I was listening to a podcast.
The guest was talking about her journey to being a leader, and she mentioned that she’d been working specifically with ‘millennials’.
“So can you unpack what you mean by the word millennial?” asked the host, presumably for the benefit of the listeners.
“So millennials are basically the middle-aged people now,” she replied.
I switched off.
To that lady (quite probably a genuine millennial herself) me and my cohort of fellow Xers and Xennials must be like Victorian piers, crumbling into the sea. Oh sure, nice for a Sunday afternoon stroll, or a nostalgic wander to see the flaky paint of the 80s, the garish amusement arcade of Pac-Mans and Space Invaders, but you’d never host a party out there! Would you? I mean not un-ironically.
Presumably she means the generation who were ‘digitally impacted’ in their teenage years, those who know how to use Snapchat but still just remember a time before we were all glued to our phones. You know the young people us ancient folk go on about all the time.
It did occur to me that she was attempting a sort of self-deprecating tone, and was humorously calling herself middle-aged, which (I’d guess she’s in her thirties) she may be. Well lady. That kind of thing gets a chuckle at your Millennial Mums’ Club… but even I know better than to turn up at a care home and complain about my knees.
Who knows what she’d make of me. Perhaps she’d say, “You look very… mature… and contented,” as someone actually did say to me the other day. Nice, I thought, chalking up the words ‘tired’ and ‘grey’ in my head. I didn’t ask for that.
I think though, to her, this champion of middle-aged millennials, I’d just be a guy in a raincoat looking out over a green, rolling sea, listening to it crash beneath the warped boards and seaweed-covered supports, and quietly throwing old chips to the seagulls.
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