We’re Not Sensitive. We’re Tired.

Some in the older generation say millennials are too sensitive. We hear it all the time.

That we overreact. That we’re dramatic. That we take everything too personally.

You know… we’re the snowflakes.

But I don’t think we’re sensitive. I think we’re tired.

I’m an elder millennial. Born in 1984. Which means I came of age right on the edge of everything - analog childhood, digital adulthood, and a front row seat to a world that never seemed to settle down. Ever

Some of my earliest memories of the world beyond my own piece of family farmland in rural Morehouse Parish weren’t soft ones.

I was in kindergarten, sitting cross-legged on a classroom floor, writing letters to soldiers during Desert Storm. My kindergarten production was a patriotic, one where all the boys wore white, and all the little girls wore yellow dresses to represent the yellow ribbons we all had pinned to our clothes every single day, and we sang the national anthem and other patriotic songs. I didn’t fully understand what war meant, but I understood enough to know that adults were worried, that something big was happening somewhere far away, and that somehow we were supposed to help by sending words and singing songs and wearing ribbons.

That feeling - that low, humming awareness that something is wrong in the world - never really left.

A few years later, I remember the Oklahoma City bombing. Not in a fully formed, adult way. But in flashes. News clips. The tone in the room. The way tragedy entered homes through televisions and stayed there longer than it should have.

We didn’t have language for trauma the way we do now. We didn’t talk about how repeated exposure to crisis shapes a person. We just… absorbed it.

By the time I was older, school had already started preparing my public school peers for danger in ways that didn’t quite make sense at the time. Lockdown drills. Quiet lines. And always adults speaking in tones that felt just a little too serious for children.

Then the Columbine High School massacre happened, and suddenly it all made sense in the worst possible way.

That was a turning point.

Not just because of what happened, but because of how it was covered. We watched it unfold in real time. Over and over again. The beginning of tragedy as a continuous loop - footage, speculation, analysis, repeat. In the evangelical Church world, our leaders used it as a moment to remind us young adolescents that the opportunity to stand up for Jesus in the face of death was ever present, and we needed to be prepared

Around that same time, the 24-hour news cycle became the norm. There was no longer a break. No evening recap and then silence. The world’s worst moments became something we could access at any time of day, and eventually, something we couldn’t escape. Constant breaking news

And then came September 11 attacks.

I was at home alone with my little brother. Watching. Live. I saw that second plane make impact. In real time, through some camera person’s lens.

We don’t know what was going on. But we did understand one thing… something had shifted permanently.

The years that followed were defined by war. The War in Afghanistan. The Iraq War. Terms like “terror alert levels” and “weapons of mass destruction” became part of everyday vocabulary. It wasn’t a moment - it was a backdrop. Constant. Lingering. Always.

There were anthrax scares. News alerts. That persistent sense that something else could happen at any time.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit, and for those of us in the South, it wasn’t just something on a screen. It was close. Personal. The kind of devastation that rearranges not just landscapes, but entire lives.

Not long after that, we stepped fully into adulthood just in time for the Great Recession.

We were told to go to college. Work hard. Do everything right.

And then those of us who followed that universally pushed life plan graduated into a world where jobs disappeared, the housing market collapsed, and stability felt like something reserved for someone else.

We watched people lose homes. Careers. Retirement savings. Futures they had spent decades building.

And we learned, very quickly, that nothing was guaranteed.

As the years continued to flash by us, the crises didn’t stop. They just changed shape.

Mass shootings became more frequent. Then common. Then, horrifyingly, familiar. Names blurred together. Locations blurred together. The grief remained.

Social media rose up around us, promising connection - and in many ways, delivering it. But it also accelerated everything. News traveled faster. Outrage spread wider. Comparison became constant. There was no longer any distance between us and the world’s pain.

And then came the COVID-19 pandemic.

A global crisis that wasn’t contained to a headline or a place far away. It was everywhere. It was in our homes, our routines, our bodies. The world shut down overnight, and we were left to navigate uncertainty on a scale most of us had never experienced before.

Isolation. Fear. Loss. Division.

And somehow, even that didn’t feel entirely unprecedented - just… bigger. Heavier. Like the culmination of everything that came before it.

That’s the part that’s hard to explain.

It’s not just one event. It’s the accumulation.

It’s growing up in a constant state of alert. It’s learning, over and over again, that stability is temporary. That something can always shift. That the ground beneath you isn’t as solid as it looks.

So when people say we’re too sensitive, I want to ask…

Sensitive to what?

To instability?
To loss?
To the constant hum of “something’s not right”?

We’re not reacting to nothing.

We’re reacting to decades of something.

We are the generation that learned how to keep going anyway. To go to school after watching tragedy unfold on TV. To build careers in unstable economies. To raise families in a world that rarely feels settled.

We adapted.

But adaptation doesn’t mean immunity.

You can be strong and still be tired. You can be resilient and still feel the weight of what you’ve carried.

So no - we’re not sensitive.

We’re exhausted.

I’m an elder millennial.

No wonder my nervous system is shot.