A week or two ago I was reading, as I often do, Tim Challies’s daily blog. The observations he was making about millennials struck me as having exceptional insight. Take a look and see if what he writes strikes a chord with you in your own interactions with millennials at your workplace, in your retail outlet, at your gym – or even in your home …

We hear a lot about the millennials today, don’t we? Millennials are that generation born somewhere between the early eighties and around the year two thousand, which means they’re mostly young adults today. The way you hear some tell it, you’d think these millennials are the cause of or maybe the solution to just about every single problem in the world. Speaking personally, I love the millennials. Some of my favorite people just happen to be millennials. Well, I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with one of them and as I spoke with her, something clicked and I think I came to understand why that generation seems to be having some common struggles. So let me tell you today about the making of a miserable millennial.

Just a little while ago I was at the physical therapy clinic, getting some work done on my ailing arms and the therapist worked on me for a little while and then he handed off the treatment to this young student. She was there, I guess it was part of her training program. Now, if there’s ever a time you feel compelled to make small talk, I suppose it’s when someone is massaging your arms, or working over your arms in some way. And so, as she was doing that I started talking and I asked her about her program and about her work-place experience and what she planned to do with her life, and as we chatted, what came across was this deep discontentment. This deep sense of purposelessness. Really it was this deep, deep sadness. And I started asking myself, how did she get there? I know the neighborhood she’s from, and I tell you, it’s one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in all of Canada. So, it’s not like she’s lacking for anything in life. She went to a great high school and then had gone on to this higher education at a premier college. She had every privilege. She even had a work placement at what’s considered a really good clinic. And yet, as we talked, she was really, really unhappy. So how did she get to be su