth contingent to drive radical politics. Young party activists. The student movement. Cub reporters. Young people who would work enough weeks to go on unemployment insurance and do crazy, radical, experimental stuff. Musicians and artists. What happens to a society when you crush the possibility of youth being young adults and instead, tell them that they will never be Serious Grown-up People?

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It wasn’t until the last century that something called a teenager existed. Before World War Two, life just didn’t have space for this new kind of human. Either you were a child, or you were an adult. Derek Thompson argues that three cultural, economic and technical forces created the teenager: “High schools gave young people a place to build a separate culture outside the watchful eye of family. Rapid growth gave them income, either earned or taken from their parents. Cars (and, later, another mobile technology) gave them independence.”

Teens emerged as capitalism’s primary target audience for pretty much everything. They were at the same time infantillized into being children while also venerated as being the most important economic object. The entire economy projected its desires onto teens, in the hope of attracting support from nostalgic and unfulfilled adults who, when asked to think back to the best time of their lives, would immediately remember being child-free, perhaps winning a sports championship or driving aimlessly in their new used car.

Teenagers lost near total agency. Too young to be allowed to do adult things but too old to be children, this construction isolated them into the solitary unit of being a student. While at the same time, they became the vaulted image of perfection — projected in film, advertiesd to, targeted, handed the mic to create popular music. I remember a documentary I once saw about the rapid detradionalization of the Ladakhi people, and the role played by their being force fed of US culture. The narrator explained that, at its very heart, US culture is a teenage boy culture.

While we should be proud that we’ve matured to give minors the freedom to just goof off for a few extra years, or protect them from various kinds of exploitation, it’s important to remind ourselves that the process of social construction can be powerful. In less than 100 years, Western society solidified teenagers through longer amounts of education, longer amounts of time before forcing the economically comfortable to work and a longer period of early life with no kids.

The economic forces have now colluded to extend teenagership into young adulthood. In education, the insistance that higher education is the entryway into a job forces people to go to school for years who may otherwise do something else. In pop culture, turning young adults into teenagers means that there is a wider audience for consumption. And for consumption in general, there are even more people now to consume. Bonus: they actually have a bit of money to spend. Journalists report on young adults as if they’re a curiosity. Did you know that this young woman invented something, they patronize, as if none of us had ever heard of Mary Shelley before.

The impact of turning adults into children has a very good financial return for venture capitalists. Consider the perennial social media argument about food delivery. When someone has never been forced to know how to cook or shop or do cooking and shopping math, they can easily believe that ordering food through a delivery app isn’t actually all that expensive. Or put more directly: they can be convinced by advertising that it is cheaper to order cold McDonald’s, delivered by an exploited worker, rather than just heating up some noodles. And the venture capitalists smile on.

As this trend is pushed higher and higher up the age chain, by the time we do find ourselves married with children, we have to grow up virtually overnight and still we aren’t ready to assume the role of adult.

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It first occured to me that we lost a critical tier of age-based citizen engagement when I listened to a victory speech given by former Unifor president Jerry Dias. Dias had first got involved in the union when he was something like 19. His involvement grew from there. I thought to myself — how many people at the age of 18 or 19 or even 22 find themselves today in a workplace where they could get involved in activism at such a young age and stay involved? I was particularly interested in this as, at the time, I had just written a book about young people and the labour movement. I was 29 and knew I still had another four years before Unifor would stop considering me a young worker.

A young worker at 29.

Young workers in many unions, Unifor included, are considered young until they’re 35. This is objectively a ridiculous thing, but it’s born out of the reality that younger adults have been infantilized; forced to wait their turn forever, have their heads pat, bide their time, think about the state of the world and feel helpless and, critically, lack access to any tribune to do radical politics. At Unifor’s most recent national convention, while there were hundreds of retirees present as delegates, I think the number of “young workers” was fewer than something like 40. Replace this union with any other workplace or any other situation: we have convinced ourselves that adulthood doesn’t start until 50. And with this convenient frame, we collectively accept that young adults are marginalized from most positions that could grant them power or stature or access or practice for what is needed to express radical politics.

