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Millennials Are Sharing The Biggest Lies We've Been Told As A Generation

Millennials Are Sharing The Biggest Lies We've Been Told As A Generation

Buzz Feed23-06-2025
Millennials were raised on promises of flying cars, stable careers after college, and the dream of owning a home. But here 2025, none of that feels remotely true.
We're drowning in student debt, hustling through a gig-based economy, and watching Gen Z ironically recycle our baggy jeans, along with the rest of the early 2000s trends we wore unironically.
While deep-diving through r/Millennials, I came across a post asking millennials to share the biggest lies they were told growing up. From participation trophies to the myth that turning on your car's cabin light at night is illegal, these responses pull back the curtain on just how many tall tales shaped our generation.
"That millennials created participation trophies. I was 7 in 1988 when my summer baseball team placed second-to-last in league play, and every player was literally awarded a trophy. I PROMISE you, at the age of 7, I did not have the resources to order trophies for myself and all my teammates."
"The food pyramid and the idea that different areas of the tongue taste different flavors."
–u/Square-Hedgehog-6714
"Take out student loans to pay for your degree, and you'll definitely get a job making enough to pay off the loans."
"You will write all your papers in college in cursive. Lmao."
–u/Briebird44
"If you're a good driver and don't have any claims, your insurance rates will decrease over time."
"That our future was going to be so much better than our parents'. We were all going to be high paid white collar workers, and the economy was going to keep growing fast enough to make that a possibility for everyone. Lol, instead our life expectancy is going down while retirement age keeps going up and the economy isn't even keeping up with inflation."
"Quicksand is a common thing and knowing how to escape it will likely save your life one day."
–u/akronguy84
"Discussing your salary with coworkers is wrong."
"Don't talk to strangers on the internet. Don't get in a stranger's car. Today, I use the internet to hail an Uber so I can get into a stranger's car. But really though, stranger danger was really overblown when we were kids and has made society more insular and crappy."
–u/clothespinkingpin
"'Hard work will bring success.' Total bullsh*t. This is literally what you tell exploited workers. They told our parents, and our parents told us, believing them."
"That the United States was built on a system of checks and balances and that the President is not a king."
–u/Liquid_1998
"'You'll become more conservative when you're older.' That's bullshit."
"The Philadelphia Eagles will never win a Super Bowl."
–u/Kindly-Leather-688
"Be loyal to your job and they will stand behind you 100%. Cue the Great Recession early in my career…luckily, it showed me early on that loyalty to a company is BS. I'm loyal while there, but if I get an uneasy feeling at some point, I'm looking out for myself."
"'Cellphones and the internet are rotting your brain. We don't allow phones in this classroom.' Fast forward to 2025, when you need a cellphone to order at a restaurant, and the internet to basically make money. Without either, you basically don't exist, but back in the day, you weren't allowed more than 30 minutes on a cellphone, if even."
–u/Legal-Baseball9203
"Turning on the car cabin light while driving at night is illegal."
–u/poison-rationality
"Video games will get you nowhere in life. Now I see teenagers and 20-somethings making six figures or more streaming online. It's wild how you can never really know the future (but act like you do)."
–u/sstubbl1
"That you couldn't eat a vegetable or fruit seed because a plant will grow inside of you (curious to know if this was something in other countries, too)."
