My Facebook news feed has recently been all a-buzz with the latest news: Millennials aren’t eating cereal.

Doesn’t take much to make the news these days, does it?

Heavens to Betsy, we’re not eating cereal, and the reason the news people are up in arms is because the most common reason cited is that it’s inconvenient to wash a bowl.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh!

I really wish I lived in a world where that was actually a crisis. That’d be an awesome world. The spoons are not getting dirty, send out the troops! Prepare the cannons!

And why is it too difficult to wash bowls? Because millennials are lazy. The article infers this from the fact that of parents surveyed in 2014, 82% of them did chores as children, while only 28% of children today have them.

Let me find a way to put this, using small words:

…THE PEOPLE YOU SURVEYED ARE MILLENIALS. THE CHILDREN THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT ARE NOT MILLENIALS.

This is a rant. This is a full-out, I-am-sick-of-this rant.

Dear news people: stop whining about the generation you created. Get some frikkin self-esteem and be proud of your work. Or did you not understand that lesson when you were jamming it down our throats?

Hmm.

Okay, self, pull back. Yes, the news is dumb, but that’s not exactly new, now is it? Bias has always been around, one generation framing itself as the saviors as the next one goes “we didn’t say ‘revolution,’ we just said ‘not squashed.’” Same old, same old.

But complaining that we’re not eating the disgustingly unhealthy processed cardboard known commonly as “cereal” seems a bit low. I seem to remember just a few years ago that this was a reason to rejoice. “Young people today are being healthy!” Perhaps that was before the reigning generation realized they had shares in those companies and that not eating cereal in the name of health is all good and well, but retirement funds have to come from somewhere.

Same old, same old.

Hello, I’m a millennial who doesn’t eat cereal. Ask me why. Is it:

1. I am a lazy blister of a human being sucking the life out of the economy.
2. The apartments that have dishwashers are too expensive for me to afford because I am being priced out of the town I grew up in by rich students whose parents can pay $750 apiece monthly rent for a shared apartment, plus utilities, in the poorest county in the state, so even though my apartment was advertised as having a dishwasher, it doesn’t, and never will, and therefore I wash all my dishes by hand and if I am going to go through the bother of washing one, I’m damn well going to get some nutrition out of my meal, which means I’m not going to eat cereal. Or buy it, for that matter, because I have better ways to spend my limited resources that don’t include eating the equivalent of hamster kibbles.
3. You didn’t read 2 because I am a millennial and you assumed that I wrote nothing but lazy blister words about self-esteem.

Take a guess.

This argument going on here is not about cereal, it’s about entitlement. Companies owned by older generations feel entitled to millennials’ hard-earned dollars to make sure said company’s pensions go through. Younger people feel entitled to some level of nutrition when they buy a box labeled “food.” In this quest, we’ve learned to be suspicious of fancy packaging. We have to be; we don’t really have the money to waste because we were trusting enough to take on student loans that you can’t get out of unless you die.

So we millennials have learned not to listen to the people in slick suits, the advertisers, the sales clerks. Back when we were in school, we didn’t even trust our teachers, because when we noticed there are only two places where you have to ask permission to go to the bathroom, it wasn’t long before we realized that actually, there’s only one.

We slogged through our days from school to home and back again, cramming our free hours with sports and volunteer work and clubs and jobs until free-time consisted of the minutes we sneaked with headphones over our ears to drown out our own increasing anxieties that actually we didn’t know how to cook dinner or pay bills or do anything grown-ups do. And then when we were pushed into society, turns out we were in trouble for what we didn’t know, and no one was more shocked than the people who previously said “You’ll learn that later!”

Now they say “Millennials are lazy!” right before making fun of us for being special snowflakes, as if they never spent all our lives insisting that we must, in fact, be special snowflakes, because ordinary snowflakes can’t get into the good colleges to take on crushing student debt that will mean we don’t want to bother with washing dishes because we have to commute forty-five minutes a day because we can’t afford to live near work.

And so we don’t eat cereal so much.

The media likes to scream they don’t know how millennials got this way, but we’re not difficult to understand. All you have to remember is: we no longer trust anyone over forty.

What, you’ve heard that before? Was it said by the people who are now angry about millennials?

Why yes, yes it was. Where do you think we learned it from? Only instead of anointing those words with anti-war slogans, we decorate them with our charming, glittering bags of self-esteem. Huzzah!

</rant.>