Reading the recent cover story Sucks to be Us in New York Magazine was enough to boil the blood of even the most jaded Gen Xer. The article, written by 20-something journalist Noreen Malone begins with an extended "gchat" between the author and her sister, who is bemoaning the fact that she has moved back in with her parents and is also seeking gainful employment. The narrative arc of the chat, written in that shorthand that anyone under 30 immediately recognizes and anyone over 30 finds annoying and grammatically embarrassing is a microcosm for the rest of the story, which essentially says that a generation raised to think that their shit did not stink, that merely showing up warranted a certificate and were so overscheduled with after-school activities and extra-curricular resume polishers entitled them to the American Dream the minute the ink dried on their diplomas but instead, they were slapped with the cold hand of life in the form of a tanking economy and a round trip ticket back into the nest from whence they sprung.
To which, on behalf of everyone else who has been there and done that, I quote the comedic genius Artie Lange: "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH". Guess what millenials? The universe is indifferent to the fact that you were the captain of the soccer team or spent a spring break feeding orphans in Somalia or that your mom and dad so coddled you that the mere whiff of criticism makes you break out into hives. The world does not owe you anything except the same heaping pile of shit and aggravation that the rest of us have been dealing with since you were in diapers. There are no guarantees in life, nothing is handed to you and not everyone is going to pucker up because you showed up to your job on time and did your work properly (it's the basic pre-requisite to *keeping* your job). Put your head down, shut the fuck up, drop your cell phone and do work, menial work, meaningless work, but work, work that makes you value work qua work, and understand that just because you do work, or learned fencing during your semester abroad in France, does not mean you will get ahead.
For a generation that reveres Palahniuk, you seem to have missed one of the key messages from Fight Club. You are *not* a unique snowflake. When you realize this, perhaps you will quit whining about the raw deal you were handed and go do something of value, or of complete meaninglessness (to you at least) because that's what people do. Your grandparents lived through a Depression and fought World War II. Do you think they were overly thrilled with the hand they were dealt? I know it's not as bad as losing your cell phone while you were bar hopping or having someone say something mean about you on Facebook, but work with me. Their grandparents (if they were black and living in the South) were not considered human beings, but chattel. The rest didn't have it much better, what with the hundreds of thousands of them that died either defending or attempting to subvert our Constitution (who did what is predicated largely on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you lived). Not quite as bad as not having extra sockets in your childhood bedroom to plug your iPad2 into, but pretty awful nonetheless. Your uncles and great uncles fought in a war that no one remembers (or commemorates), came back to a society that had passed them by and had to wear the label of the generation that "lost" a war (while wearing polyester leisure suits). Admittedly, this might not be as damaging as having your mom fold your laundry or your dad take the car you didn't pay for to the Jiffy Lube, but a challenge nonetheless.
Oh, and there's a whole segment of your own generation that has had limbs blown off, lost best friends and essentially been forgotten by the rest of us while they fought for our freedoms in far away lands for a cause that looks ever more murky and questionable the longer we are there. They come home broken, emotionally, spiritually and physically, carry the scars of war in their bodies and their psyches; of course, they did not have to suffer the humiliation of getting ditched at Bonnaroo or snubbed on LinkedIn by the recruiter you met at your college job fair, but hey, re-learning how to walk with a prosthetic leg is no fun.
Overachieving millenials, I do feel your pain, but when I got out of college in the middle of the last recession and had 100 rejection letters thumbtacked on my wall, I didn't wrap a kafiyyah around my head and complain about my student loan debt or how I got hosed out of my dream job at the non-profit I wanted to work at, I worked - I worked in a dry cleaners, I worked in a retail store, and I worked for a catering company. I hustled to make money while keeping my long-range focus of becoming a lawyer in mind. It sucked, I hated it, but I did it because mom and dad weren't letting me live rent free in my childhood bedroom and paying my cellphone bill.
