Still hating on millennials?

A new study released by boutique firm 747 Insights in partnership with consumer intelligence platform Collaborata found that the generational differences boil down to only three primary factors: age, societal norms, and technology.

The study, called "Generation Nation," surveyed over 4,000 Americans from their late teens to their early 70s to find out how they feel about everything from work to friendships to brands, and analyzed their responses. Millennials were defined as people born 1981-1997, meaning they're currently ages 20-36.

"What we've learned in our Generation Nation deep-dive is that, while behavior and beliefs may be influenced by generations, they're dictated by life stages," wrote the researchers, who decided to do this research to have cross-generational data points after years of studying millennials specifically. "In other words, how Gen Z is today is just as Gen X would have been today had Gen Xers been born 35 years later."

I spoke to principal researcher Michael Wood about the report, and floated my theory by him. Are millennials really so entitled, and lazy, and difficult to deal with? (You know you've heard it.) Why is hating on millennials so popular?

"If you go back in time, Boomers were also referred to as the 'me generation,'" Wood told me. "We've always carried biases against people who are younger than we are."

He continued: "I think part of why you hear so much about millennials is because they were a generation that was really set up to do so well. There was so much promise around millennials because of technology and the internet and how strong the economy was - this is a generation that held so much promise. Just their size alone made them a force to be reckoned with." There are over 75 million of us, according to Pew.