Millenials are Lazy

Millennials are, by their own admission, the least likely cohort of Americans to want to work hard. So says the new study by Jean Twenge and Tim Kasser, published in Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin:

We examined whether culture-level indices of threat, instability, and materialistic modeling were linked to the materialistic values of American 12th graders between 1976 and 2007 (N = 355,296). Youth materialism (such as the importance of money and of owning expensive material items) increased over the generations, peaking in the late 1980s to early 1990s with Generation X and then staying at historically high levels for Millennials (GenMe). Societal instability and disconnection (e.g., unemployment, divorce) and social modeling (e.g., advertising spending) had both contemporaneous and lagged associations with higher levels of materialism, with advertising most influential during adolescence and instability during childhood. Societal-level living standards during childhood predicted materialism 10 years later. When materialistic values increased, work centrality steadily declined, suggesting a growing discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them.

A "discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them" is, more-or-less, how a scientist would define "laziness." It's not laziness if you simply lack material wants - a Buddhist monk is not lazy. It is lazy to expect reward without effort. 

 

Jean Twenge's The Narcissism Epidemic should be required reading for understanding contemporary America. The Baby Boomers were the most narcissistic generation on record, until they unleashed their children on the world.