We’re here, we’re queer, and we like to cheer!
Just kidding, not all of us are queer. Just a lot of us. And not all of us like to cheer, either. Just a lot of us.
So lots of millennials take selfies and get drunk at happy hour. We also love to reminisce about Rocket Power, Hey Arnold, and the good ol' days of the 90s.
If you were to spend a day spying on a 20-something New Yorker, what phrases could you expect to overhear?
Well, there’s a bunch of stuff we say all the time, and we’ve compiled a list of them here. So how many have you either said or overheard before?
1. “You can’t sit with us!”
Mean Girls is the cultural bedrock of our generation. We all quote this movie so much, it's possible we don't even realize we’re doing it. Seriously, Mean Girls has seeped so deeply and completely into our social consciousness that disentangling it from our culture from it would be impossible.
Mean Girls is so undeniably inextricable from millennial socialization it's ridiculous.
“You can’t sit with us!” Why wouldn’t it we say this all the time? It’s the perfect way to break the social tension when someone asks, “Can I sit with you?”
If you say anything along the lines of, “On Tuesdays we wear pink,” or, “Two for you, Glenn Coco! You go Glenn Coco!” or, “Get in loser, we’re going shopping!” to anyone born between the years 1987 and 1995, you'll undoubtedly be met with a knowing chuckle.
Tiny Fey, you are a goddess.
2. “Happy hour?”
We love happy hour.
Maybe because we’re poor. Maybe because we love drinking. Maybe because we live life on the seat of our pants. Maybe all of the above.
The point is, we go to happy hour a lot.
3. “Brunch?”
We also love brunch. We love getting out and about on Sundays, hitting the town, and getting wasted. Whoever invented the idea of brunch, or more specifically, the idea of unlimited mimosas, is a genius.
We're sure restaurant staff in every metropolis hate brunch, the entitled 20-somethings who spend hours pouring back mimosas, breaking glasses, and yelling.
To all wait staff: we'e sincerely sorry about our behavior at brunch, but if you didn’t want us to drink unlimited mimosas for two hours, you shouldn’t have advertised it as “bottomless.”
4. “Are we dating, or just hooking up?”
Oh hook up culture, oh hook up culture... Where would we be without you?
If you’re in your 20s and you haven’t said this, you’ve had it said to you.
None of us know what we want! Kierkegaard said, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” and I think that quote definitely applies here.
We’re under way less pressure to get married early, so we hook up a lot. Sleeping with someone doesn’t mean you’re dating, and millennials have had a hard time getting used to that fact.
5. “Let’s take a selfie!”
Selfies, while convenient, are the bane of our existence.
If you went somewhere, did something, and had a good time, did it really happen if you didn’t take a selfie and put it on Facebook or Instagram?
,6. “YOLO”
Thank you, Drake, for commercializing this convenient term.
What did people say before Drake’s “The Motto” when they wanted to make an impulsive, reckless decision?
The point is that YOLO gives us permission to take that last shot; to go wild on a weeknight; to hook up with our back burner bro.
Without the existence of YOLO, 20-somethings would probably all be much more responsible.
Was there a word preceding YOLO, to represent a similar concept? Check this out, which traces the origin of YOLO to the 1700s.
7. “FOMO”
People have been afraid to miss out long, long before the 90s.
But, luckily for us who spent our formative youth rooting for Michael Jordan, eating Lunch-ables, and watching Space Jam, we have another convenient acronym to express our feelings.
The social anxiety that comes with being left out? Well, that’s FOMO, of course. Do we have more reason to feel FOMO than the generations that predate us? Well, of course we do.
Before, if someone didn’t call, you could assume maybe they called when you weren’t home. Now, of course, if they didn’t call, they didn’t call.
Before, if you didn’t get invited you probably wouldn’t know unless someone spilled the beans by accident. Now, if you didn’t get invited you’ll know. Because you’ll see the pictures on Facebook.
And the moment when you weren’t invited, and then you see the pictures on Facebook is a wrench to the gut. 20-somethings know this, and that’s why we say FOMO so much. #GetAtUs
8. “My phone is dying!”
Follow a 20-something around New York City all day, and you’re bound to hear this once or twice before 3 p.m. When evening starts to creep on, you’ll hear this phrase with much more frequency.
Our phones are amazing, because they represent a whole world of possibility, connection, and information. So much possibility, connection, and information, in fact, that our batteries can’t handle it.
We’re so dependent on our cell phones, by and large they've become an extension of ourselves. So when our phones die, it’s a a disaster. We won’t know how to get where we’re going, whether or not we’re meeting our friends, or whether or not our boss is emailing us.
So, we say this a lot. Unless you’re a New Yorker who’s invested in a Mophie case, which we all should. Totally the best $80 you'll ever spend.
9. “I’m poor!”
This one isn’t our fault.
Thank you, Ashley Clements for these statistics: In 1970, the annual tuition at Yale was $2,550, and the minimum wage was $1.45.
So, in 1970 if you worked a minimum wage job to pay for college, you’d have to work 4.8 hours a day. In 2014, annual tuition at Yale was $45,800 and minimum wage was $7.25.
So, to afford Yale while working a minimum wage job, you’d have to work 17.3 hours a day. There’s some fun data for adults who think they’re harder working than 20-somethings just because they were able to make enough money to pay for their education while in school.
Perhaps inflation and proportionately low minimum wage is the cause of generation Y’s crushing debt, but maybe we’re just poor because we’re young.
Check out That's Weak: 11 Excuses Millennials Need to Stop Making Right Now.