Unlike the Fox 5 media meltdown, last week’s lengthy piece in the New York Times thoughtfully explores the complexities of being twentysomething in America. Instead of simply bashing us for being young and doing the things that young people do, the author posits that Generation Y is actually in a new life stage called “emerging adulthood.”

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The traditional cycle has, indeed, gone off course, to the dismay of many in the older generation. But just because young people have decided to buck the so-called “orderly progression” of life events, doesn’t mean we don’t get to qualify for full adult status. What may have defined our parents, and even our parents’ parents, is not necessarily what defines us.

And what did define our parents exactly? What made them into adults? The author seems to equate adulthood with several forms of stability: living situation, job security and marital status.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

Now there is some truth there, at least for me. I usually move to a new apartment every year. I’ve already had five jobs and I’m only 27. I had to move back home with my mom in 2006 after breaking up with my live-in fiancé. (Ironically, that relationship ended because after we got engaged, he had demanded that I stay home and be a housewife after grad school instead of actually making use of my degree.) And I’m still single.

So yes, times are a’changing, but many behave as if all the changes are coming about all because of twentysomethings. It’s actually a combination of the evolving societal trends of both Baby Boomers and Generation X. Only 61% of Millennials grew up in a two-parent household, a smaller percentage than the three previous generations. Many of us didn’t even see marriage in our daily lives growing up. My mother and father were never married, which may be part of the reason why I never saw marriage as a top goal for my life. I always thought there were things that were more important to focus on as an adult.

But then again, what is adulthood? If it’s defined as going to college, finding a steady job, getting married, then having 2.5 kids and a station wagon, then my generation is way behind. Although we’re being hailed as the “most educated generation in American history,” only 21% of Millennials are married (half the percentage of our parents’ generation at the same ages).

Indeed, the author of the NYT article lays out the five milestones of adulthood as such:

1. Completing school
2. Leaving home
3. Becoming financially independent
4. Marrying
5. Having a child

To her credit, the author does acknowledge the fact that all young people don’t move toward adulthood at the same pace, sometimes by choice.

Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace. Some never achieve all five milestones, including those who are single or childless by choice, or unable to marry even if they wanted to because they’re gay. Others reach the milestones completely out of order, advancing professionally before committing to a monogamous relationship, having children young and marrying later, leaving school to go to work and returning to school long after becoming financially secure.

Or maybe…young people just aren’t buying into this rigid model of adulthood.

What if young people are simply defining adulthood in a totally different way? What if we instead define adulthood as figuring out your purpose in life? Well, my friend, then that’s where you would see that Generation Y is way ahead of the game. My peers are all trying to find ways to be able to follow their dreams. We’re all seeking that sweet spot of doing what we love and getting paid for it, often flocking to nonprofits or startup companies. Millennials are looking for meaning in their careers, after having seen our parents work themselves to death, often unhappy with their jobs and rewarded with little promise of retirement, pensions or the ever-evolving Social Security. Why, even young lawyers are embracing their interest in public service.

And on the marriage front, more and more young women are delaying or forgoing marriage because, well, we can.

Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, a professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., says with more options, women are delaying marriage to pursue education and find the man they really love. ”It’s only in the last 20 years that women have said they’d marry just for love,” says Coontz.

Add that to the fact that young people do, on the whole, have a lot more options than our parents did at our age.  But it’s up to us to figure out which ones are best for us and when. And if we take a little longer to do that, so what? I think it’s more important that we make our own milestones, not these arbitrary ones that tell you nothing about how to find the joy and wonder in life. When are we supposed to figure out what really makes us happy?

So yes, I disagree with the idea of an “emerging adulthood” for twentysomethings. Instead, I believe we’re entering into a different kind of adulthood, one that’s different from our parents’ and one that we do, in fact get to define (and redefine) for ourselves.

Me and Mobilize.org’s Maya Enista were featured on Fox 5 News last night in a special segment about Generation Y. The piece was titled “Can Generation Y Deliver?” that ran with a companion text article called “Can Generation Y Keep America Great?” You can watch the video below (my clip begins at 1:45).

I think Maya and I tried to dispel some of the myths about our generation, yet the producers chose to focus on some of the more negative stereotypes associated with Millennials. Following our segment was a second piece that opened with a Baby Boomer business owner’s perceptions of his Generation Y employees. And that’s where it all started to go downhill.

Despite the constant interruptions by the biased reporter, the homie Swaptak held his own, and made an important point early on in the conversation:

There’s slackers in every generation.

Yes, there are also some 50 year olds out there sitting at their desks right now who may not be on Facebook, but who are not adding any real value to their company. So, it doesn’t make sense to attribute laziness to an entire generation simply because of our youth.

But this post isn’t about addressing all of the many #fails in the second segment. I just wanted to point out some of the problems with using this particular frame of pitting the younger generation vs. the older generation.

It Assumes That America Is, In Fact, Great

Yes, there are a lot of great things about our country, including the amazing legacy of service left by Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. But in many ways, that rich legacy is beginning to fall apart right along with our financial security. Have you seen the people in charge lately? Right now we are in desperate need of new, inspiring leadership to mend the social fabric of America and young people in every generation have always been able to bring that to the table. It’s also interesting how the older generation is slow to acknowledge their role in the shift in values that their kids may have grown up with. Many parents endeavored to give their kids everything they didn’t have, and now complain that Millennials have “had too much and they don’t realize what they do have and how to be grateful for what they’ve got.” One question: who were the ones who gave us “too much?” That’s right, our parents.

We also tend to forget that the America that Millennials were raised to live in is a much different America than the one older generations grew up in. My family, for instance, warned me against going into the military and instead encouraged me to get a college education and go out and make a good living for myself. Even though my grandfather fought for his country, he did not want that life for his granddaughter. He did not want me to ever have to go into war. He wanted me to live a different kind of life in a different kind of America.

Generation Y is Not a Monolith

Despite the plethora of studies that have been done on Millennials, the problem with most of them is that they represent a very narrow swath of young people: the white middle class. Yes, for some members of my generation, the typecast of not working hard and being entitled is true because they have been given everything. They have been spoiled. But for the rest of us, especially young people of color and low income Millennials, this is just not the reality. We have had to work damn hard just to fight our way into college and out of it. We have had to overcome enormous challenges of being raised in single-parent homes where there may not have been money to buy a computer or a cell phone to even begin to be “Digital Natives.” We have had to see our parents struggle to make ends meet, and for that reason, we try to figure out a way to create an easier life for ourselves. We don’t think we’re “too good” to deliver pizzas, we just know that we’re capable of so much more.

It Negates the Fact That Older Generations Use Technology, Too

Do you think that there aren’t 60 year old board members and CEOs who aren’t making money off of Twitter and Facebook? The technological inventions of my generation have allowed successful companies to become even more successful. Our constant “status updating” fuels an entire capitalist economy that our parents and grandparents profit from. If social media were as frivolous as they say, older people wouldn’t be using it at the same rate as young people.

‘Can Generation Y Keep America Great,’ then, is not a useful question for discussion. It’s actually really dumb if you think about the logic of potentially writing off a group of 80 million people living and working in America. We’re not going anywhere, y’all. For real. And if we want to have more productive collaboration across generations, we will need to get beyond the stereotypes and say what’s real. While it’s always a controversial media opportunity, nothing is ever really gained from these types of conversations.

So you can run and tell that. Homeboy.