Why do we cling to vacuous generational labels such as ‘millennial’? | Kitty Drake

Birth-year categorisation simplifies the complex work of trying to understand ourselves and others around us

Picture a millennial. Her tastes, like her emotional problems, are oddly specific. She likes squishy pillows because they soothe her anxiety. She likes curvy fonts for this reason, too, and baby cacti. She can't have a real baby because she is too poor. She can't find a partner because she is too alienated. Perhaps she has a fish. She is locked in an Oedipal battle with the boomers, her parents, who told her she would inherit the Earth but sucked it dry.

Like the teenager", who emerged in post-depression America, in part as a marketing tool that recognised the spending power of adolescents, the millennial" is largely a work of fiction. Rationally, ascribing similar socioeconomic circumstances to the roughly 1.8 billion people born between 1981 and 1996 makes no sense. Not all millennials are unable to afford to have a child, just as not all boomers are smugly retired (indeed, in the UK 1.9 million people over the age of 65 live in poverty, according to figures from the Department of Work and Pensions).