We are all fucked but let’s blame the Millennials anyway

“Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.”  Time Magazine cover story.

Thanks Time magazine, you give me the warm and fuzzies.  By the way good luck with that whole print magazine thing, I’m sure it’ll turn out great for you.  I’m sure Egon was wrong when he said “print is dead” all those years ago.

But anyway, to be blunt, fuck you.  How dare you cast aspersions on an entire generation and so casually write off people.  Lazy?  This is an extremely competitive market with people competing desperately for jobs far below their skill set and  education.  My generation is a group of people saddled by debt from unwieldy, and let’s face it unfair, student debts.  We compete for subpar jobs with employers who face no repercussions for paying us a s little as possible and treating us a poorly as possible.  There is a reason people are protesting.  There is a reason there are so many people quitting their day job and jumping into start ups.  We aren’t lazy as a whole.  We are not necessarily hard working as a whole either.  But to survive and do reasonably well my generation needs to be either lucky or scrappy.  And luck only cuts it for part of the time.

Entitled?  Narcissistic?  Maybe.  But I have a few counters for this.  One is starkly obvious.  We aren’t as old or experienced.  Experience has yet to teach many of the generation that they aren’t special.  They are unique and wonderful, we all are, but they aren’t inherently better than others.  To butcher Socrates we can think of it this way, the more I know the more I understand that I know so little (“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”).  That’s a hard pill to swallow.  It makes sense to me now but when I was an idiot teenager I thought I was brilliant.  I really did.  I thought my life would be simple and without great difficulty as I got older (immensely foolish)  How could I have possible think I was so smart?  It isn’t sheer arrogance it’s simply the foolishness of youth.  Immaturity.  It is only cured by time.  We can’t simply judge a group of people at one age against another group at a more advanced age.  We also cannot judge them when our society has changed so drastically.  It simply is unfair and unrealistic.  And that is another thing that confuses me.  The older generation either is unwilling to admit this, willfully ignorant, completely oblivious, stupid, or looking through rose colored glasses.

Our culture does us no favors.  Just look at the dismay state of education.  It is simply an incubator.  We hold onto the youth for a certain amount of years and let them fend for themselves after.  We remove so much content from schooling in the hopes of pushing them through faster and more efficiently that we no longer care about the quality of the time spent.  We teach to the lowest common denominator far too often.  We let bad behavior and poor decisions go unpunished.  We teach the children that not trying is a valid method for success.  Why should they put in effort?  Parents have no issue complaining to a teacher.  Administration has less concerns with educating children than with keeping things in line and prepping them for the next test.  Testing is ruining our schools.  They are rewarded or punished on these tests.  Why should schools do anything but simple prepare the kids for it.

We coddle these children.  We prevent them from harm.  We tell them they are special.  I understand every kid gets to play mentality but you don’t hold back the star.  We celebrate mediocrity in schools.  Children leave school ill prepared for the world at large.  We expect them to pick up the slack at paid schooling.  We force college education on them because we failed them at lower levels.  The institutions of education are failing our future generations and we stand idly by uncertain and confused.  I know many times I deserved lower grades or certain reprimands but I coasted by.  It taught me awful behaviors that I had to later unlearn.  I cannot simply coast through life.  I cannot rely on simply being smart.  The world isn’t handing out opportunities.  But for some reason as a much younger man I thought I was owed an opportunity.  I knew I was smart.  But that means nothing.  I’m just a number, a few letters on a piece of paper on a resume to some HR person. The paper they shuffle through (emails now) don’t convey that so simply.  Having it so easy for so long was not conducive for a strong head start in my career.  For my hubris and foolishness I suffered many years moving from one shitty job to another slightly less shitty job.  Now I have a moderately respectable big boy job I’m not ashamed of.  I figured it out on my own through hard work.  I dealt with ignorance and cocksureness saddled on me by an older generation too weak to say, “things are hard out there.”  If only they hadn’t expected me to magically grow up at eighteen and come to a conclusion on my own.

