Why Millennials Are Messed Up
The Millennial-Boomer Dance
Trigger warning:
If you are a boomer, this will trigger you. But you will not even realize you’re triggered because you can’t deal with your feelings.
If you are a millennial, this will trigger you too. You may or may not decide to blame it on the boomers, depending how neurotically self-aware you are.
If you are Gen-X, you will be laughing at how obsessed we are with caricaturing and blaming each other for all our problems.
If you are Gen-Z, welcome to the shit show. You guys can choose to not do what we did.
I just got back from spending a month long holiday with my boomer in-laws. We FaceTimed with my boomer parents, for good measure.
When we arrived home, I had to fire a boomer. Or kind of. Not even sure what’s happening at this point.
That boomer was my housekeeper. My house-cleaning lady. My maid, dammit. Yes, I have a maid. Or I had one. If you can afford to have someone reset your house from all the hidden toddler crumbs and do the other dirty work for you, you are entitled to, and don’t need to soften the language by calling her your cleaning lady.
Like a millennial would. Because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Because our parents trained us to take care of their feelings, and feel responsible for their feelings.
I love you mom, don’t worry, if you’re reading this, this is a general thing and I am going to make a generally generational point here, so please, do not be sad and then expect me to take care of your feelings.
So while we were gone, we didn’t want our maid to miss out on her income for a few weeks. We wanted to be fair. So we gave her this task: clean the house the first week like normal, take a week off for Christmas, and then when you come back, clean the extra stuff that doesn’t usually get cleaned. In other words, a deep clean across three sessions.
We came home two days early, a day before she was supposed to come for her last clean, and the house was… not clean.
When I finally walked into our home, my body winding down from the boomer holiday, I was expecting the lingering smell of lemon cleaner to still be faintly aromatizing the air.
It did not smell clean, but okay, it had been six days. But it also did not look tidy at first glance. And then, upon inspection, I realized that most of the house had not been cleaned.
It appeared to be pretty much in the same state we left it.
We had paid our maid for three sessions in advance, even though we only really needed her to come once. We had given her a Christmas bonus. We had even invited here to have a special boomer lunch with our in-laws the last time she was here, a poutine we made with cheese from Quebec. We brought her sweets back from our trip.
I felt angry.
I was still reeling from my emotional hangover from the vacation. Not only had I been dealing with run-of-the-mill boomers, but a very difficult mother-in-law, who did things like tell my three year old that she was sad he didn’t want to play with grandma, or hold her hand. She would do this in a pouting, childlike voice, both infantile and infantilizing, and totally emotionally inappropriate. I pulled her aside months ago on our last visit, and told her, “you can’t do that to our son.”
I explained to her that children are not there to meet the needs of adults. Adults are there to meet the needs of children. She had it backwards.
“But if I want to play with him, I have a need too.”
“Exactly what I’m saying,” I explained, “You are focused on your needs instead of his.”
Her eyes started to glaze over, and I knew she was no longer listening to me, but preparing her rebuttal.
“We are teaching him how to say no”, I went on. “How to understand his own limits, and not make him feel responsible for making other people happy.”
“But if I have a need to play with him, and he says no, he is being disrespectful.” she replied.
“How is he being disrespectful by saying no if he does not want to? Is it not then disrespectful for you to ignore his need to not play?”
Our circular conversation went on and on and on and on and on and on and in the end, she played the victim because I was a mean mother who focused on my son’s feelings instead of hers.
But why are we so obsessed with feelings? Us millennials?
Because we were treated exactly like my son and expected to submit to the authority of overgrown children trying to get their emotional needs met by us. And we were punished when we did not do so.
And so we became obsessed with feelings. We could not get enough of them, because we had to quash our own when we were children.
We became the generation that says “I feel that you…” followed by a thought. We speak in therapeutic lingo, and expect our partners to validate us at all costs, trying to get what we never got as children. We became conscious/attachment/gentle parents, following cult-like dogmas, letting our kids scream and hit like wild banshees and being afraid to put up boundaries with them, too. We became the estranged adult children on internet forums talking about no-contact strategies and rigidly adhering to these principles despite how we may have actually felt.
We became hyper-focused on feelings because we figured out that ours weren’t really allowed to be felt. And then we took it too far.
So I came back to my apartment, having spent a month in hyper-vigilance and consistent limit setting, trying my best to not feel responsible for this woman’s feelings, as my own were neglected. There was no room for me to tend to my feelings because I was very preoccupied with dealing with hers. And then I found that my maid had done something that came across as suspicious.
All of the emotional tension I felt got displaced onto her in my mind. I had mental accusations: she had not come, or if she had come, she had sat there and twiddled her thumbs. She slacked on the job. Instead of cleaning once like we agreed on the first day, and then doing some extra stuff on the others, she was stretching a regular clean into three episodes. She didn’t keep her end of the agreement (this, at least was true). She was dishonest. She was ripping us off. She was lazy. She thought she wouldn’t get caught.
I am likely mostly right about this, but also got some things wrong. I was on a mission to find out.
I put my messages of fury into Chat GPT and asked it to come up with a version that was professional, polite, non-hostile and non-accusatory.
I then took the bland message and spiced it up slightly, and hit send.
Once the robot had managed to derive some reason from my feelings, I actually calmed down and was able to respond rationally with her from then on. No more robot needed. I asked questions, and remained polite.
It turns out she did some random things on the first day and didn’t really clean inside. She cleaned the inside of the fridge. She cleaned the deck outside, which could not have taken all day, and a month later didn’t really matter. She was hoping to get it all done tomorrow, before we got home.