When I took out loans to go to law school, I knew full well what that meant and what my obligation would be. Even so, the first job I had out of law school didn't even come with a paycheck- yes, I volunteered because I wanted a foot in the door in the office I was working, and eventually, I got in and even after I got in, I was paid peanuts, and scrimped and got by on nothing for a long time but I did it because I loved what I did and it had meaning. Eventually, I got to a place where I earned enough to pay down that debt and ultimately retire it in 9 years, not 10. But in between, I was unemployed, I did "temp work," I took jobs that were well below my level of education or ability because I was brought up to work, to pay my debt when I borrowed money and not complain about it.
There seems to be a disconnect between outcomes and decision making that suggests these millenials had to do little of the former and never appreciated the latter. For example, Ms. Malone tells us about "Sam," a high school classmate and high achiever who, now nearing 30, is deeply in debt, aimless and questioning whether he should have gone to college in the first place. The story between high school and now answers all our questions. Sam, who had an acumen for math, took out $50,000 in loans to attend college, but when faced with stiffer competition in the math department, opted for a poetry writing major instead. After graduation, Sam took a flyer on being a woodworker's apprentice, a job that lasted "a couple of months" but ended because he got tired of vacuuming up wood chips. After bouncing around for a time, Sam took out another $25,000 in loans to take continuing-education classes in engineering. His money didn't last long and we're told Sam is now toggling between his car and parents home, feeling worthless and regretful of, all things, his college education. Sam's tale of woe is supposed to illustrate the plight of the millenial but what it did for me was illustrate how one bad decision gave way to another and another until Sam ended up where he is. Instead of say, sticking with something he was good at - math - that might have turned into a career, maybe not the career he dreamed of, but a career nonetheless, he bailed and chased a dream that lasted just a few months before he quit that too. When that didn't work out, he dug his hole deeper to take continuing education classes. Baffling.
To Sam's parents credit, they did try to steer him back to math and science at some point, but one wonders where they were when Sam was taking out that first loan and certainly the second. If Sam was such a high achiever in high school, why didn't he go to a state school or a community college that might have offered him scholarship money. And who is to blame for Sam's aimless shifting from poetry major (really?) to apprentice wood worker to "job working in urban education" to his current observation "I need to get a career, I need to make that move." You think? Careers don't just fall into you lap, Sam. The semesters you spent studying poetry are when you should have been laying the foundation for that career you now so desperately want. If not then, perhaps instead of grousing about scooping up wood chips, you should have stuck it out and learned a trade.
We also learn about Yaphet, who had a $45,000 a year job as a taxi dispatcher. Pretty good, right? Not good enough for Yaphet, who decided to take out $50,000 in student loans to get a degree in marketing management. Now don't get me wrong, I think education is an important and valuable thing, but if you need to take out that much money to get it, perhaps you need to rethink which school you attend, or attend part-time, or save some of that hard earned money until you can afford to go to school without having to take out loans. Alternatively, Yaphet could have stuck with the taxi dispatching gig and made a life and career out of that, slowly accumulating experience, perhaps opening his own taxi or limo service and becoming a small businessman.
Ms. Malone quotes something posted on a Tumblr for Occupy Wall Street: "I worked hard (40 hours a week during most of my education), for what? Tell me what I need to do to get ahead, because I did everything right!"(emphasis in original). There, at its core, is what is wrong with the millennial attitude. No one ever told them that just because you "do everything right" means that you get to live happily ever after. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Life is unfair, you get your degree and are thrust into a job market that is awful and no one is going to wipe your tears or blow your nose. Get over it. Use those finely honed skills and network with your parents friends, your own friends, get on that Internet thing you seem tethered to 24 hours a day already and figure it out. It is discomfiting to think that a generation of children are being graduated from our educational institutions with this level of both entitlement and lack of coping skills to handle failure. The world is not only an imperfect place but a cruel and hard one where things do not always go your way. That this immutable truth was not shared with these young adults borders on parental malpractice.
