In an apparent bid to alienate future readers, the LA Times published a piece on Saturday called “Millennials, you literally cannot call yourselves adults until you take this pledge,” in which human Thinkpiece Bot Chris Erskine offered up a set of rules he thinks millennials must follow before we can earn the right to call ourselves adults.
The post was intended to be funny, but its suggestions that millennials “swear off smut,” “just once […] try eating without texting,” and “save 10% of everything [we] own” came off as tone deaf and unoriginal. If you’re going to hold up a stereotype about a younger generation, you should be prepared to have yourself stereotyped as well; true to millennial form, many readers used Twitter to let Erskine know what they thought of his ‘humor column:’
. @latimes Boomer pledge: I won’t ruin the environment I won’t ruin the economy I won’t demand that you act grateful for the hell we made
— Alex Hardisons Ghost (@euchrid) October 11, 2015
.@fivefifths @latimes pic.twitter.com/F7hyzj34OT
— Luis Paez-Pumar (@paezpumarL) October 11, 2015
#millennialpledge is obviously a silly article but seriously: we’re cleaning up your economic mess+fighting your wars. respect would be nice
— spooky jones (@onesarahjones) October 11, 2015
Today Erskine published a follow-up piece addressing the response he received, in which he claimed that millennials would be able to take a joke if we’d been spanked more as children: #MillennialPledge backlash is ‘what you get when you raise an entire generation without spanking.‘
I think that title speaks for itself, but here are some other telling excerpts:
As you might expect, the first wave of reaction was from older readers, who’d seen it in print (and wake up before 7 a.m.).
The second and third wave came from millennials themselves, who proved to be frightfully smug and humorless over the whole thing.
To me, this is what you get when you raise an entire generation without spanking.
[…] Has any single one of you punks been drafted?
The oceans are cleaner, the roads safer, the economy more diverse. And, oh yeah, it was boomers who invented your precious iPhones and personal computers.
I just…sure, LA Times, this is a humor column (using that term extremely loosely here). But when the humor you publish is this out of touch with reality and lacking in nuance, don’t expect me to get my actual news from you, either.
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