We’re sucking dry the best part of being young from the young. And the economy bears a lot of the blame.

6

This year, the oldest of the elder millennials will turn 44. With just 37 years left to live, according to Canada’s average life expectancy, they (we) are solidly over the hill. They are also on the cusp of entering the age of being the most indebted. Their most radical days are, statistically speaking, behind them.

But not because they don’t individually and personally feel radical. If radical politics were vibes, the reaction to Luigi Mangione’s murder of health insurance CEO buddy shows in no uncertain terms that the vibes are strong. But vibes are not enough. To express radical politics requires action and, unfortunately, those of us with young kids and debts and responsibilities and new ailments are unlikely to be the ones leading the masses towards the barricades.

And this is where we see the political utility of infantilizing young adults in the clearest of terms: we need young adults to help create radical spaces for us all. This is not something that they alone must or even can do — it’s a push-pull among people of all ages who all have different things to offer based on where in their lives they are. But without that youth engine, we lose our most sustaining lifeblood. And, without the opportunities and trainings and practices that people of my generation never had, we have a crisis — we collectively simply do not have the skills, the time, the analysis, the access to resources to do what needs to be done. It’s way harder to gain these skills at 38 than at 18, nevermind the years already behind you. Add to that the burnt out Gen Xers (among whom the best radicals are often tired and even crusty) or the Gen Xers who are occupying spaces that deradicalize their institutions (hello some corners of the labour bureaucracy and the NDP) and the crisis is compounded upon compounded.

We are then left with dregs — hacks like Pierre Poilievre who has been auditioning to be PM since he was first elected at like 23 (I don’t care about him enough to look that stat up right now), or hacks like any member of the Liberal Party that declares what it means to be “progressive” through contorted and perverted notions of progress. This caustic combination means that the Liberals subsume a politic that is usually developed and practiced by activists, especially young people, that would normally result in concrete action. But by subsuming this politic for crass political returns, they turn it to be a grotesque version of what the left should or does actually want. From DEI to the latest thing that is making Jordan Peterson cry, the Liberals have supplanted radical activists, distorted their ideas and turned them into shit that is easy to (and should be) ridiculed.

Which puts us all on the ropes, for when the Conservatives see the playing field and say: this is easy, let’s just occupy the rest of the space that is open. They do, and they come across as the only group fairminded and credible enough to govern. Because after all, we are all still children and while we all experience things and know things and have an idea that things are bad, we are not allowed to express them in any credible or serious way. We are actively shut out of thses spaces, as we have been for years, because of our childish notions, like Free Trade Was A Disaster or Maybe The Economy Is Actually Causing Harm.

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This all seems pretty bleak, especially considering that we can’t reverse the clock for us Millennials. We will bump up against Boomers who won’t leave certain positions till they die, Gen Xers who won’t give us a chance, other Millennials who are hacks and who have been complicit. That leaves Gen Z who are swimming in this shit, made worse by a techonoligcal fascism that has stolen from them basic elements of humanity that they will likely never get back either.

But nothing is ever too late. Imagining ways to re-create spaces for human autonomy — right from the earliest days of allowing children dominion over their neighbourhoods, through to professional opportunities, eliminating debt, nationalizing rental housing and up through to more time off and creating spaces to re-create community bonds — these are all things that are possible. They aren’t easy but they’re possible. In fact, they’re more possible than not, if we think about how long humans have existed on this planet and how long that humans have had these things. Remember: teenagers didn’t even exist a century ago!

We are living under a spell of precarity — it keeps us all on thin ice and tells us that if we move too fast or too suddenly, we will fall through and die. And we are told this through a million different imputs that we don’t have much control over and that are extremely compelling. We believe them.

But what if we stop believing them? What if we refuse to accept these tropes by better understanding our current material conditions, reject the lies that we are told by the people who profit the most off our current conditions? If we create these spaces, we can change our spaces. We just need to understand what is true and real and what is fake and false.

This is true and real: the vibes are right. The moment is ripe. Young adults and middle-aged and retirees — we all have a role to play and we can play them. We just need to find that courage, that channel, that path forward, and follow it.

Wait — peanut butter and avocado? Is iStock serious?!