If I want to be generous, maybe she’s an artist at heart and wanted to get creative. I think, in reality, she was probably doing something very half-assed and thought we would never know.
So my trust was broken. I could give her the benefit of the doubt, and the part of me that has learned how to take care of other people’s feeling first wants to, but my overall experience with her has proven this kind of thing would totally be up her alley. She likes to cut corners, if she thinks no one notices.
But she was a nice enough lady. She did a good enough job. She’s a boomer, and she’s trying, and I’ve seen her work hard. So what the heck, I kept her here for a while despite knowing all of this about her.
When I was asking her questions, the first thing she did was make it all about her feelings.
She felt so bad. She felt so ashamed, she felt like no one noticed and appreciated the hard work she did. She went into victim mode, just as in the situation I described with my mother-in-law.
I ignored her diatribe and her appeal to my emotions, and focused on asking questions. Had she noticed the floor was damaged? I wasn’t blaming her, I had to point out, I just had to give my landlord as much information as possible.
Me staying measured while she was flailing around panicking and trying to derive my sympathy (I figure this was also in large part due to her repressed feelings that she had done something wrong) really seemed to trigger her.
She suggested she come tomorrow, and finish her work. I told her that I had already finished cleaning up, and we would have someone come look at the floor, so better not tomorrow.
I wanted some time to think, to not respond to the panic of the situation. To let my own emotions calm, to process (there’s the psycho-lingo) everything else I had been dealing with for a month.
Her response was something along the lines of a toddler stomping their feet, and saying “Fine! I will come pick up my things tomorrow!”
She didn’t even quit. She fired herself.
So I said, “Okay, that’s fine, thank you very much for your services and I wish you all the best moving forward.”
I guess I called her bluff, because she went into nostalgia mode, emoting and getting sentimental and apologizing more.
Goddamn it I got triggered.
It’s so fucking hard to stop taking care of the boomer’s feelings. They are pouring out of them, leaking out, begging for some kind of love that they never got because their parents were of another type of generation with their own emotional issues.
The conversation was already done, but her monologue was not. It may have been sincere, but it was also extremely inappropriate and emotionally manipulative. She was begging me to take care of her feelings.
And in the end, I obliged.
“We had mismatched expectations, yada yada, I did appreciate your work which is why we gave you a bonus, I wanted the opportunity to calm down and think about things tomorrow, bla bla fucking bla.”
I did the millennial-boomer dance. I took care of her feelings.
And now I feel like shit. Because I had remained outwardly calm, and assertive, and stayed professional. And then I got sucked into the drama and did whatever was needed to get her to feel better so that I could feel better, too.
But I don’t feel better. I feel worse.
I put her needs before mine.
And that is exactly why many millennials do child-led parenting, in a misguided overcompensation, to make sure their kids put their needs first. But here’s where they get it wrong: they need to erect many of the boundaries for their kids, and set examples of good boundaries to them.
And that includes millennial parents setting appropriate limits with their own children, and with their other children, also known as: their boomer parents.
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I barely did the dishes for the last month. Ten years ago, I might have believed that this was a good deal.
Jesus Christ.
Kate, I know that you don't want to make specific accusations, so these are my words, and I don't expect you to necessarily agree. As the son of a severely narcissistic and borderline mother (readers-Mommie Dearest levels of abuse, yes, I'm serious) both these women look like narcissists to me.
I call the behaviors you described "leading indicators." By that I mean, "A behavior so far outside the norm and reasonable decency that likely only a Cluster B would do this. It's not something a normal person would do on a bad day."
Bill Eddy, who runs The High Conflict Institute (worth checking out) has a formulation, too. He refers to these people as "high conflict," but most of the time he's talking about Cluster Bs while staying away from diagnostic language (I have no such scruple about it, but that's me). He asks people to think of the "90/10" rule. Ask ourselves, "what would 90 percent of people do in this situation." If the answer is "they would not have behaved this way," Bill says you've almost certainly identified a "high-conflict person."
In my terms, you've identified a clinical-level narcissist or close.
Your MIL's behavior is all I need to know to form a pretty accurate assessment of her character. I know these people inside and out. My mother was not the only such person in my life by a long shot.
And your maid? What awful, manipulative, unprofessional behavior. A woman her age should be ashamed of herself. She did take advantage of you, she knows she did, and she still tried to make you soothe her. Classic Cluster B behavior.
I understand why you were triggered--I was just reading this. I walked away from the computer and deleted my reactive response. *I know this in my gut because I grew up with this.*
You're right about boomers and millennials. Your generation was so manipulated and under-parented, and parented in the wrong ways, that your cohort is largely disconnected from reality and proper emotional functioning. The parents were not goddamned good enough by a long shot.
My generation, X, is not blameless either.
Take heart though that you are the fully grown up mature woman that your elders are not, and that many in your peer group are not. I've met a lot of you. Come sit at the Gen X lunch table eh? I'll bring the Corn Nuts.
PS-Those who react with "stop labeling people" are either feeling personally stung, which is their work not yours, or they're acting as enablers for people or themselves who behave this way. "Stop labeling" is very popular, but in real grown up world, it actually means "stop communicating specific information that does not flatter me. I am going to characterize your normal and reasonable attempt to categorize and identify patterns as 'being mean' to socially defang your point of view."
The truly tragic thing is that the child-led approach, while often motivated the way you describe, *still* makes kids responsible for figuring out how to satisfy their parents needs, but with even less clear information about what those needs are.