I'll let you in on a secret. It's not something we're meant to talk about, but if a columnist stares at a blank document long enough, millennials – drawn by the scent of an approaching deadline – will begin to appear in that space.
Just when a columnist is considering filling that page with a top 10 list of Things That Happened In My Backyard That Mean That Climate Change Isn't Occurring, a line of millennials dances right on to it and fills it up.
They're always on call, those millennials, particularly in the summer months when the news is slow – and it's warm. Do a Google search, click news, past week, and you'll see how busy our young hero has been, and so I salute you, Blank Page Millennial.
Blank Page Millennial lives in his parents' basement to save on rent, yet he doesn't know the value of a dollar.
Blank Page Millennial carries massive student debt, yet his desire to earn a decent living is never "responsible," given his liabilities, or "ambitious" or "motivated" – it's "entitled."
Blank Page Millennial is preoccupied with appearances, yet he doesn't realize how much cooler he'd look if he stopped ride-sharing and owned his own car.
Blank Page Millennial is vain, as evidenced by the historically high number of selfies he posts on Instagram – launched in 2010 – yet he clearly doesn't pay close enough attention to his appearance or he'd know he has a beard.
"He's narcissistic," says Columnist on a Deadline, "and if he cared about the way he looks, he'd look more like I want him to look."
Blank Page Millennial wastes his time sending short missives, some of which are personal, on Twitter even though it's a public forum. His undertaking there is always "performative," never "communicative," according to the decidedly non-millennial columnist.
You'd think Columnist on a Deadline had never spun reflectively through racks of postcards, searching for an image idealizing his particular circumstance before mailing something off that was witty and succinct, and ended with the 15 characters that are "Wish you were here."
Had telegrams been free in the 1800s, I'm sure a lot of "EATING CRUMPETS STOP WISH THERE WERE SOME WAY I COULD SHOW YOU WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE STOP THERE IS RASPBERRY JAM IN ALL THE LITTLE HOLES STOP" would've been sent, but to Columnist on a Deadline a few lunch tweets define the medium – and a generation.
Basically, Blank Page Millennial is always on his phone but he seldom talks on his phone – which is bad, says Columnist on a Deadline. The only person he talks to on his phone is his mother, which is really bad.
Strong intergenerational relationships alarm Columnist on a Deadline the way the apparent waning of intergenerational relationships alarmed previous incarnations of Columnist on a Deadline – those whose blank pages filled up with flappers, hippies and Gen-Xers. The idea that speaking to your mother several times a week is the contemporary equivalent of writing home once a week, in this age of free long distance, isn't one that Columnist on a Deadline can afford to entertain.
"Respect your elders" and "Call your mother" are sage advice only until a generation of youth consults its parents and calls its mothers, then it's "dependency" and something has been allowed to go terribly wrong – by, of course, Blank Page Millennial's Mother.
Blank Page Millennial's Mother usually makes an appearance around paragraph four of Columnist on a Deadline's effort. Millennial's Mother is an educated, professional woman, which is all well and good, Columnist on a Deadline will dutifully note, but that extra income allowed her to send her child to a particular kind of class that Columnist on a Deadline never attended. That class, Columnist on a Deadline insists, will only give the child grandiose ideas and fail to prepare him for practical employment, particularly if his parents tell him that he's good at miscellaneous skill, on the off chance that he is.
I went to school with little girls who took baton-twirling, for heaven's sake, although there was absolutely no sign of growth in the baton-twirling sector, and yet no one seemed to think the sky was falling.
Yet, these days, little Simon's mum lets him play soccer and throw pots, and he's sure to turn out an unemployable megalomaniac who both lives in his parents' basement and has an expectation of not living in his parents' basement – both of which are wrong.
Blank Page Millennial's Mother is a new incarnation in the long line of bad mothers. Previous generations of bad mothers worked outside the home and so weren't attentive enough to their "latchkey kids." Consequently, they raised an earlier generation of dreaded "kids today."
The new breed of bad mother works outside the home and, due to her guilt, disposable income and education, which cause her to "overthink" parenthood, she dotes too much on her children.
A modern mother selfishly has too few children and thus values them too highly. She cares for her own children like they were her own children – much to the bewilderment and sometimes anger of people who aren't the parents of those children.
She's a "helicopter mom." Her attentiveness to her too-tiny brood makes her as reviled as the mothers who once filled op-ed pages by selfishly having too many children, and thus couldn't dote on all of them enough, raising a prior generation of people who insisted on being younger than the people writing about them.
Blank Page Millennial may view not having a child before the age of 27 less as failure – and more as "smart move" or a "lucky break," yet he is deluged with op-eds about his unwillingness to meet dated markers of maturity.
He ought to own a house by now, he's told, while being accused of being financially illiterate. This may confuse our dedicated, page-filling Blank Page Millennial – or it may just cause him to wonder whether it's prudent to take financial advice from an industry that devotes so much of its resources to alienating its next generation of subscribers.