–u/Admirable_Green_1958
What do you think has been the biggest lie told to millennials as a generation? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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If emoji belong to everyone and no one, who gets to say what the default meaning might be? Emoji are less a language than they are 'insurgents within language,' Keith Houston writes in Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. As his lively exploration of the form usefully puts it, they are the 'lingua franca' of the web, and the route they have traveled is more complicated than you might think. Their antecedents are ancient (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Mesoamerican pictograms), though the journey from their modern birthplace (Japan circa the turn of the millennium) to their current ubiquity has been quick. That doesn't mean it has been smooth. Houston is contagiously enthusiastic about 'vibrant, vital emoji.' 🤗 He is also alert to the mixed blessings of the icons' versatility, their 'many-splendored entanglement with the written word.' Emoji, he writes, are 'a colorful and symbiotic virus whose symptoms we have only haltingly understood.' 🦠 Ambiguity, for emoji, is both a feature and a bug. One symptom of their elasticity is that no one can agree, exactly, on how to categorize them. Ever since their emergence, they have stirred debate among linguists. On their status as a language—implicitly recognized in 2015, when The Oxford English Dictionary named 😂 as its 'Word of the Year'—the consensus is 🤔: They are language-like without being language. (Houston suggests that 'body language' is a helpful way to think about them.) They're symbol-like, yet unlike most symbols, they constantly change in meaning and number. Can they function as punctuation (❣️🤡😬🔥)? Maybe they're better viewed as tactfully ambiguous conversation-enders—useful, as the writer Katy Waldman put it in 2016, for 'magicking us out of interpersonal jams.' Exiting his own definitional jam, Houston turns to the rich story of how emoji came to be. The ones most familiar today are typically attributed to the Japanese engineer Shigetaka Kurita; in 1999, a series of images that he designed were shared among users of Japan's main mobile carrier (teenage girls were the envisioned customers). Even the origin story of emoji, though, is muddied by questions about who really made them what they are. There are other contenders for 'first emoji' honors, Houston points out—so many, he writes, that 'it is no longer possible to imagine that emoji were ever 'invented' in the strictest sense of the word.' Instead, they evolved as so many technologies do: through a combination of accident and intention. In emoji, Japan's singular aesthetic traditions—manga and anime, in particular—achieved a form of universality. Emoji made use of manpu, the genre tropes commonly understood to convey amusement, anxiety, and other emotions. Exploding in popularity as digital chatting caught on—an ascent that accelerated when Apple, Google, and their fellow behemoths became emoji adopters—the pictograms acknowledged no national boundaries. In 2011, a year after emoji officially came under the supervision of a nonprofit called the Unicode Consortium, Apple introduced an emoji keyboard to its U.S.-marketed iPhones, bringing hearts and party poppers and sun-yellow faces to text messages throughout the land. The website Emojipedia, aiming to provide an exhaustive catalog of emoji, arrived in 2013. In 2014, a campaign got under way on the digital-petition site 'The Taco Emoji Needs to Happen,' it announced. The petition received more than 30,000 signatures, and the 🌮 was born. Taco Bell had been the catalyst. Two years later, an article titled 'A Beginner's Guide to Sexting' outed another 🌮 meaning, one its corporate sponsor likely never anticipated (vagina). Emoji, the not-quite-a-language language, were becoming part of the world's linguistic—and commercial—infrastructure, importing some of the unruliness of IRL interaction into virtual spaces. People used emoji to accentuate (👏🎉😂). They used emoji to hedge (😑🤔🌤️). They used emoji to joke (😜). They used emoji to flirt (😍😉). Emoji were pictures that could extend people's voices, visual icons that could help convey intended tone. They said nothing precisely, and that allowed them to express a lot: enthusiasm, sarcasm, anger, humor. They followed the same broad arc that the internet did; having originated as quirky novelties, they were becoming utilities. By the mid-2010s, the 'staid old Unicode,' as Houston comes to call the Consortium, had discovered the headaches accompanying 'emoji fever.' The organization, launched in 1991, was composed of a rotating group of engineers, linguists, and typographers charged with establishing coding consistency across the internet's static characters (letters, numbers, and the like); its goal was to enable global communication among disparate computers. Now it found itself overseeing dynamic characters as the public clamor for more emoji mounted. The Consortium was the gateway to new emoji: It invited the public to suggest additional icons. But its