Of course, generalizing all millenials as entitled crybabies would be no more accurate than saying all Baby Boomers were pot smoking hippies who fucked at Woodstock. No doubt there are countless people between the ages of 20-30 who work for a living, without complaint and without being photographed for a magazine. One such person, Ms. Malone's friend Desi, dropped out of Georgetown and now makes a living delivering cloth diapers and doing wood working (must be a theme among Ms. Malone's friends?). Many others are raising families, gainfully employed and quietly going about the business of creating a life for themselves. But let me clue Ms. Malone and the rest of those she speaks for into some of the realities that they will come to know - bills need to be paid, money needs to be earned, and it does not always happen from a job that is enriching and meaningful. Sometimes work is just a means to an end - a way to make sure there is food on your table, hot water in your shower and gas in your tank. Ideally, it is something much more, a way to make a difference in the world, to help others and express, through your labor, the value you place on yourself and what you do. It is both naive and idealistic to think you will (or can) get these things 6 months or in many cases, 6 years, after graduating college, and it is laudable to want those things so quickly. But like all the generations before you, dues must be paid, life lessons must be learned and trial and error is a fine way to drift so long as there's a north star you follow.
If Millenials want to see a cautionary tale, they should look at the real victims of the economic downturn. While it's unfortunate that 20somethings are struggling to find work, they have the greatest commodity at their disposal - time. Sadly, people their parents age and older do not have that same luxury. The market meltdown in 2008 destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars of savings that people in their 40s, 50s and 60s were relying on for their retirement and will never get back. Older workers laid off or fired from their jobs will find it hard to make up the income and salary they earned and do not have the experience and in many cases, the technological savvy that young adults take for granted. A middle aged man or woman is far worse equipped to compete in the global economy than a person two decades their junior. Moreover, unlike young people who can now be carried on their parents health plans until age 26, think about a 50 year old who has no job and no health insurance. Medical bills, prescription drugs and basic screening for a variety of diseases from colon cancer to high blood pressure are far more critical in your 50s than your 20s. Finally, while young people are hiding out in their parents homes, their parents friends are struggling to pay their mortgage and help get their own children through school.
When I graduated college, Generation X was tagged as a shiftless and cynical cohort, littering malls and shopping centers in low wage McJobs because the future we expected and had been promised to us was not there. We were latch key kids who grew up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic and a "say no to drugs" mentality that frowned on even the slightest bit of experimentation. Twelve years of Republican rule had expanded the gap between rich and poor, a savings and loan meltdown had cost taxpayers more than $100 billion and the future looked bleak. If we had looked at our future through the narrow lens of the present day, it would have been just as depressing as it must seem to recent graduates and 20somethings who see a broken political system, an awful job market and a general lack of opportunity. What I would tell all of you is that life is a marathon, not a sprint. Within a few years of graduating college, our economy was going gangbusters, and classmates and friends were making more money and doing more creative things in the Internet boom of the 1990s than their parents could have possibly imagined. Times change, for both good and bad, but if you have long-term goals in mind and are flexible in reaching them, you stand a good chance (no guarantees!) of making it. Water tends to find its table, and if, as a group, you are as motivated, diverse in your experience and open minded in your attitude as you seem to be, things will work out just fine and the cycle will continue. You will be the home owning, leaf raking, snow shoveling bill payers and carpool drivers of the 2020s, eager to tell the next generation with the temerity to complain about their situation "you don't know how good you have it."
Follow me on Twitter @scarylawyerguy
Oh, and there's a whole segment of your own generation that has had limbs blown off, lost best friends and essentially been forgotten by the rest of us while they fought for our freedoms in far away lands for a cause that looks ever more murky and questionable the longer we are there. They come home broken, emotionally, spiritually and physically, carry the scars of war in their bodies and their psyches; of course, they did not have to suffer the humiliation of getting ditched at Bonnaroo or snubbed on LinkedIn by the recruiter you met at your college job fair, but hey, re-learning how to walk with a prosthetic leg is no fun.
