This Viral Tumblr Thread Captures What It’s Like to Be a Millennial in the Workplace
It's a popular media narrative: Millennials are work-averse and whiny.
But if there's any truth to the above, there's also truth to this: Young adults today have reason to complain.
If they are the most educated generation to date, they're also paid peanuts and struggle to pay off staggering student loans, every class of college graduates more indebted than the last. Despite being entrepreneurial, they're often written off as irresponsible and frivolous.
For all these reasons and more, a Tumblr thread cataloguing the woes of the workplace millennial is going viral.
On FutureProof, four anonymous users have aired grievances under pseudonyms plucked from Greek mythology, lending support to the aforementioned "overeducated, underpaid" theory.
Meet "Millennial Cassandra."
She was hired to be her company's social media director because of her age, which in turn keeps her colleagues from taking her ideas seriously — even though she's apparently often right.
Meet "Millennial Persephone."
She "can't get a job without a degree, but because she had to take out loans to pay for college, she must spend one-third of her life working just to pay them off."
This is "Millennial Tantalus."
Tantalus' company is keeping him on as an unpaid intern and promise to hire him as soon as something opens up. The company posts new jobs every week, but his boss "shrugs apologetically" and tells Tantalus "he'll just have to make do with being paid in experience a little longer."
And then there's "Millennial Sisyphus."
This poor soul keeps seeing his job application attempts foiled when the online form deletes his resume information every time he hits "next page."
Millennial Sisyphus fears it will be like this forever.
Whether or not the anecdotes or the characters are authentic isn't clear, but it's also irrelevant. The experiences of Cassandra, Persephone, Tantalus and Sisyphus speak to a struggle that's all too real.
But we're not whining.
