An Open Letter to Nonmillennials

This is not an excuse, but an explanation of how our tech has shaped us

Photo: Bronek Kaminski/Getty Images

Dear Traditionalist, Baby Boomer, or Gen Xer,

Millennials have been criticized for too long for supposedly being more entitled, impatient, and narcissistic than previous generations. We have endured taunts labeling us as sensitive, sheltered, and snowflakey. But avocado toast and acai bowls will not be the legacy of this generation. What follows is a description of the world we grew up in and an explanation for our tendencies — an exposition of our very subjective realities.

We grew up with the internet, smartphones, networked devices, and a Wi-Fi connection — indeed, we developed with the information age. People older than millennials might classify technology as tools used for business, enterprise, utility, or even convenience, efficiency, and work. But for us millennials, technology, as it is today, is an axiomatic truth. Just as functioning drainage systems may have been unquestionable givens to those born into such a time, so too is the notion of devices and screens to our generation. No doubt an impressive piece of engineering technology — but also one that is integral to our lives and integrated into our daily functioning.

We did not enjoy the privilege of growing up within a micro-context, one that required physical presence in an environment to undergo experiences and shape our minds.

We do not know the simplicity and certainty of a physical identity alone determining our existence. Today, yesterday, and for a few years now, in fact, we have been living in a macro-context: a vastly, densely interconnected global society, enabled by technology. The environment a person interacts with is no longer limited to the physical world within which they are embodied — technology has unleashed onto us this new, digital one. And while it is easy for the generations shaped by the Old World to sing praises about the enabler that is technology, it is us, the millennials, who are the guinea pigs of the New World, whose cognitive and physical systems are being shaped, poked, and prodded by the untested, foreign, omnipotent digital paradigm within which we’ve been raised.

Avocado toast and acai bowls will not be the…