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Mem: Things that invented the millennials

For half a year, an entire list of what Generation Y had rethought on social networks has accumulated: collective farms have become “art centers”, dormitories have become “coliving”, and forest is an “ecotrail”.

Millennials listen to a concert in the Danish coliving Nest

The term “millennials” (or “Generation Y”) is the designation of people who were born between the beginning of the 1980s and the end of the 1990s. Their involvement in the world of technology distinguishes them from older generations : they got acquainted with computers and phones quite early (but not as early as the next generation Z), used to sit on social networks and often act as the first users of new inventions and devices.

Another distinctive feature of the Millennials is the rejection of old ideas and orders. At some point, older generations began to actively criticize generation Y for this. Every now and then articles appeared in the style of “Millennials destroyed X”, where X is a habit, institution or industry.

In this regard, a meme appeared in the West based on materials that millennials destroyed marriages (they rarely start a family), the banking industry (less trust inbanks) and even mayonnaise. From 2016, the media and users of social networks make up entire lists , to which the “murderous” generation Y has reached.

Millennials killed exorcism

Millennials killed … * spins the wheel * … mayonnaise

Millennials killed the American cheese industry

But, rejecting some things of the “old” world, the millennials sometimes simply re-invent them under a new, more fashionable formulation. So in Europe and US cities, colivingings became popular , which in Russia, back in 2015, were described as “hostels for the millennials”.

Gradually, the joke about the reinvention of certain things turned into a Russian-speaking meme about the Y generation. The situation in January 2019 was the most revealing. HSE invited guest teacher Daria Serenko talked about how her students came up with an art center where people would have to cultivate their parcels of land.

On Twitter, they agreed that the Millennials eventually rethought either a regular cottage or a collective farm.

Gradually, the wording “Millennials invented / Millennials invented” got accustomed, and now and again began to mention in social networks “new” words and phenomena that existed in practice before.

The joke even became the basis for a small game “Millennials invented.”By May 2019, the meme is still alive and quite common on Twitter. For six months, users realized that millenials invented cardboard (Nintendo Labo’s cardboard toys based on the Switch console), communism (the trend for “collective consumption”), the forest (interactive “eco-trails”) and many other things.

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