Overachieving millenials, I do feel your pain, but when I got out of college in the middle of the last recession and had 100 rejection letters thumbtacked on my wall, I didn't wrap a kafiyyah around my head and complain about my student loan debt or how I got hosed out of my dream job at the non-profit I wanted to work at, I worked - I worked in a dry cleaners, I worked in a retail store, and I worked for a catering company. I hustled to make money while keeping my long-range focus of becoming a lawyer in mind. It sucked, I hated it, but I did it because mom and dad weren't letting me live rent free in my childhood bedroom and paying my cellphone bill.
When I took out loans to go to law school, I knew full well what that meant and what my obligation would be. Even so, the first job I had out of law school didn't even come with a paycheck- yes, I volunteered because I wanted a foot in the door in the office I was working, and eventually, I got in and even after I got in, I was paid peanuts, and scrimped and got by on nothing for a long time but I did it because I loved what I did and it had meaning. Eventually, I got to a place where I earned enough to pay down that debt and ultimately retire it in 9 years, not 10. But in between, I was unemployed, I did "temp work," I took jobs that were well below my level of education or ability because I was brought up to work, to pay my debt when I borrowed money and not complain about it.
There seems to be a disconnect between outcomes and decision making that suggests these millenials had to do little of the former and never appreciated the latter. For example, Ms. Malone tells us about "Sam," a high school classmate and high achiever who, now nearing 30, is deeply in debt, aimless and questioning whether he should have gone to college in the first place. The story between high school and now answers all our questions. Sam, who had an acumen for math, took out $50,000 in loans to attend college, but when faced with stiffer competition in the math department, opted for a poetry writing major instead. After graduation, Sam took a flyer on being a woodworker's apprentice, a job that lasted "a couple of months" but ended because he got tired of vacuuming up wood chips. After bouncing around for a time, Sam took out another $25,000 in loans to take continuing-education classes in engineering. His money didn't last long and we're told Sam is now toggling between his car and parents home, feeling worthless and regretful of, all things, his college education. Sam's tale of woe is supposed to illustrate the plight of the millenial but what it did for me was illustrate how one bad decision gave way to another and another until Sam ended up where he is. Instead of say, sticking with something he was good at - math - that might have turned into a career, maybe not the career he dreamed of, but a career nonetheless, he bailed and chased a dream that lasted just a few months before he quit that too. When that didn't work out, he dug his hole deeper to take continuing education classes. Baffling.
To Sam's parents credit, they did try to steer him back to math and science at some point, but one wonders where they were when Sam was taking out that first loan and certainly the second. If Sam was such a high achiever in high school, why didn't he go to a state school or a community college that might have offered him scholarship money. And who is to blame for Sam's aimless shifting from poetry major (really?) to apprentice wood worker to "job working in urban education" to his current observation "I need to get a career, I need to make that move." You think? Careers don't just fall into you lap, Sam. The semesters you spent studying poetry are when you should have been laying the foundation for that career you now so desperately want. If not then, perhaps instead of grousing about scooping up wood chips, you should have stuck it out and learned a trade.
We also learn about Yaphet, who had a $45,000 a year job as a taxi dispatcher. Pretty good, right? Not good enough for Yaphet, who decided to take out $50,000 in student loans to get a degree in marketing management. Now don't get me wrong, I think education is an important and valuable thing, but if you need to take out that much money to get it, perhaps you need to rethink which school you attend, or attend part-time, or save some of that hard earned money until you can afford to go to school without having to take out loans. Alternatively, Yaphet could have stuck with the taxi dispatching gig and made a life and career out of that, slowly accumulating experience, perhaps opening his own taxi or limo service and becoming a small businessman.
