They say the Millennial Generation has entitlement issues due to awards for participation and, therefore never had to deal with losing. But is it true?
There has been a long-standing belief from older generations that people born from 1981-1996 are entitled due to receiving participation trophies from sports and other activities. This generation, if you buy into the idea of generations, is known as the Millennial Generation. The Millennial Generation is defined by people coming to age during the early twenty-first century.
Some people say generations as defined by popular culture don’t exist, but for the sake of this argument, let’s go with defined generations as we have come to know them. There are the generations that came before the Millennials: The GI Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X. The generation that came after: Gen Z. Each generation has its own set of defining characteristics chosen for them by the creators of the generation system.
What if participation trophies weren’t a new phenomenon for the Millennial generation? Would you believe they’ve been around for nearly one-hundred years? In an article posted on Slate.com by Stefan Fatsis. The author went through newspaper clippings online and found that participation trophies have been given out for nearly a century. In 1922, participation trophies were given to people playing in a high school basketball tournament in Ohio. In 1970, people were given participation trophies after a soapbox derby in New York. Read the article and search for yourself on newspaperarchive.com to find more examples of the entitlement inducing trophies. If these trophies induce entitlement as the previous generations claim, then they need to look at themselves too.
Debates about participation trophies also began when many Millennials were in their teens or early twenties. These are ages when people are more narcissistic in their development. Of course, they’re taking pictures of themselves. Of course, they’re self-important. Don’t the previous generations remember what it was like to be that age? To say an entire generation is entitled based on their most self-absorbed years is plain wrong.
Have you been to a department store and see a Boomer or Gen Xer complain about something petty? Maybe an expired coupon? Their pumpkin spice latte was too hot? The Karen meme appears to have some truth behind it. A Karen, as used in a part of speech by urbandictionary.com, is a “Mid aged white woman with bob cuts. . .” They are defined by “Currently at your workplace speaking to your manager.” As a person who has worked in the food industry, the most entitled people I have seen have almost always been the older generations along the Boomer and Gen Xer ages. Nearly every time I see someone complaining at a store, it’s a Boomer.
It has been noted that the Baby Boomer generation tanked the economy. More specifically, the ultra-wealthy class of the Boomer generation put the economy and housing market in the crapper. When a Millennial complains of crippling student loan debt placed on them by previous generations, they are called entitled. College has been marketed to Millennials since their birth, and as Millennials reached college age, the cost of education rose to astronomical heights in comparison to the Boomer generation. When Millennials graduated, they found the job market and the economy decimated, and houses costs to be far from obtainable. But, complaining about it would make Millennials entitled. They are seen as entitled by people who were able to afford college with a part-time job and a house from a job that didn’t require an education. It seems almost like a setup. It’s like a trap set by the wealthy class of the Boomers to make money off the suffering of Millennials.
The Baby Boomers and Generation X are generally the parents of Millennials, thus being the people giving out the participation trophies. It has to be asked, why did they feel the need to give these trophies to the Millennials? Was it hard for them to see their children lose? Did they receive one themselves and remembered how good it made them feel? Did their kid losing a game make it harder for them to live vicariously through them? Did they get bored of complaining about how the pumpkin spice anything was no longer on sale? The list of questions could go on, but the main one that should be answered by the previous generations is what made them want to give out these participation trophies? What insecurities were they experiencing to do that and then have the audacity to call the Millennials entitled? Could it be that they knew that they were destroying the economy, housing market, and raising education costs so that the life of the Millennial would end up being one big participation trophy, and they felt kind of bad for it?
Photo by Ariel Besagar on Unsplash
