The media also report that, for instance, job seekers who have been out of work for more than six months are essentially unemployable. That idea is terrifying for a person of any age. But put it together with the employment statistic, and look at it from the perspective of a young person. We are being told that our lives could be over before they even begin.

It's a wonder that the same writers who have commented so perceptively on the Boston attack don't see the danger in that.

Pieces like Time's silly new cover story -- whose rollicking lede calls millennials "lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow" -- compound our problems by making us the problem, downplaying the role social forces like unemployment have played in our development. There is a particular irony to the timing of the story: It was posted online within hours of the International Labor Organization's new report on the global youth-unemployment crisis, which The Atlantic's Derek Thompson writes about here.

Yes, the Time story ends with an issue-selling, counterintuitive twist: Millennials are spoiled, but their personality traits suit them well to survival in a networked age. The second movement is cheap, and not as persuasively argued as the initial thesis. Articles like this provide older Americans with psychological justification for ignoring their guilt over the concrete problems young people face. If millennials are dreadful, even a little sociopathic, then why should anyone focus on improving their life prospects? This attitude, comforting and stimulating though it may be for older people, poisons the debate over youth issues. It is time for a reset.

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Millennials have had it easy in many ways, as the press never fails to note. But we also had a rough start: Our childhoods were punctuated by the September 11th terrorist attacks. Some young people use prescription drugs or marijuana as palliatives. But palliatives don't stop many of us from feeling that a society in trouble has decided to throw away its newest members first.

No doubt the frequent negative portrayals of millennials in the broader culture make this situation easier for our elders to stomach. The problems we face as a group are made into a spectacle by a press that calls us a tragic "lost generation" with one breath and "lazy," flighty, and "coddled" with the next. These problems are trivialized by glib portrayals in popular culture. (Lena Dunham is a gifted writer, but Girls does us no favors politically.) And as things go in the broader culture, so they go in the home. Loving parents who fret about their own children don't seem to realize that a generation, to some extent, rises and falls together. If the job market contracts, it squeezes all young people into lower-paying, lower-prestige jobs. If pessimism about the future breeds anxiety and depression in some of us, a bad attitude is likely to infect the rest of us. Clinching a full-time job doesn't feel like much of a victory if your best friend is still sleeping on his mother's couch.