Can't You See It, Man?

David Brooks studies his son's generation:

Just 26 percent of millennials are married, compared with 48 percent of boomers at that age. Only 42 percent plan to have kids. They are also having less sex. A study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior projected that millennials would have eight sexual partners by middle age while boomers had 10 or 11. According to a survey from the online dating service Match, 49 percent of people in their 20s have not had sex in the past year.

The general impression one gets is of a generation that is stressed, energetic, creative, skeptical and in the middle of redefining, and thinning out, the nature of affiliation. Its members have been thrust into a harsher world where it is necessary to be guarded, and sensitive to risk.

They want systemic change but there is no compelling form of collective action available. Their only alternative, which is their genius, is to try to fix their lives themselves, through technology and new forms of social interaction, rather than mass movements.

Oddly, there are no millennial columnists writing today at the NYT to respond... Le sigh.
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ADDED:  ON this:

Their attitudes toward Social Security perfectly reflect this stance. Most millennials expect to see no Social Security benefits by the time they retire. But they oppose reforms to take money away from older workers to distribute it downward. They just figure they’ll take care of retirement individually, often using algorithm-based investment vehicles like Wealthfront.

I think Brooks forgets: whatever their Boomer parents collect from the system, likely trickles into their own pockets one day, as Boomers guard their young more than in past generations and provide for them (and their children) for longer and longer periods into adulthood... *

Some of them -- to clarify. Certain classes of Boomers and millennials; the ones Brooks is writing about and over-analyzing here.

(Interesting that while he gets into their sex lives in detail, he does not mention the millennial's choice of drugs, legal and illegal, or use and abuse of stimulants and depressives, like alcohol, pills and heroin.

Personally, I think that would have made a for a more realistic column, and a true comparable of the two generations: what are they trusting to put in their bodies that influence their social choices and actions, like the less driving now and preference for conformity over competition in the workplaces, schools?

Perhaps some have unknowingly surrendered independence for the promise of greater freedoms?

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, millennials change jobs less frequently than people in other generations. And a study of 25,000 millennials in 22 countries by Jennifer J. Deal and Alec Levenson found that at least 40 percent expect to stay with their current employer for at least nine years. Forty-four percent said they would be happy to spend the rest of their career at their current organization.

Millennials travel and move less than earlier generations. They are less likely to have cars, and their relative lack of driving time is not compensated for by the use of other modes of transportation.

Of course, that observation would fly in the face of what Brooks concludes:

Another glaring feature of millennial culture is they have been forced to be self-reliant and to take a loosely networked individualism as the normal order of the universe. Millennials have extremely low social trust. According to Pew Research, just 19 percent say most people can be trusted, compared with 40 percent of boomers.

What do I know?  I'm just in the generation sandwiched between father and son, born in 1968 myself.*

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* I've always thought 1965 was an artificial distinction as to when the Boom babies ended; and perhaps post-1973 (the year Roe came down) ought to be a better marker of the shift in generations.  No one writes about that:  how Roe affected the numbers in the classrooms, how society defined who was wanted and unwanted, and the eventual shift in attitudes of the people who came before, and after...

(ie/ the prevalence of children with disabilities, and Down syndrome, whose presence previously was accepted, albeit often hidden, as just a natural part of life...)