The backlash against Millennials is not only mostly unfounded, it’s also something that has been passed down since before even the Baby Boomers.

It’s common these days to see people complaining about Millennials. It feels as though you can’t turn on the news or look at a paper without hearing about how Millennials are a screwed generation. Millennials are supposedly a lazy generation that is full of themselves, but this view of a younger generation is nothing new. It’s something that has been perpetuated across the generations. Time magazine came out with an issue teasing the Millennials entitled ‘The ME ME ME Generation.’ But the Baby Boomers were given the nickname ‘The Me Decade’ as inspired by an essay written by Tom Wolfe. We’ve simply always perpetuated this disgust and disappointment in the younger generation.

We can’t even decide on solid dates for generations. The Millennial generation cut-off dates bounce around from the early 1980s to the early 2000s and everywhere in between. The fact that there aren’t obvious and solid dates for generations only serves to drive home the point that generation doesn’t really exist.

One of the most prevalent misconceptions is that Millennials are lazy and will more or less ruin the workforce. However, Joe Beccalori, the CEO of Interact Marketing who has watched his own workers, says that working with Millennials is just like working with any other generation. In an article he wrote for Forbes, he described that with every kind of worker you just need to find out a way to motivate them and Millennials aren’t any different. No generation has truly been different from one another. We are all the same.

The circulating of this culture is unhealthy. There’s the constant lack of faith in the generations the proceed us. We need to stop this way of thinking. Whether we’re Millennials or Generation X, Y, Z or whatever let’s be the first group of people to look at the children who will be the future and encourage them. Mold this world into something worth inheriting.