The trend of Millennials buying RVs is quite illuminating.
"Millennials" are not a homogeneous group. The oldest of them are in their late thirties living in the suburbs with their kids. The youngest are in their early to mid-twenties, stereotypically living with their parents or renting apartments in the city. “The majority of researchers and demographers start the generation in the early 1980s, with many ending the generation in the mid-1990s.”
If one looks at statements in the RV industry and in conservative media like Forbes and Business Insider, it is a story about how Millennials actually do have a lot of money and they are enjoying life in a capitalist society that supposedly provides so many opportunities. This might describe the older Millennials living in the suburbs with kids.
But if one digs deeper, buying an RV is a careful purchase for these older Millennials. They do their homework. The RV keeps the family together for local trips on the weekend or during the vacation (summertime). This saves them money, similar to the way having Netflix rather than going to the movie theater or having cable TV saves them money.
There is also a second narrative that one finds regarding Millennials and RVs. This is buying an RV as a fulltime abode. Many Millennials are not buying starter homes and gradually moving up the ladder to the final "dream home". Some of them, however, are buying small RVs and eventually trading them in for larger models. These are the younger Millennials who rent apartments, and they rent because they cannot afford houses, and also because buying a house would reduce their mobility, which they need to find jobs. Buying an RV for them is not a cheap weekend getaway with the kids, but a way of getting away from paying rent. Also, they often work online, and living on the road is therefore not a hindrance for them.
Note that Circa is not establishment media. Circa is oriented toward Millennials, but has been described as conservative by liberals.
Sinclair says that it aims to "let the content drive [Circa]" and not let the site adhere to any set political or cultural viewpoint, describing Vice News and Breitbart as "partisan-driven" news sites the new Circa would not intentionally emulate. Though Sinclair has aired conservative political content on its stations, its stated intention with Circa is to present information with "no spin, just facts and transparency" and in "an irreverent tone" that will allow the site's target audience (young adults 18 to 35 years old) to form its own opinions.
An "irreverent tone" is politically ambiguous because Trump has an irreverent tone. It could be that the Millennial demographic is characterized by irreverence across the political spectrum. That is, liberal Millennials watch Stephen Colbert and love his irreverence, and conservative Millennials love a certain anti-liberal political incorrectness. If Circa strives to have an across-the-board irreverence, liberals might perceive this as conservative and conservatives might see it as liberal. In that case, rather than attracting a large audience and having a broad appeal, Circa might not click with those Millennials who are ideologically committed (although they would read articles from Circa that were reposted, rather than faithfully tune in to the Circa website, as Circa would prefer).
If irreverence is a quality of Millennials, how does that distinguish them from Generation X or the Baby Boomers? It would seem to be a matter of degree only. In fact, the characteristic qualities of the “Millennials” seem to be exhibited by all current living generations of Americans. The differences might be that among young adults those tendencies are slightly more pronounced because of their relative vulnerability to the same environment that shapes all Americans, and the greater flexibility of young people in adopting new technology. But one does not find that young adults have profoundly different values and attitudes. And so looking for the defining traits of “Millennials” simply leads to a big, contradictory mess.
Are Millennials in fact so different from earlier generations? Instead of going broke by buying big cars and big houses, some Millennials are instead going broke showing off their shopping sprees and travel on social media. They seem just as materialistic and status conscious as their parents.
In fact, home buying behavior of Millennials seems to be not much different from any other generation when student debt and the housing shortage are taken into account.
Does public discourse on “Millennials” actually refer to that narrow segment of young adults who are educated and urban? In this narrow subset, one finds is that while they have problems like everyone else, they find solutions.
The urban housing crisis is one example of the versatility, open-mindedness and creativity of this group. When they cannot afford to rent an apartment, they will live communally in dorms and share their bathrooms.
The objective is to find hints or intimations of what the future may hold by studying this segment of young adults. It is important to remember that among this generation, it is a minority who opt for these novel modes of living, so it is a marginal phenomenon. Nevertheless the implications are interesting.
It could be that this segment of the young adult population is helping to drive down the cost of housing by opting for dormitory life and living in RVs. In the articles, they claim that they will never go back to a more conventional life of living in a house or apartment. That might signify permanent and significant change in the way that some Americans live, but it remains to be seen.
But their mode of living is also so often collectivistic and group-oriented, which usually suggests a certain conservatism. Indeed, it was predicted in one research project that Millennials would be more like the generation of the Great Depression and WW2 because of a four-generational cycle.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe believe that each generation has common characteristics that give it a specific character with four basic generational archetypes, repeating in a cycle. According to their hypothesis, they predicted millennials will become more like the "civic-minded" G.I. Generation with a strong sense of community both local and global.[3] Strauss and Howe ascribe seven basic traits to the Millennial cohort: special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving.
Aside from alleged generational cycles, one concrete mechanism that drives people to be more group oriented is economic crisis. For example, during the Great Depression divorce rates fell, not because people were discovering domestic bliss, but because they could not afford to get divorced. Prosperity tends to stimulate individualism and crisis tends to promote collectivism. Both are very appealing in some ways, and lamentable in other ways. Neither individualism nor collectivism might be expected to be long-term trends in this context, because they are often merely temporary reactions to economic conditions.
However, when a certain subset of educated Millennials opt for RVs and dormitories, it might indeed signify a trend in the context of changing technology, where they simply don’t need that much space to be happy. In fact, they claim that they have never been happier living in their RV or in a dorm in the city, and that they will never go back to conventional housing. This has the whiff of a new trend, in being both novel and popular.
But here's a takeaway for liberals who gush that Millennials represent the ascendancy of 1960-style, anti-materialistic counter-culture values:
1. There seems to be a selective focus in the literature on one segment of Millennials (one-third?) who are educated and urban, and they are taken to be emblematic.
2. This urban, educated sub-set of Millennials differ from their parents in terms of using new technology and having less money, not so much in terms of new values.
3. What new attitudes they may display might be considered "conservative" (family and group orientation).
4. The 1960s weren't quite so liberal or radical either (e.g., the TV show "Mad Men", which is popular with Millennials for its modernist style).
