Millennials see themselves as self-absorbed, wasteful
Conversely, 79 percent of Baby Boomers readily identified themselves as such, as they turned on yet another television program romanticizing the ’60s as the greatest decade ever and talked about how no one will ever match the music it produced. For example, Baby Boomers are older so they are more likely to ascribe themselves as “responsible”.
Even millennials don’t think much of their generation. Like the millennials, only 18% of the Silent Generation considered themselves part of that group.
Instead 33% say they are part of Generation X.
Millennials are harder on themselves than any other generation. And even among self-described millennials, just 8 percent said that label applies to them “very well”.
The data in the Pew report comes from 3,147 adults surveyed online or by mail from March 10 to April 6 through the American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of randomly selected US adults. 59 percent of the millennials polled described the millennial generation as “self-absorbed”, 49 percent said that they were “wasteful”, while 43 percent labelled millennials as “greedy”.
“To be sure, some of these differences may be related more to age and life stage than to the unique characteristics of today’s generations”, the authors at Pew note. But there are other factors at play here – the Millennial generation could just as easily be called the comparison generation.
“Millennial” is about the dumbest name anyone could have come up with to describe a generational group, and now we know that Gen-Xers aren’t the only ones to find it loathsome. Millennials have dealt with a number of less-than-stellar stereotypes, from people viewing us as everything from entitled babies to social media-obsessed smartphone-bots to lazy narcissists. “Young adults are more likely than older people to say there is strong evidence of climate change and to prioritize the development of alternative energy over expanding the production of fossil fuels”, the report explains.
The so-called silent generation, those aged 70 to 87 as defined by Pew, seem to have the most confusion with just 18% correctly identifying themselves as members of that group.