Ms. Malone quotes something posted on a Tumblr for Occupy Wall Street: "I worked hard (40 hours a week during most of my education), for what? Tell me what I need to do to get ahead, because I did everything right!"(emphasis in original). There, at its core, is what is wrong with the millennial attitude. No one ever told them that just because you "do everything right" means that you get to live happily ever after. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Life is unfair, you get your degree and are thrust into a job market that is awful and no one is going to wipe your tears or blow your nose. Get over it. Use those finely honed skills and network with your parents friends, your own friends, get on that Internet thing you seem tethered to 24 hours a day already and figure it out. It is discomfiting to think that a generation of children are being graduated from our educational institutions with this level of both entitlement and lack of coping skills to handle failure. The world is not only an imperfect place but a cruel and hard one where things do not always go your way. That this immutable truth was not shared with these young adults borders on parental malpractice.
Of course, generalizing all millenials as entitled crybabies would be no more accurate than saying all Baby Boomers were pot smoking hippies who fucked at Woodstock. No doubt there are countless people between the ages of 20-30 who work for a living, without complaint and without being photographed for a magazine. One such person, Ms. Malone's friend Desi, dropped out of Georgetown and now makes a living delivering cloth diapers and doing wood working (must be a theme among Ms. Malone's friends?). Many others are raising families, gainfully employed and quietly going about the business of creating a life for themselves. But let me clue Ms. Malone and the rest of those she speaks for into some of the realities that they will come to know - bills need to be paid, money needs to be earned, and it does not always happen from a job that is enriching and meaningful. Sometimes work is just a means to an end - a way to make sure there is food on your table, hot water in your shower and gas in your tank. Ideally, it is something much more, a way to make a difference in the world, to help others and express, through your labor, the value you place on yourself and what you do. It is both naive and idealistic to think you will (or can) get these things 6 months or in many cases, 6 years, after graduating college, and it is laudable to want those things so quickly. But like all the generations before you, dues must be paid, life lessons must be learned and trial and error is a fine way to drift so long as there's a north star you follow.
If Millenials want to see a cautionary tale, they should look at the real victims of the economic downturn. While it's unfortunate that 20somethings are struggling to find work, they have the greatest commodity at their disposal - time. Sadly, people their parents age and older do not have that same luxury. The market meltdown in 2008 destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars of savings that people in their 40s, 50s and 60s were relying on for their retirement and will never get back. Older workers laid off or fired from their jobs will find it hard to make up the income and salary they earned and do not have the experience and in many cases, the technological savvy that young adults take for granted. A middle aged man or woman is far worse equipped to compete in the global economy than a person two decades their junior. Moreover, unlike young people who can now be carried on their parents health plans until age 26, think about a 50 year old who has no job and no health insurance. Medical bills, prescription drugs and basic screening for a variety of diseases from colon cancer to high blood pressure are far more critical in your 50s than your 20s. Finally, while young people are hiding out in their parents homes, their parents friends are struggling to pay their mortgage and help get their own children through school.
When I graduated college, Generation X was tagged as a shiftless and cynical cohort, littering malls and shopping centers in low wage McJobs because the future we expected and had been promised to us was not there. We were latch key kids who grew up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic and a "say no to drugs" mentality that frowned on even the slightest bit of experimentation. Twelve years of Republican rule had expanded the gap between rich and poor, a savings and loan meltdown had cost taxpayers more than $100 billion and the future looked bleak. If we had looked at our future through the narrow lens of the present day, it would have been just as depressing as it must seem to recent graduates and 20somethings who see a broken political system, an awful job market and a general lack of opportunity. What I would tell all of you is that life is a marathon, not a sprint. Within a few years of graduating college, our economy was going gangbusters, and classmates and friends were making more money and doing more creative things in the Internet boom of the 1990s than their parents could have possibly imagined. Times change, for both good and bad, but if you have long-term goals in mind and are flexible in reaching them, you stand a good chance (no guarantees!) of making it. Water tends to find its table, and if, as a group, you are as motivated, diverse in your experience and open minded in your attitude as you seem to be, things will work out just fine and the cycle will continue. You will be the home owning, leaf raking, snow shoveling bill payers and carpool drivers of the 2020s, eager to tell the next generation with the temerity to complain about their situation "you don't know how good you have it."
Follow me on Twitter @scarylawyerguy
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