The Gaslighting of the Millennial Generation

Gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of making someone question their own sanity or the validity of their experiences. A combination of outright lies, denial of things that happened, and generally questioning the subject’s thought processes and conclusions boils down to the end result of thinking you’re wrong or crazy for feeling the way you do. At its core, it’s an emotional abuse tactic. Have you ever gotten into an argument with a parent, boss, or romantic partner about something that upset you, but by the end of the argument, you’ve become the one apologizing for some wrongdoing? This is often a result of gaslighting. They flip it around and become the victim, and your original feelings never get resolved because the conversation always descends into the other person’s victimization. Eventually you stop challenging them at all. Imagine a similar scenario where you are applying for a job, but the job requires a college degree, and you can’t pay for a college degree without a job so you end up taking out massive loans. When you graduate, you can’t get a job without experience. So, you take a minimum wage job (or three) to make ends meet, often while working for free in a field related to your major to get a foot in the door. You dare to utter something like, “the minimum wage needs to be raised, people can’t live like this,” only to receive a barrage of old, crotchety white people yelling at you about how they got a college education working part time and how it’s your fault for taking out the loans in the first place. Caitlin Fisher calls bullshit. Millennials are driven by a need to empower each other and become independent from the status quo. And it’s pissing off the establishment something fierce. Anecdotal evidence is great, but there’s also science to back up the whimsical empowerment driving the millennial generation. There are some 80 million Millennials, making us the largest cohort in history