technologists were gatekeepers, too. They reviewed the applications, assessing the level of demand. They were the ones who decided which images to add—and which to deny. (Durex's campaign for a condom emoji fell short.) The annual unveiling of their decisions became, in some quarters (🤓), a much-anticipated event. Each new 'emoji season' brought fresh collections of icons to users' devices. But each also stirred reminders of the icons that weren't there. Faced with feedback from users frustrated by icon selection that could seem capricious and unfair, the arbiters did their best, Houston suggests, to gauge popular support for new candidates. But lapses in the lexicon were obvious, as a mere sampling reveals. Early on, 'professions' were depicted as masculine by default. 'Couple' was a man and a woman. The woman's shoe was a ruby-red heel. Representations of food reflected the pictograms' Japanese origins and U.S. tech dominance, but not their worldwide story. In the quest for more choices—and in response to users' campaigns—the Consortium added, among many other emoji, an array of food items. (They were not always culturally authentic: In an attempted nod to China's culinary traditions, a takeout box joined the lexicon.) In 2015, the group introduced five 'realistic' skin-tone options for humanlike emoji figures. The update brought unintended consequences. Lined up next to other hues, the sunny yellow originally meant to scan as race-neutral (in the lineage of the classic smiley face, Lego mini-figures, and the Simpsons) now read, to some, as racist. Light skin tones, intended to reflect users' skin color, evoked, Houston notes, a similar reaction: Some saw the choice of those light-hued symbols as a 'white power' gesture. Complexity, when emoji are involved, will always find its way back. The Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee—a 'crack team of emoji wranglers,' in Houston's words—had its hands full. Gender updating in particular proved challenging. Early Unicode guidance on depicting emoji people had emphasized, but not required, striving for gender neutrality. To move beyond stereotypes, should equity or androgyny lead the way? Same-sex couples and same-sex parents were soon included. Women were liberated, as one peeved op-ed writer had urged, from 'a smattering of tired, beauty-centric' emoji career options: 16 professions, available in male and female versions, were added. To Houston's surprise, the 2017 gender-focused emoji season met with no political or press furor—perhaps owing to public 'emoji fatigue,' he speculates. (Androgyny lived on that year, for the most part, as fantasy—through the magical figures issued in the new batch 🧙🧚🧛🧜🧞.) How much control, at this point, the subcommittee can exert over emoji denotation and connotation isn't clear. Unicode's emoji now coexist with platform-specific icons that users can customize for themselves (think: stickers, Bitmoji, Memoji). The latest iterations, such as Apple's Genmoji, use artificial intelligence to create ever more adaptable pictograms. Meanwhile, Unicode's emoji are becoming only more protean: The 💀 has expanded from a mark of disapproval to a sign of amusement (death via laughter). The 😭 might suggest laughter too now, in addition to its sobs. When words have oppositional meanings like this, context typically helps clarify which one applies—thanks to accompanying text, you can probably tell whether the 🍑 you just received is a fruit, a body part, or a call for impeachment. The 👍 and other emoji similarly used as stand-alone replies are part of a different class: They bring ambiguity without resolution. They bring a whiff of Babel. But myths have their own ambiguities. Although the Babel story conjures the arrival of a dystopia—a people perpetually lost in translation—it's also a creation myth: an ancient attempt to explain why people with so much in common are divided by their languages. Understandably, we tend to focus on the ending of the Babel tale, but it begins with humans in community. Only later does language divide them. For most of human history, communication barriers have made us illegible to one another. Emoji float, merrily (mostly), over the barriers. And their ambiguity is essential to their buoyancy. Emoji, as images, can never be tethered to one meaning. Even if 'emoji season' ceases to yield new crops, the icons that exist will keep evolving. They will keep challenging us to evolve with them. The namesake of Houston's book, the 'face with tears of joy,' has long been the world's most popular emoji. It has also been, according to recent reports, the subject of another Gen Z pronouncement: The 😂 is cringe. What it communicates, above all, is the hopeless unhipness of its sender. I use it anyway, mostly out of habit but also because, to me, joyful beats cool every time. And my 😂 are in good company. Each day, around the planet, billions of 😂 ping across screens. Their usage might decline in the future. Their primary meaning might change. For now, though, they are what we have. For now, because of them, we can laugh together across the distance.

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