The Baby Boomer vs Millennials vs Gen Z talk is never ending. I find joy in watching @champagnecruze‘s TikToks where he embodies the differences so hilariously.

For anyone who is unaware, millennials have crawled and clawed our way through life so future generations could soar. I know it may come off as biased given I myself am a millennial, but walk with me.

It is commonly known that our baby boomer parents had it very good. They lived in the era where single-income households were a thing and thrived. My own parents were no exception. My mother decided to stay at home when we moved from Zimbabwe to South Africa then to Ghana and back to Zimbabwe over the course of my childhood. My father’s company handled our school fees, provided company cars, accommodation, drivers, cooks for us and even paid for our overseas holidays to England, France, Mauritius and so on.

In 2024 – this hardly exists. If at all. As soon as companies realised they could do away with office perks when Covid kicked in, they capitalised on this. With employees being forced to fund their own work-from-home set-ups by themselves for the most part. Do you think these same companies are scrambling to pay for overseas vacations for anybody?

Millennials have witnessed how good life was thinking we got next. And what we got next were high-levels of debt thanks to student-loans, inflated costs of living, sky-rocketing property prices, economic instability, political volatility and social division in many regards.

We may be the laughing stock, but we have lived through the digital revolution – knowing what it was like to do homework using paper, pen, dictionaries and encyclopedias; having to wait – at the agreed upon time – by the phone when someone said they would call; recording music from our favourite radio stations on cassette tapes so we could jam out later; to fiddling with floppy discs; to having one computer for the whole fam with slooooooooooooow dial-up internet; to getting mobile phones where ‘Snake’ was our form of scrolling on social media; to seeing true superstardom rise and fall; and to now, where everyone has creative power and opinions that can be shared at the tap of a button with the rise of social media.

We also witnessed many a recession, wars, pandemic, natural disasters and sky-rocketing home prices. And we just had to adapt. We have dealt with the toxicity of our ancestors and spent so much on therapy to undo and work through our traumas. We have had to call out the generations before as we seek a better, more liberated world for ourselves and future generations. All while living off pay-checks that the Don Drapers of the world would spend in one evening of inebriation.

So please, give us our cred. And also feel free to start a housing fund for us. We are enough with being judged for not having what our parents had whilst trying to keep our sanity. Thanks.