2008 crash Archives • Bitches Get Riches

A lot happened ten years ago. We’d just voted Barack Obama into the White House. Billy Mays was here and alive and selling us Hercules Hooks. Shorty had freshly acquired them apple bottom jeans comma boots with the fur. Kitty and I had just entered our senior year of college (holy fuck we’re old).

We were sweet baby angels who did exactly what we were told: get good grades, stay out of trouble, pursue a career where you have both passion and talent. We pushed ourselves to work part-time, take on industry internships, still achieve academically. We’d done it. Our futures felt secure and blindingly bright, like Southern California teeth.

And then the walls came tumbling down.

Much ink has been spilled over the 2008 stock market crash and subsequent economic recession. So you’ll pardon me if I add to the deluge. But my purpose here, ten years after the fateful events that ripped the world economy asunder, is to give a millennial’s eye view of the thing.

Below is my attempt to understand and explain the 2008 crash and recession in a way I couldn’t have ten years ago.

We were seniors in college. I think it’s fair to say we had no idea what was going on at the time, what it meant for our future, and why it all was happening. We didn’t understand why the world our parents, teachers, guidance counselors had promised us just… no longer existed.

We graduated into a situation no one—least of all the class of 2009—was prepared for.

Guys. We were so fucked.

Lazy, entitled, freeloading, whiny, safe-space-inhabiting, impatient, thin-skinned, don’t-know-the-meaning-of-a-hard-day’s-work, precious snowflakes. Millennials. My generation.

Or, if you’re Time Magazine, “The Me Me Me Generation.” This is but one example of the current favorite editorial of the lazy middle-aged journalist. It’s one in which they trash millennials for everything they’re anecdotally doing wrong. And they do it with very little empirical evidence about what’s actually going on in their lives.

Writing indignant think pieces about how awful the young people are these days has been in style since Socrates was wearing bedsheets as a fashion statement in the amphitheaters of Athens. But this style of editorializing still pisses me off.

I’m tired of it. For one thing, the entire concept of “generations” is bullshit, as perfectly explained by Adam Ruins Everything:

For another, the Millennial stereotype is pure, unfiltered cockamamie. So let’s set aside for a moment the fact that generations are a nebulous concept devoid of meaning and that the popular stereotype of millennials is false. I’d like to take this moment to explain a thing at you.

I’m proud to be a millennial. Here’s why.