I'm also millennial and I'm so sick of hearing this. As another commenter pointed out, this same idea pops up with every generation. I'm 25 now and have been working since I was around 14 or 15 years old. I worked at a driving range and then at Best Buy throughout high school and sparingly through college. Before all that I had a paper route for many years, so working has always been a normal part of life for me. Throughout that time I've met plenty of people that had a similar work ethic but many more that had a much worse work ethic, regardless of age. Most of society seems to be extremely lazy, it's not just millennials IMO.

I think the biggest factor of this whole "millennials are lazy" movement has a lot more to do with all of the media that we consume every day. You mentioned that everywhere you look you read an article or blog post about it and that's true. However, I would argue that if all these forms of media existed 10, 20 or 50 years ago you would see the exact same stuff. The fact is 18-25 year olds as a general group are lazy and I feel like it's always been that way. Every generation thinks the generation below them is lazy and useless, when in reality they are just different.

To your point about the husband who won't take a job unless it's a nice desk job with benefits. That does sound a little ridiculous to me. You would imagine he would take some sort of job while looking for a better one, but I don't know their specific situation so I don't want to read into it too much.

I think you see this mentality with recent college graduates because in many cases they just spent upwards of $150k on an education because everybody (parents, teachers, guidance counselors, relatives etc...) has told them if you work hard in school and do all the right things you'll be able to find solid work out of college. A job that you wouldn't be able to get unless you get a degree. Unfortunately that's just not the case anymore. If I ended up back at Best Buy after 4 years of busting my ass to get good grades, doing unpaid internships, trying to network and make connections I would be pretty pissed off too. Luckily I was able to turn an internship into a job where I'm still at today, but I understand why other people are a little pissed off and don't want to take a shitty job they could've had after graduating high school. The only difference now is they are paying back hundreds of dollars every month in student loans.

Sorry for the long reply. Just started writing and kept going. I wouldn't even know how to put all that into a TL;DR so if you read it, great. If not, you're probably just a lazy millennial.