I’m not saying it’s easy to tell your children they aren’t geniuses.  I’m not saying it’s easy to tell the young that things are rough out there and it might not get better.  But it’s worth it.  Children don't need friends.  They need parents.  Tell them no and tell them often.  Protect them but without insulating them.  And don't you dare complain it's hard.  Tough shit.  It's your responsibility as a parent.

Living at home?  Fuck you twice.  What do you expect us to do?  We know that salaries have gone done and the price of education has gone up (while the worth of education has gone down).  We know the market is competitive and saturated.  We know in order to survive people are taking whatever they can get.  And yet we complain that this generation moving home is simply out of shiftlessness.  Business seems more ruthless that ever.  The employees rights and benefits shrink as time passes.  The new work dynamic is mercenary work.  Jump from company to company slowly increasing your salary.  This replaces staying with the same company until you retire slowly working your way up and being rewarded for diligence.  The boys club is here and it’s here to stay for quite some time.  Good luck breaking into the group.

But times will change.  The boomers will eventually have to retire.  And the thing that should be pants shittingly terrifying is the people in charge will be us.  You eat up all that social security you assholes.  Leave nothing for us.  That’s fine.  You had your chance for change and your fucked it up.  You traded in the love ins and hippy rebellions for suits.  You ushered in a new era of greed and ruthlessness.  You have created and endless series of wars and acts of aggression.  You have lied and misled us.  And you have the nerve to call us self obsessed?  You think you can live comfortably in your golden years when we have to power.  You think it’s a good idea for the people how control your fate to be angry.  Guess what happens when some who was withheld power for so long finally gets it?  I envision a lighting strike in the background, a maniacal laugh and an old man releasing his bowels at the realization.  But maybe we as a generation who have seen the ruthlessness of those we look up to won’t mimic the behavior.  We might not behave in the same manner.  I fucking hope so.  Just because we were shit on doesn’t mean we should behave the way.

We are a generation of lost souls abandoned by our elders forced to fight amongst ourselves.  We are your creation.  You saw our anger and rage when we protested the 1%.  We saw your casual disgust and intolerance.  We can hope there might have been that rekindling of spirit you once had.  Maybe a remembrance of what happened in Ohio at Kent state all those years ago.  You railed against the police as dogs of your parents generation and yet you do the same to us with no sense of irony of hypocrisy.

We are a generation who is slowly finding its voice.  We are a generation of who lived through numbness of the nineties after the saccharin bullshit of the eighties.  We survived the awkwardness of the first decade of the century.  We are slowly coming back to coherence and we are angry.  Will we continue to cycle?  Will we cast off our yoke only to make those younger than us suffer?  I don’t know.  I have hope for us to be better.

But what can be done now?  The obvious answer is to educate the older generation and the media.  If the media who control what we consume and reaches the whole of society perceives my generation as slackers those are the hearts and mind that must be won over.  But it won’t be particularly easy.  Fortunately the way we gather news is in transition like so many other industries.  I get most of my news online.  I barely watch television and the print medium I read is books.

Small to medium side note, I much prefer actual books over reading off tablets.  I enjoy having the tactile sensation of pages turning as well as the smell of the pages, the ink and the binding.  I don’t have a terribly well defined sense of smell (due to an enlarged adenoid and deviated septum) but the old book smell, is one I have a great fondness for.  “The vanilla smell in old books comes from Lignin, a compound that is essential to trees having the stiffness to grow tall. Lignin comes out naturally in the paper pulp process which led to its prevalence in newspapers and book pages.”*

Of course turning the tide of media is not an easy job.  But places on the internet are the best forums for my generation to start.  Simply because most of these newer forums are controlled and visited by my generation.  The older “standard” news outlets are more and more borrowing from the internet sources.  Perhaps if there is an uproar there a cogent argument about the hypocrisy of the older generation may penetrate the culture.  Perhaps all that is needs is a push.  Our society is already gaining much ground in sexual equality perhaps economic and generational equality can come on it’s heels.

Ben

http://freshnews.gorhamsavingsbank.com/2011/10/bad-news-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cbook-smell%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-a-casualty-from-the-move-to-digital-books/