Millennials
Millennials
[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: I'm just saying– White Hat: All these millennials will be in for a shock when they have to grow up and enter the real world.
[Zoom in on Cueball's head and upper body.] Cueball: Except... Cueball: "Millennials" started reaching adulthood about 20 years ago.
[Zoom out to full view of White Hat and Cueball facing each other in a frameless panel.] Cueball: Which means that some millennials can't respond to your criticism because they're busy taking their kids to check out colleges.
[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: But ...no, millennials are college kids! Cueball: Maybe they're not the ones failing to grow and change over time here.

According to the definitive chronology of generations , millennials are born between 1982 and 1999. Those born in 1982 reached adulthood (18 years) in 2000. As of writing of this comic (mid 2019), this is about 20 years ago. When the term became widespread around 2012, replacing the previous term "Generation Y", the average millennial was 21 years old, so the image was popularized of millennials as "college kids". The parlance of the word in everyday usage seems to be expanding so that it now includes not just those that were originally Gen Y, but also some younger Gen Xers, as well as current teens and college kids (many of whom are actually Gen Z/Generation 💅).
In this strip, White Hat expresses a sentiment of prejudice against millennials, claiming they aren’t prepared for “the real world.” This is a sentiment that sometimes can be found among those of older generations.
However, Cueball refutes this by saying that many millennials have been adults for almost 20 years, and those that had kids early on are taking them to college. This is due to another common misunderstanding, where the definition of “millennial” has changed so much, and expanded so often, that nobody really knows what it means anymore.
White Hat refuses to accept this, saying millennials are the college kids, to which Cueball says that maybe White Hat is the one not growing up and accepting that millennials are, in fact, adults. The title text builds on this, complaining that Randall has been having these discussions for over a decade.
The title text begins with the word "ironically," for what appears to be an entirely sincere complaint, possibly in reference to Alanis Morissette's pop song " Ironic ," which is often said to be a generation-defining hit among millennials, and which was widely criticized for misusing the word. Alternatively, Randall may simply be using "ironically" to mean "strangely".
White Hat has been similarly confused by what ages different generations are in 973: MTV Generation .
[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: I'm just saying– White Hat: All these millennials will be in for a shock when they have to grow up and enter the real world.
[Zoom in on Cueball's head and upper body.] Cueball: Except... Cueball: "Millennials" started reaching adulthood about 20 years ago.
[Zoom out to full view of White Hat and Cueball facing each other in a frameless panel.] Cueball: Which means that some millennials can't respond to your criticism because they're busy taking their kids to check out colleges.
[White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: But ...no, millennials are college kids! Cueball: Maybe they're not the ones failing to grow and change over time here.
