The
perception
that tech-
savvy
young
people are
“smarter”
implies
they should
be getting
successful
more
quickly;
often
they’re not.
THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF SUCCESS
article first appeared—18-year-old Repub-
lican Saira Blair became the youngest U.S.
lawmaker when she was elected to the West
Virginia Legislature. She’s now out of poli-
tics at 23— the same age as fashion blogger
and magazine editor Tavi Gevinson, who
was 15 when she found internet fame. At
17, Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai became the
youngest person to win the Nobel Prize.
Now 22, the education and civil rights ad-
vocate hasn’t rested on her laurels.
As most millennials are slouching into
their 30s, these and other hypervisible hot-
shots are getting younger and younger,
whittling away at the maximum age limit
at which someone can get their “big break.”
For every young cultural force like
Lena Dunham or genius app creator like
Evan Spiegel, there are thousands of other
twentysomethings sitting in their parents’
basements wondering why they haven’t
invented an app or started a fashion line.
According to a Pew survey, young people
today have more debt than their parents
and grandparents did at their age and, for
those who don’t have at least a college de-
gree, less income—which means we’re the
least financially stable generation in re-
cent memory. We’re making life decisions
later than ever, delaying marriage and ba-
bies longer than previous generations did
(partly because of the cash-flow problems)
and taking much longer to settle into a ca-
reer. Yet, thanks to platforms like YouTube
and Kickstarter that remove the traditional
gatekeepers, there’s a pervasive expecta-
tion that young people should be achiev-
ing more, faster, younger.
“There’s a lot of attention paid to peo-
ple who have success very young, like Tay-
lor Swift and Mark Zuckerberg, but the
average young person is not coming into
their career until later these days,” says
Jean Twenge, the author of Generation
Me. “Across the board, what you can see
is much higher expectations among millen-
nials compared to boomers and Gen Xers,
but a reality which is if anything more dif-
ficult than it was for those previous gen-
erations when they were young.”
Middle-aged sourpusses have long com-plained about America’s cultural fixation
on youth, and to be fair, the Beatles weren’t
much older than Taylor Swift. Bill Maher
even devoted a segment of his show Real
Time to ageism, calling it “the last accept-
able prejudice in America.” But today, the
world is dominated by tech, and tech is
dominated by young people. “I want to
stress the importance of being young and
technical,” Zuckerberg, the co-founder of
Facebook, said in a speech to a Y Combina-
tor startup at Stanford in 2007. “Younger
people are just smarter.”
But even for those of us who happen
to be young, a youth-obsessed culture is a
pretty raw deal. The perception that young
people are “smarter” implies they should
be getting successful more quickly, and
often they’re not. “In the internet age, the
idea that fame is just out of reach has be-
come more common,” says Twenge, noting
that technological advances like YouTube
helped launch the careers of stars like Jus-
tin Bieber. “I think there’s an impression
that it’s easier to become famous now or
easier to be discovered... but that may
not be entirely true.”
That expectation that it’s easy to get rich
and famous may also contribute to some of
the negative stereotypes about millennials,
especially the reputation for laziness or en-
titlement. In other words, next to Lorde,
the rest of us look like schlubs.
“I don’t think they’re comparing them-
selves to those wunderkinds necessarily,
but maybe their elders are, who are so criti-
cal of them,” says Jeffrey Arnett, a doctor
who coined the phrase “emerging adult”
and says he’s found little evidence to sup-
port the claim that millennials are lazy. “I
wonder if that’s partly related to the fact
that you have these amazingly success-
ful young people, and people are saying,
‘Well, if Mark Zuckerberg can do this, why
can’t you?’ ”
Of course, none of these comparisons
are Taylor Swift’s fault, and she does every-
thing in her power to nix that competitive
instinct, especially among other women.
But the fact that young superstars seem to
have been born fully formed implies that